This Is Why Proofreading Is More Than Just Rereading

This is an excerpt from my book, A Proofreader’s Guide to Business Writing. You can learn more and order a copy here.

The last thing I want to share with you before we get into the nitty-gritty of proofreading is the power of process.

If you’re already a super-powered businessperson, it’s likely you already know this. But in my previous 15-year career in quality management, I was surprised to learn how many people in the business world don’t really understand why processes are important (or how to create good ones that actually add value).

The meat of this book is the four-step proofreading process I’m going to share with you in the next section. It’s a stable, repeatable process entirely focused on the steps that bring value. There’s no fluff or check-the-box activities. Neither is it cumbersome, arcane, or labyrinthine. In fact, the opposite is true: it gets you the results you need as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And if you use it, it can help you transform your content from “pretty good” to “expert level.” Let’s spend a few minutes talking about why this is the case.

This Process Ensures Consistency

Do you remember what you had for lunch a week ago last Tuesday? How about what you were wearing? What were the contents of the fifth email you read that day, and how did you respond to it?

I’m guessing you probably answered “I don’t know” to each of the above questions. (I did.)

So on what basis would you expect to remember how you spelled a certain niche industry term in a blog post you wrote a month ago? Or whether your headers used standard headline capitalization or not? Is it realistic to expect yourself to remember whether your company prefers “startup” or “startup,” or “eCommerce” or “e-commerce?”

Unless you are competing in international memory competitions, relying on just your brain to keep all the details of your writing consistent isn’t going to work well.

When you follow the process outlined in this book, however, you don’t have to rely on the too-often-faulty hard drive inside your head. You now have tools and references at your disposal that you can use and check against to ensure that every time your content lists the name of your product or service, it’s the same.

This Process Ensures You Don’t Miss Anything

It’s deceptively easy to miss things in writing.

Among other reasons, this is because your brain likes to take shortcuts to to save energy (can you really blame it?). When it comes to reading, this means your eyes often overlook obvious errors in the text. Your brain “knows” what the text is trying to say, and it predicts, assumes, and fills in the gaps of whatever it is you’re reading (and especially if you wrote it).

For instance, did you catch the extra “to” in the paragraph above? (You can go back and look; I’ll wait.)

Just scanning over your document haphazardly—or checking it with Grammarly and calling it a day—almost ensures you’ll miss something.

With this proofreading process, on the other hand, you’ll be purposefully reading the text with an eye toward finding and fixing every mistake. Coupled with a good dictionary and a style guide, you’ll be equipped to spot every issue if you commit to the process outlined in this book.

This Process Frees Up Your Brainpower

Remember how I just said your brain likes to conserve energy? This can be a bad thing when it comes to finding and fixing errors in your content. But when you implement the process in this book, it becomes an advantage.

The more you repeat an action or process, the more automatic it becomes. As you grow in your proofreading skills, you’ll settle into things and no longer have to give quite as much thought to issues that arise. How do I spell iTouchPad again? Crap, now I have to google it! becomes Let me tab over to the style guide to see what we decided for how to spell iTouchPad. Asking Is it correct to write “55” or “fifty-five?” for the umpteenth time wastes brainpower in a way that flipping over to the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style does not.

Plus, by following this process, you don’t have to waste precious time or energy reinventing the wheel. I’m a professional proofreader and editor, and this is the exact process I utilize every day in my work. Why sit there at your desk trying to come up with your own process when you can just adopt it whole cloth from an expert?

That’s really the beauty of this process. Your company likely didn’t hire you to be a proofreading subject-matter expert, but you rightly surmised that it was important to do anyway. With the process outlined in this book, you can save implementation time and effort and instead execute your core responsibilities—the tasks you were actually hired to do.