Proofreading Your Essay
The last step in the revision process is proofreading. It is the final look through your writing. This process can help you catch smaller errors, such as spelling mistakes that you might have missed when you were editing for larger errors.
Top Tips
✓ Use the spell check and grammar check features of your word processing software. These tools are not perfect, but they can help.
✓ Read your work out loud. Your ear can sometimes be more helpful than your eye. If it doesn’t sound right to you, it probably isn’t.
✓ Consider reading your paper from the end to the beginning. You may not see an error if you read from the beginning to the end because the brain overpowers the eye. It knows what you wanted to say and therefore may "see" what it wants to see and not what is actually there.
✓ Use a pencil to point to each word. This is another technique to make you focus on what you have actually written, not what you think you have written.
✓ Consider working with a partner at this stage. A partner may spot mistakes that you have missed.
Study Tools
Use this list of prefixes and suffixes as a reference for your writing.
Use this checklist as a guide when you are proofreading your essay.
Use this tip sheet to help you know what you should be looking at in each phase of the revision process
The Proofreading Process
Watch this video (The Learning Portal Ontario, 2017) to learn about proofreading and what you should look for when you are reviewing your essay one final time. You can also download the Proofreading Video Transcript.
During the proofreading stage, you should check your essay for spelling and other small, word-level errors.
Unless otherwise stated, the material in this guide is from the Learning Portal created by College Libraries Ontario. Content has been adapted for the NWP Learning Commons in June 2021. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY NC SA 4.0 International License.
All icons on these pages are from The Noun Project. See individual icons for creator attribution.