One of the most essential components of the writing process is the editing phase, when we review our work for issues of clarity and completeness as well as for any spelling, grammatical or mechanical errors. Although it is often tempting to submit a piece for publication as soon as you are finished with it, spending time to review your work for errors and clarity ensures that your final product will look and sound professional, which can improve your ethos as a writer and thus your reader’s reception to your argument. Although experienced writers employ different approaches to editing and proofreading, below are some guidelines to help you ensure your work is prepared for submission or publication.
Publishers have subject matter experts (SMEs) who read texts just to assess the appropriateness and accuracy of the content. You should look over your work with these goals in mind, first ensuring that the information included corresponds with the work’s goals and argument, and then ensuring that all factual information included in the text is accurate. There may be issues of clarity that require providing additional info or examples, and there may be irrelevant or extraneous information that distracts from your text's purpose. In some cases, unresolved contradictions from competing sources could undermine your argument and need to be addressed.
Once you are satisfied the content is set, you should review your text for mechanical issues. One of the best ways to identify potential spelling and grammatical errors is by reading your work aloud. When reading your work out loud, errors become more obvious as they interrupt the rhythm of sentences. Perhaps we may need to include commas to segment ideas, or periods to divide them into separate thoughts. You may also benefit from stepping away from your draft for a while after you complete it, as the detachment allows the work to appear less familiar, which in turn will allow errors to seem more obvious when rereading. If there is a specific area of writing that you know you struggle with, such as use of passive voice or pronoun usage, you can begin with these areas to identify and address any of the common errors that appear in your work.
Once any basic errors are taken care of, you can return to your text to see if there are opportunities to increase identification and ethos with your audience. Your relationship with your audience is established, not just by what you say, but how you say it. Maintaining this positive relationship can be aided by adhering to simple things, such as proper use of titles or jargon or other linguistic conventions connected to your discipline. But it can also be connected to a reader's sense of whether you are engaging in honest inquiry, or are being overly partisan or inflexible in your assumptions or interpretations. "Weakening" one's claims by adding qualifiers that show you are making tentative claims only based on the information presented, and which could be modified further based on new information, for instance, can sometimes help readers feel you are being more rational and honest in your argument than if your claims were absolute in nature. Some periodicals or publishers even provide style guides to help you meet the expectations of their readers. At the very least, you want to make sure that you're not distracting readers from the primary purpose of your writing with choices that draw attention without contributing to the text's effectiveness.
This 3-step process can help you become a better proofreader of your own writing, and encourages you to read your text multiple times, each time paying attention to different aspects of your writing. Improvements at this stage can be small but consequential, so leave time to reconsider your writing even after it is "complete"; you'll be glad you did.
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