Professional Proofreading – Smart Tips and Tricks

When you have completed your book, the first thing that comes to your mind is publication. You look for the literary agent and publication houses. Sending manuscripts to many publication companies and eagerly waiting for their positive response. But that doesn't always happen, right? Sometimes you face rejection from most of the companies. It's either your genre wasn't for their company, or you wrote something that for them wasn't trendy. Or maybe the manuscript you submitted was full of mistakes? If you send in your manuscript without professional proofreading, then you had it coming.

Proofreading is like a basic ingredient in your recipe. Without it, you won't be able to make a delicious dish. Just like that, when it comes to your book, you need to make sure that it's error-free; otherwise, it won't be a huge success. We have penned down a few effective professional proofreading tips for you. Go through them and see how you can make your book a successful one.

The first tip for proofreading is reading backward. Once you have completed your book, print the manuscript and read it backwards. This trick helps in spotting the mistakes that you missed the first time proofreading your manuscript. This will help you in looking at the words without getting engrossed in the story.

When reading the manuscript, place a ruler under each line as you read it. We have noticed that many readers skim through rather than reading word by word. That's why it's best to place a ruler under each line to make sure that you are reading and not skimming. This professional proofreading trick will help you in finding the mistakes you didn't see before.

Before you dive into proofreading your manuscript, go through the stuff that you wrote before and see what type of mistakes do you usually make. Do you type there instead of their? Or do you start using present tense instead of past tense in the middle of your story? Once you notice your typical mistakes, make a list of them. Then dive into proofreading your manuscript. Once you know the typical mistakes, you make you will see them easily.

Always pick one mistake and stick to that. See if there are many comma mistakes. Go through the whole manuscript trying to find the comma misplacement or syntax error. This way of professional proofreading will help in correcting all the mistakes throughout your manuscript.

The best way to proofread your manuscript is to read it aloud. Print the manuscript and start reading it aloud. Reading it aloud makes you notice the mistakes that you didn't before. Hearing what you wrote will make you realize any cliché sentences, badly structured lines, and everything. It's the best professional proofreading trick if you want your manuscript to look perfect.

Another amazing tip for professional proofreading is letting someone else read it. When you give someone else the manuscript, they read it from the reader's eye and will be brutally honest with you. They will help you in pointing out the sentences that make no sense or aren't clear enough. They will even tell you if a certain paragraph was boring to them or not.

Don't just settle down with your manuscript and finish it in one go. Rather try reading it at different times. If you read the whole manuscript in one go, then there are chances that you will miss out on the mistakes. Why? Your brain will be tired from processing so much in one go. That's why professional proofreading is done from time to time.

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