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>> INSTRUCTOR: Alright, so now we're going to talk about proofreading.
Well, what is proofreading? This is when you go through your paper
and correct all the typographical, grammatical and sentence structure errors.
This is different from revision: revision is what you do when you go through your paper
and you read it to make sure you said what you wanted to say, as far as content.
Once you've done that process, that's when you get into editing,
and that's where proofreading shows up. That's when you go
from looking at the big picture to going down to each individual sentence
and making sure that, word-wise, it says exactly what you wanted it to say.
So, how can you tell if you need to proofread?
You need to proofread, always, every time, every single time, proofread.
There's nothing that you are going to write where you are just going to be like,
"Oh! I'll just write it! It doesn't matter," unless you are texting a friend
and you don't think that your friend will care.
Otherwise, if it's a paper, you're proofreading it.
Now, how can you proofread? First of all, take a break.
If you just finished your paper, I don't care your paper is due in twenty minutes:
take a break, get up from your computer, walk away, go outside, get a drink,
go to the bathroom--whatever it is you need to do to take your eyes off of the screen,
because when you come back from break, you'll actually read what you wrote,
whereas if you just try to proofread right after you've finished writing something,
you will read what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote.
Your brain will just automatically put some words in there, so you have to take that break.
The longer the break, the better off you're going to be [laughter],
but I understand that sometimes life doesn't work that way.
Another thing you can do is read out loud. Reading your words out loud to someone else
is awesome because you can just watch their face and see if they start to look confused,
as that's usually a clue, or just read it out loud to yourself.
If you hear it, normally you'll hear some of those errors.
Or, if you want to print out your paper, looking at it not on a computer screen
with a pen in your hand will sometimes help you to spot some errors, as well.
So those are your proofreading options.
What are some common issues?
Well, we love spellcheck and grammar check; they do not catch everything, though.
For instance, this sentence right here ["Bears live I the woods"]
would be perfectly fine. Spellcheck doesn't know what it is you meant to say.
They are like "Oh, yeah, "I" is a word, totally, I'm good," but really you meant to say,
"Bears live in the woods," so they're not going to help you out with context.
Or, something like "The story's them (this is supposed to be "theme) is symbolized
by the recurring references to butterflies." It's not going to pick up on these types of errors.
So you don't want to rely on the green and red underlining too much.
Also, another issue is that sometimes we forget to delete words,
or we just get delete-crazy and we delete too many. So you end up with things like,
"[The time on the clock] was read [quarter past eight]," rather than
"The time on the clock was [quarter past eight]."
Or, we skip words: if we have this sentence here
["While practicing martial arts can help children develop self-confidence]
they also need to learn" ...something?
I don't know, I probably had an idea here and I lost it.
So, you want to make sure that you are adding in the rest of the sentence.
And, some final issues: overall, we're going to have some homonyms--
those are the words that sound alike, like their, they're, and their, and sent and cent, etc.--
so just make sure that you have the right word, the word that you mean.
Or you might have an issue with comma splices or subject-verb agreement.
Now, I'm not going to talk about these here because we have two separate videos
for both of these issues, so if you think that might be part of your proofreading problem,
go watch those videos instead.
Overall, when you are proofreading, pay attention to what you are doing,
or you may definitely make some mistakes in your paper.