Transcript Lesson 16 Essentials Video: Proofreading

HYESU: Revisions are more—at least for me—more for structural things and then the proofreading is more for diction, punctuation, how one sentence flows into the next one.

CHATIANA: In college, I was taught to read backwards so you can check your sentences. And my mom was the one who told me to skim through it to make sure everything is correct. And my mom was also the one who told me to read carefully, read it very slowly, and don't read it out loud slowly so that it sounds correct.

HUSSAIN: For grammar and spelling errors, I read from the end. I go to the like last sentence in my paper and just read backwards. So I found out when you make—when you read forwards, you tend to miss a lot of the mistakes you make in spelling or grammar, but if you go backwards and you read just—take a sentence by—going backwards, there's no flow so, you focus on each sentence.

MICHAEL: Just looking at everything like a microscope. You're not focusing on the paper's cohesion anymore. You're just thinking about each letter, and that's usually how I look at. I just—I don't look at it for a paper—as a paper anymore. I just—scanning for words and scanning as sentences.

KARINA: To proofread I read out loud whatever my work is because I hear what's wrong. I'm like that does not sound right. That sounds really weird. I'm wording this completely wrong. And reading it aloud a couple of times—and I do it maybe two or three times, and I'm like OK until it starts sounding a little bit better. Because like I said, I think writing—even though it's academic writing, I feel like it's like a song or a poem. It has to have certain ring to it that it just sounds good.

SAMANTHA: But there's something about—just in my brain—there's something about when it's on a computer, I think that it's already done, so I maybe don't look at it as deep as I should. But when it's printed out, I'm like, oh. There's problems. I need to look at this and look for the problems.

VINH-THUY: Reading it over and over and over out loud really helped me. And having a second pair of eyes look at is really, really, really, really helpful because sometimes even if you read it, you read it the way that you think you wrote it, but really it's not the way that it appears on paper. And now after having a second eye taking a look at it, well, you catch that mistake.

DAN: You can make people completely lose your point if you're not polished, if you haven't made the right moves.