When you’ve worked on a piece of writing for a long time, it’s easy to become overly familiar with the content, meaning you’re more likely to miss errors as they happen. The obvious – and most effective – way around this is to get another person to review your work. But sometimes you need to polish something yourself without help from another.
Here are five tips that can help you to copy-edit and proof your own content more effectively.
1. Read it out loud as you go along. Reading guarantees you’re engaging and processing the content on a deeper level – rather than just scanning over it. Additionally, your eyes may be used to the content, but verbalizing the onscreen text allows you to hear errors or text/sentences that don’t sound right.
2. PDF the document and review it in its entirety as a PDF, highlighting/commenting as you go along. In your usual word-processing software, you’re likely to be overly familiar with the appearance and format of the content. By reviewing the entire document as a PDF, you’ll engage, review, and mark up edits differently. You can then compare this document versus the original and implement edits to create a new draft.
3. Change the font. Really? Yes, changing the appearance of the content will enable you to look at it with fresh eyes. The new perspective will help, and you’ll notice things you didn’t see before.
4. Review sections/chapters out of order. In reverse is great. You’re used to reviewing from start to end, so inevitably the first segment will get the freshest eyes. Try reversing this, so the last segments get the fresh eyes. Alternatively, reviewing chapters out of order has the same effect – you consider content out of context and look at it differently.
5. Add time to the equation. Put some distance between yourself and the content. Coming back to it later will give you a new perspective and energize your editorial review. A few days will help – but a few weeks is better. Obviously, this suggestion won’t be an option if you’re working to deadlines!
You may be skeptical about some of these suggestions but give them a try! It’s all about looking at your content through fresh eyes. Altering the context and/or format of your review can help you spot things you might’ve missed otherwise.
