Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Without Proofreading You Do Not Know If Everything Makes Sense

By Peter Hughes


When you spend your time writing and it is the reason you can go to the bank with something in your hand, you must be able to make yourself understandable. This is by knowing what you are writing about, however, it also means doing a couple of other activities to accomplish this. Those would be editing and proofreading your material for understand ability.

Editing means that everything must hold up and fulfill the promise of the title. All of the facts must be checked and any math used, as an example, should be verified. The entire written piece should hold up and be the fulfillment of the promise that your title gave to the reader. The content must be coherent and editing that first draft will help accomplish this.

While editing is looking at the facts of the piece, what many call proofing is looking at the piece itself or the construction of it. A person, whether yourself or someone else, proofs the copy by checking the sentence structure and punctuation. Colons are often a confusing subject and proofing helps locate those problems and get them fixed.

Editing skills are necessary to assure that all things written down, or as much as is appropriate, is correctly documented and proofing ensures that whatever is said looks properly formulated on the paper. You want to say something about a political policy, but the sentence structure must be constructed properly in order to not distract from your strongly held belief, regardless of whether it is from the right or left, politically.

One of the things or devices that get over used, in many cases, are commas. There are entire books and power point presentations written about their use and many writers still are not convinced about their proper use. Capitalization is another problem to many. Using the wrong word for the context or misspelling it can create problems for readers of material if it is not their first language and they are depending on accuracy to help them follow context. Proofing will help retain that easy to read flow.

The grammar rules that govern all civilized written material are not always followed to the letter by writers. This is not to call them lazy, but, occasionally, unaware what they are doing in this area. Many of them use an outside proofing service that takes care of these things for them and takes that first draft and transforms it into something of which to be proud.

As you may be involved in the writing industry or are simply trying to put together some copy for the promotion of a product or service, you need authoritative copy. You may need, if you are unsure of the appropriate grammar rules, an expert to take a look and help you out in this regard. Professional editors and proofing companies exist all over the Internet for your use.

You want everything you write, whether for yourself or a client, to be perceived as a professionally executed. If you are unable to follow the correct rules, find someone who can and hire them for this task. Your professionalism will be enhanced and your earnings will continue to grow.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment