9 Great Tips for Proofreading Your Assignment

You Cannot Learn Without Making a Mistake

Mary Tyler Moore has said “Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow”. It is obvious that you might make mistakes while writing an article, email, blog, or an academic paper that can change the meaning of the sentence. Major mistakes in an assignment can affect your academic grades. Therefore, whenever you write papers like thesis, research papers, dissertations, research methodology, make sure that it is free from all types of errors such as spelling, grammatical, formatting, structuring, and others.

If you are looking to get better at proofreading, simply follow the below-given tips. These will surely be helpful in proofreading your assignment.

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1. Start proofreading after overall revision

Once you are done with the writing task, it is important to work on the content and information of your assignment. Write first, then edit, and finally proofread. Moreover, start proofreading after a short break. It can be from an hour or a week as per your deadline. It gives a fresh perspective and a breathing space that allows you to spot errors and eliminate them easily.

2. Use spellcheckers and online editing tools

In order to save time, you can use online tools to check spelling and grammatical mistakes. Additionally, it polishes the paper by fixing space issues, adding bullets wherever necessary, tables, and paragraphs. If you are unaware of such tools, simply avail help from our assignment help experts.

3. Understand the writing styles

The writing style in academics differs from an assignment to assignments, such as thesis, academic essays, blogs, dissertation, and more. The proofreading and editing part involves one to have the knowledge of the basic rules and the language used in an assignment. Thus, understand the assignment first and include appropriate terminology to write your paper.  

4. PYP: Print Your Paper

The experts offering proofreading and editing services for university students suggest that you print your paper to proofread rather than proofreading it on a digital screen like a mobile, tablet, or a computer. Also, the Scientific American article has recently spoken about the ways in which reading from a paper is different from a screen. Therefore, finding mistakes on a paper is quite easy than a screen.

5. Proofread one criterion at a time

Proofreading the whole paper at a time can be daunting and it gets difficult to tune it perfectly in one attempt. Instead, you should be required to set a criterion and proofread one at a time. This method is one of the most effective ways of finding errors in a document.

6. Proofread upwards

This is a common technique used by many proofreaders, because of its effectiveness. While proofreading and editing a paper for the first time, proofread it from the bottom and move upwards. It allows proofreaders not to get distracted from the content of the paper and helpful in managing the content easily. Start proofreading by picking one paragraph and check for typos, sentence formation, and grammar mistakes.

7. Pay extra care to homonyms

It is a wise choice to add Grammarly to MS Word for checking spellings and basic grammar mistakes, but you should also know that MS Word does not pick the homonym errors. Homonyms are words with similar pronunciation but have different spellings or meanings. So, look for such errors with extra attention to improve the quality of the assignment.

8. Check punctuations

Minor errors like comma splices, misplaced quotation marks, apostrophe issues, or any other punctuation errors can bring a huge effect on your grade. So, understand the importance of punctuation while writing and make it correct if found any.

9. Cross-check numerical values

While proofreading you should double-check the numerical values because in case if you place misplace a full stop while quoting the total number of population of a country, it will totally change the data. Hence, always check the numerical values of your assignment twice.

There are few students who use unnecessary words to fatten their writing which is not a good practice in academics. One needs to revise the written work and erase such instances. Following the above ten pointers for proofreading might be a time-consuming task and many students could possibly give up. Not to worry if you’re one of them. Take help from experts at Online Assignment Expert who specialise in proofreading and editing lengthy documents. Do visit our website today to know more about our academic services.