The Art of Proofing for Bloggers

If you really feel like you should be writing a blog, it might be because you are a good writer. If you understand that proofreading is a huge part of a writer’s job, you’re not only likely a good writer, you very well may be a professional writer. Proofreading is a skill that you will build over time as you start working on your blog. Here are some of the tools of the trade that you’re going to need to proofread your blogs effectively. Remember: nothing makes you come off as someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about more quickly than a poorly proofed article.

Text to Speech

Text-to-speech features are built into most operating systems. If you happen to be using Microsoft Word as your word processor and you’re on version 2010 or later, there is a text-to-speech feature built right into it that you can access from your options menu. You should use this to read your blog entries back to you before you post them. You will likely be amazed at the mistakes you find when you use a text-to-speech reader as opposed to what you find when trying to proofread your content manually.

Reading Out of Order

After you’ve gone through your content once, go through it again but read it out of order. Skim through the text and look for mistakes that you might not have noticed when you were reading it front to back. The reason that this works well is that, when there is a word missing or an improper word choice in a sentence, your brain will tend to fill in the word you think should be there, even if it’s not there. Taking things out of order can help your brain to notice mistakes that you may not notice otherwise.

Post Your Edits

Blogging technologies such as WordPress themes make it easy to edit content once you have it posted on your website. If you notice something in an old blog post that wasn’t quite right, go ahead and edit it. One of the things you want to do, however, is make certain that you flag that post as having been edited. This has become a convention with writing on the Internet. You might put something along the lines of “This post was changed to correct ‘a injury to his knee’ to read ‘an injury to his knee’”. The reason that this matters is that somebody may have cited that article with the original mistake and, when somebody checks back, they may not find the phrase that was originally cited on your blog, and you need to clarify why it’s gone. Proofread well, and you won’t have to make these types of changes.

About author

Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse –  a web studio that creates professional WordPress themes, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.