Proofreading when you are going at it solo can seem tedious and it can feel like someone is pulling your fingers out. Or nails on a chalkboard, trying to get blood out of a stone or some other equally prolonged painful exercise.
However, for bloggers and other types of content producer, this is vital now more than ever as the potential audiences for our work grow and grow.
Schedule Time
Mindset is important when it comes to approaching any work, and it is no different for proofreading. Focus on the task. One thing that I have found makes it easier is to schedule it into your day – dedicate time. Don’t procrastinate? The more you stick to the scheduled time, the better you will be for it as you can balance the time you spend working with the time you spend creating and having fun.
Audience
Consider who your audience are. If you are writing to upload on social media like Twitter, adapt your writing. If you are proofreading your blog so then it is going to be uploaded to your site after, you can write in longer sentences. The purpose your blog is for will reflect the language that you use and how you approach your proofreading.
Make It Daily
Doing things on a daily basis is a good way to form the habit of doing so. Proofreading daily – or writing daily and then proofreading your own work the day after – will strengthen your proofreading muscles and help it to become something that you are very familiar with doing. This will also help you to work out your best working environment. Some people like to proofread to music, some don’t. Some like to proofread in a dedicated office space and some will like to proofread somewhere cosy rather than formal. Figure out what works for you.
Network
There are plenty of people blogging out there in various forms. To get yourself used to proof-reading and also to network, why not approach someone who is blogging on a similar area to you and see if they want to do an exchange – they proofread your stuff while you proofread theirs. This is a good way of strengthening your proofreading while not running the risk of not seeing your own mistakes. As a plus side, this can always lead to further networking between your blogging peers like guest posts, boosting your audience even further.
Sound It Out
This might sound a bit simplistic but reading aloud has helped me to pick up on phrasing that really needed working on. This is because we often read in a different way to how we write. The ear can pick up on things that we might not see as being wrong when we are writing.
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