Do your students waste endless time erasing whole sentences? Do they become discouraged when they look at their rough drafts filled with arrows, illegible notes in the margins, and ugly lines of scratched-out writing?
Let’s save them the pain by teaching them these handy, easy-to-use proofreading marks.
I’ve watched students in my writing classes scratch out whole sentences and rewrite them. They draw lines through words. They burn up their papers and crumble their erasers just to change something.
This is totally unnecessary.
There’s an easier—and quicker—way to proofread that doesn’t require a lot of rewriting, which should be good news to our students.
But first, the other grammar tutorials
This is the last in a series of tutorials on grammar. In this one, you and your students will learn how to use these helpful proofreading marks.
If you’re dying to know what the other grammar tutorials are about, click here for one on punctuation in dialog. (Tarzan and Jane help out on that one.) Click here if you yearn to know how to handle commas in compound sentences with coordinating conjunctions.
And click here for the hard-hitting exposé on where to put the comma, period, colon, or semicolon when using quotation marks. Here’s a tutorial on a question I suspect you’ve heard from your students about using question marks and exclamation points with end quotation marks (you know, do they go inside or outside?).
For the tutorial revealing the crazy fact that the word “everyone” is singular, click here. And to finally put to rest your students’ confusion about it’s/its, you’re/your, and others of that ilk, click here.
Proofreading Marks
As with all the other tutorials, you get a super-duper package today: an infographic to teach the proofreading marks, an example of how to use them in a real paragraph, an exercise so students can fix someone else’s mistakes, and the answers.
Proofreading marks are fairly universal and can be tremendously helpful to your students when they are editing their work. After your students complete their rough draft, have them print off the essay or short story. Reading the rough draft from a piece of paper catches more mistakes than simply reading the essay from a computer screen. Then students can apply the proofreading marks as tools to help them shape a better essay or story.
The following chart contains common proofreading marks used by all professional writers. For a PDF of this chart, click here.
The following image shows how to use the proofreading marks in an essay. For a PDF of this example, click here.
Proofreading Marks Assignment
Follow this link for the free download of a proofreading assignment.
Directions: Use the proofreading marks to catch errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing, and to make the reading go more smoothly. Use a colorful pen so you can keep track of your corrections.
Proofreading Marks Answers
Teachers, follow this link for a free download of a suggested answer to the proofreading assignment.
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You can find another proofreading tutorial here. Students will proofread a letter to the editor that needs a lot of help!
This grammar tutorial is taken from The Power in Your Hands: Writing Nonfiction in High School by Sharon Watson (that would be me). To get free samples from this course that will take the burden of teaching writing off your shoulders, click here.
Yours for a more vibrant writing class,
