Proofreading is never easy. Anyone who says it’s easy is trying to sell you something or has never actually tried it.
If we can’t make it easy, at least we can make it easier for our troubled, weeping students. In fact, with these three tips, you can change it from a job that requires the strength of a backhoe to one that uses a garden trowel.
Many professional writers use the first two methods in their own writing, and so can your students. The third one is exclusively for students.
1. Encourage your students to proofread their essays in a location other than where they write them.
If they like to write essays while sitting on their beds, ask them to use, say, the couch or the backyard swing when proofreading. Writing is creative; proofreading is logical. These two skills use different parts of the brain, and it will help students immeasurably to create in one place and fix in another.
2. Let your students’ essays take a day or two to “cool off.”
If the assignment is due Friday, ask your students to have the first draft done by Wednesday. On Thursday, they can pick up their writing again, take a look at it, and more easily find mistakes in grammar, mechanics, and in how they want to say things.
Using a day to cool off will allow your students to approach their work a little more objectively than they would have done when they were so attached to it. Proofreading won’t be so painful because, by now, their work won’t seem golden to them. It won’t be so much a part of themselves.
3. Let them practice the skill of proofreading on someone else’s paper.
Checking their own work can be mind numbing and discouraging, but trying to find mistakes in someone else’s essay is almost fun.
Try this: Copy and paste a short essay or article you find online and then make some specific changes to it on your computer that will result in mistakes. For example, if you are focusing on correct punctuation, delete a few periods, use a quotation mark incorrectly, change a sentence into a run-on, and so forth. Then ask your students to find the mistakes. Now proofreading is not a burden; it’s a game.
The students in my writing classes love it when I bring in poorly written letters to the editor from our local newspaper. They consider it a challenge to fix the mistakes or smooth out the cumbersome wording. I think yours will, too.
For a very popular tutorial on how to use proofreading marks, click here.
Teens edit someone’s letter to the editor here.
Yours for a more vibrant writing class,
