There are two points at which you may be required to proofread your text. If your work is not for publication, then when you have revised it until you are satisfied that you cannot improve it any further, you should print or type it out and read it carefully one last time. You are looking, essentially, for small matters that may have escaped your notice before: spelling mistakes that have not been caught by the spell-checker, errors in punctuation, or inconsistencies of the kind mentioned in the previous pages. By this time, you may well be so familiar with your text that it is very difficult to look at it with the close attention necessary to spot small mistakes. The best way to do this is to prevent yourself deliberately from getting into the flow. Read the text slowly sentence by sentence, with a brief pause at the end of the sentence. If you are still worried that your eyes are sliding over the text and may miss a mistake, try starting at the end and reading your sentences individually in reverse order.If your work is being published, the publisher will usually send you a typeset copy (proofs or galleys). The proof copy shows you how your work will appear on the printed page. Your task is to go through it carefully and mark any corrections or alterations that you wish to make. You are looking for any errors that you may have overlooked before or that may have been introduced by the keyboarder or printer. Errors can creep in even if you have provided your work in electronic form (for example, an apostrophe or single quotation mark could come out straight ['] or curly ['] if text has been imported from different word-processing software.) You also have the opportunity to make any last-minute changes to the text, but these should be kept to a minimum as publishers may charge you for alterations made at proof stage that affect more than a specified percentage of the text. When making your corrections and edits, you will need to use special proofreading marks. Most publishers will provide you with a list of these marks and an explanation of how they are used. Proofreading symbols can also be found on the Web or in some style manuals and dictionaries.
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