Proofreading Tips for a More Productive 2016

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re either a writer or a person who frequently comes into contact with the written word. You might be a journalist who writes articles, a blogger who writes blog posts, a student who writes term papers, or an activist who writes grant proposals. As long as your life includes at least an occasional putting of a pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, you know how important it is to proofread everything you write. You also probably know how tough it can be sometimes.

There’s a great article on Wired explaining why catching your own mistakes is such a challenging task. The fact that your brain is responsible for both the writing and the proofreading works against you, as does the tendency to simultaneously look for errors in spelling, grammar, and meaning. Still, people find ways to do it, and with a little help from only five tips, you will too.

1 Get All the Help You Can Every good word processor has an integrated spelling checker, and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it. Better yet, you can enlist the help of specialized proofreading software. You can’t rely on these tools completely because they might not have the proofreading capabilities of a human. But some tools get close. Ours does, and we’re not saying it because we want to sing our own praises. It’s just a statement of fact.

2 Go Into Proofreading Prepared When Roy Peter Clark suggests something, writers around the world take heed. When he says you should keep a list of the most common language errors you are prone to making, you should create it right away. The list might be helpful in the process of writing, but in the process of proofreading, it’s invaluable. It’s the kind of list that’s populated with “to” and “too,” “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” and similar errors.

Having a broader checklist of specific errors to look for in a text is also recommended. Parallelisms, split infinitives, grammar, and sentence structure issues should all be a part of a checklist you should go through every time you proofread. If you don’t want to develop one on your own, you can find great ones online.

3 Trick Your Brain We tend to be better at proofreading texts we are familiar with, as opposed to texts we see for the first time. However, the kind of familiarity you get when you read something once or twice before proofreading it and the kind of familiarity you get when you create your own text are not the same. The former is beneficial and the latter is not, so you need to trick your brain into the sweet spot of familiarity when you want to proofread your own work.

There are a couple of things you can do. First, put some temporal distance between the acts of writing and proofreading. Second, proofread a hard copy instead of a computer file, if you can. Either way, change the font, the size of the letters, even the number of columns in your text. Change the color of the letters. Whatever you need to do to make it look and feel different, do it.

4 Read Out Loud Reading out loud can actually increase the accuracy of your proofreading. Try reading the text in silence first, especially if you’re not reading your own work, and then reading it once more out loud.

5 Divide and Conquer You can’t take a text and proofread it in only one pass. Well, you can, but the results won’t be that good. You should do a few passes instead, each time concentrating on one specific thing. Here’s an example: First, make sure the editing process is completed and that there are no issues with clarity, style, or structure. It’s rarely a good idea to proofread and edit at the same time, as you’ll probably get a poorly edited, poorly proofread text in the end.

Start with reading the text, out loud, as mentioned in the previous tip. That will help you catch some errors, such as missing or double words. Get your list of common mistakes and check for them in the text. Follow that with a grammar check. If you followed tip number two, you probably have a list of things you need to check—things like grammar issues related to the use of verbs and pronouns, for example. So you check your text for those issues. While you’re at it, you can check sentence structures for errors. Next, move on to checking punctuation. You can highlight each punctuation mark in the text, look at it carefully, determine whether you need it or not, whether it’s placed correctly, and whether it should be replaced with another punctuation mark.

Finally, check the spelling. One of the best ways to do that is to read the text backward, word by word. That way, you will minimize the chances of your brain processing the whole sentence instead of a single word, so start with the very last word in the text, and move to the left and upward until you reach the first word. By the time you’ve done it, you’ll have an error-free text in front of you and the whole of 2016 to reap the benefits of knowing how to proofread efficiently and effectively. Have a good one!

Writers, Get Ready for NaNoWriMo!

Every November, wordsmiths around the globe take on the ultimate writing challenge—to crank out a 50,000-word novel in just thirty days. The event is called NaNoWriMo (an acronym for National Novel Writing Month), and last year it drew 431,626 participants. Although the format is meant to encourage quick, seat-of-your-pants writing, the words writers churn out during the annual event aren’t necessarily for naught. So far, over 250 NaNoWriMo novels, including Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, have been published by traditional book publishers.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!

Are you planning to write a novel in November? Although NaNoWriMo challenges writers to write hard and fast without stopping to edit or check grammar, that doesn’t mean you have to set out unprepared. The Grammarly team thought it would be fun to arm you with some writing tips and words of encouragement so you’ll be well prepared for your adventure. During the month of October, we’ll share a series of writing advice articles to get you geared up and ready to tell your tale.

NaNoWriMo Prep: Week 1

How do you get ideas for a story? Cultivate curiosity!

It’s possible that you’re thinking about writing a novel in November and you still haven’t decided what to write about. Now is the perfect time to start planting the seeds of ideas and seeing what will take root. But how do you find those idea seeds? By cultivating curiosity.

Every child’s curiosity has gotten her into trouble at one point or another. It starts by thinking: what would happen if I did X? What would happen if I touched that hot stovetop? What would happen if I set my goldfish free? What would happen if I jumped from the top of the stairs? Would I fly? Fortunately, with age comes common sense—we stop burning our fingers, sending our goldfish to the sewers, and fracturing our tibias trying to feed our curiosity. Unfortunately, those painful lessons—not to mention nagging parents and teachers—cause us not only to stop trying to answer silly questions but to stop asking them in the first place.

This month, start asking silly questions again. (Don’t jump! Answer that “would I fly” question in writing, please.) No one writes well in a vacuum, so challenge yourself to get out and observe humans in their natural (and unnatural) habitats. Go to a park, a concert, a political rally, anywhere you can people-watch, and then start asking questions. That sad-looking man in a business suit sitting on the park bench with a newspaper in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other—what’s his story? Why does he look so sad? Has he suffered a loss? What kind of loss? Was it his job? His wife? Millions of dollars in the stock market? What’s in the brown paper bag? Is it something that will complicate things for him? What would happen if he slept on the park bench tonight?

While you’re out on your field trip, carry a small notebook so you can write down what you observe and ask all the silly questions you want. Note the sounds you hear, the smells, the sights. But most of all, notice people and start asking yourself what their stories might be and what would happen if . . . You don’t have to have real answers—create them!

Be “curioser and curioser.”

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). ―Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Now that you’ve got notes, it’s time to think about whose story you might want to tell. While you were out, which people intrigued you and made you ask the most questions? Make up names for them. Make up pasts. Make up character profiles (here’s a fun worksheet) about their likes and dislikes, their bad habits, and their biggest flaws—the things that will really get them into trouble. All fiction evolves from getting characters into trouble and then testing those characters as they work their way through it to come out on the other side a changed person. (More on this in a future article.)

Does one of the characters you invented stand out and make you eager to learn more? Does one of them keep popping up in your daydreams or keep you lying awake long after you should be asleep? That’s the one you want to write 50,000 words about come November. Let him or her rattle around in your head for a while and become real.

3 Works to Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.

In President Obama’s final State of the Union address, he included a call on Americans to use their “voices of unarmed truth and unconditional love,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called them. Dr. King’s legacy lives on not only in Obama’s speech but also in the minds and hearts of Americans as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the third Monday of January each year. The following three books are touching reminders of the life of this exceptional activist, humanitarian, and civil rights leader.

I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World by Martin Luther King Jr.

This book collects what Coretta Scott King described as “many of what I consider to be my husband’s most important writings and orations.” Among the pieces in the book are “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” and his last sermon, “I See the Promised Land.” The sections are ordered chronologically to follow the history of the civil rights movement and other events. The introduction is by James M. Washington, the editor of the book.

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.

Strength to Love is a collection of Dr. King’s sermons about his philosophy of nonviolence, his vision of Christianity, and his sense of social justice. Coretta Scott King wrote the foreword, saying, “If there is one book Martin Luther King Jr. has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is Strength to Love.”

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Clayborne Carson (Editor)

This first-person account of Dr. King’s life is woven from collections of unpublished writings, interviews, and correspondence from Stanford University’s collection of archival material. Clayborne Carson, a historian and documentarian, compiled these materials into a book that supplements Dr. King’s other autobiographies Stride Toward Freedom and Where Do We Go From Here. Carson’s book takes readers from Dr. King’s birth in Atlanta in 1929 through his entire life story and illustrates the moral courage that sustained him through the most difficult times.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day gives us the opportunity to reflect on the great courage of this iconic leader. Some may only know him as the leader of the civil rights movement, but reading his works gives us insight into his beliefs and the passion that guided his life.

Should You Take Notes By Hand or Electronically?

At a professional conference in 2014, Clive Thompson, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, presented “The Pencil and the Keyboard: How The Way You Write Changes the Way You Think.” In this session, he claimed that handwriting was better than typing in certain situations and vice versa. One attendee, Eric Peters, decided to explore the issue further in the article “Keyboard vs. Pen: What’s the Best Way to Take Notes?” Before reading on, think about how you would answer that question, and then examine his research below.

Handwriting Improves Memory Retention

Researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer conducted an experiment to see whether people would remember more after taking notes by hand or on a keyboard. They instructed half of the participants to write their notes with pen and paper. The other half used keyboards. In each of their trials, the people who wrote notes by hand remembered more of the information. Why?

The answer has to do with a mental process called synthesis. As you listen to a lecture, for example, you can’t write fast enough to record every single word of speech. To compensate, your brain decides which information is most important, and that’s what you write down. That’s synthesis. Have you heard the expression “in one ear and out the other”? Rather than discarding everything, your brain synthesizes information, thus making it easier to recall than non-synthesized information would be.

Typing, on the other hand, allows you to record the lecture almost verbatim, but it actually results in less synthesis, which results in less retention. Scientific American explains: “When typing, students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.”

When Typing Is Better

Not everyone agrees that handwriting is the best option for notes. In a Thought Catalog blog, Zoe Annabel lists four ways typing may be preferable to handwriting. Her number three reason is efficiency. Typing may be better if the goal isn’t memory retention. For instance, rather than studying for an exam, perhaps you are taking minutes at a business meeting. If you plan to file the document afterward, you can always consult your notes later to find the information you need. In that case, fast typers would capture more details than someone taking notes by hand.

Another benefit of typing is neatness. Or as Zoe Annabel puts it, “typing is prettier.” Are you sharing the notes with someone? If your handwriting isn’t exactly neat, others reading the notes would probably appreciate a typed copy rather than a handwritten one. What about spelling, punctuation, and grammar? Many word processing programs come with a spelling checker or grammar checker that can help you catch misspelled words or other writing errors. Some programs even guess what you are trying to type after a few keystrokes! In short, when communicating with others, typing may be your best option.

What do you think of the research? Is it true in your case? Let us know in the comments: Do you take notes on paper or digitally?

Grammarly Announces Winner of 3rd Annual $1,000 Scholarship

On January 12, Grammarly launched its third annual scholarship essay competition, encouraging students to share their thoughts on one of two writing prompts:

• What is poetry, and how does it influence your writing?
• What is the funniest book you have ever read? Talk about why the book was funny and how it impacted you.

We received an overwhelming response from students of all ages, in all disciplines. After perusing your essays, Grammarly is delighted to announce the $1,000 scholarship winner: Elizabeth Woolf.

Elizabeth shared how spoken word poetry empowered her to develop her poetic voice. Her poetry is about “simple and complex thoughts; from [her] obsession with lakes, red doors, airport security, and sweatshirt hugs, to [her] puzzlement with the passage of time.”

Congratulations, Elizabeth! You certainly have a way with words.

To all of the participants in this year’s scholarship competition: Thank you for sharing your personal thoughts and anecdotes. The Grammarly team enjoyed reading each essay, and we encourage each of you to keep on writing.

What to Do When Someone Takes Credit for Your Work

You feel great after finishing a project, but then someone else takes the credit. What should you do? If you lose your cool, you could lose your job. Don’t run the risk! Let’s look at three scenarios and some strategies that can help you turn a bad situation into a favorable one.

The Passive Praise Stealer

You collaborate with a coworker on a project. Later, you overhear your boss commend your colleague: “What a fantastic job! You must have devoted a lot of thought and effort to this task.” You expect your coworker to say they couldn’t have done it without you, but instead he just smiles and says thanks. How will you ever get ahead if your colleague steals your thunder?

Suggestion: First of all, don’t assume that your coworker intentionally deprived you of your due honor. Perhaps he’s nervous around your boss, or he thought that your boss would commend you personally. However, you don’t have to be passive just because your colleague is. Why not give yourself some credit? Approach your boss privately. Ask him for feedback about the task. You might say something like, “I was wondering if you were satisfied with how the project turned out, or if you needed me to make a few tweaks.” When he expresses surprise, modestly explain your role and your investment in the project’s success. And, lest you become a hypocrite, mention an essential contribution of your colleague too.

The Blatant Snatch-and-Grabber

What if your fellow worker took credit for your work on purpose? Suppose you discovered that she lied to claim your writing as her own. You might be tempted to shout and break things, but that won’t do any good. How can you cope?

Suggestion: For published pieces, alert your colleague to her tendency to “borrow.” You might even use a report from a plagiarism detection program as evidence. If your work hasn’t been published, why not give her a chance to come clean? Not everyone agrees on the definition of plagiarism. She might feel that changing a few words makes the writing her own. However, all is not lost. In an email or in person, tactfully point out that her writing closely resembled the work that you prepared. If she admits her guilt and agrees to rewrite the piece, you can move past the incident in peace.

On the other hand, she might deny it. Consider the case of Kaavya Viswanathan. When this Harvard student faced charges of plagiarism, she claimed it was “unconscious.” Her story fell apart, literally, when her publisher found out that she copied several passages of her novel from different sources. The publisher gave her the boot and immediately pulled the book out of stores. So even if you can’t prove it this time, you can prepare yourself to respond if your coworker tries the same trick again. Take preventive measures by considering how your associate managed to get her hands on your work. Do you need to update your passwords? Lock your desk drawers? Send early drafts of important documents to your boss for review. If Stealy McGrabby tries to take credit for the work later, she will be caught red-handed.

The Big Boss Thief

What if the thief isn’t a colleague? What if the thief is your boss? People may steal ideas during brainstorming sessions, when ideas are bouncing all over the place. What happens when he acts as if he came up with the idea by himself?

Suggestion: In these types of situations, you shouldn’t be too offended if the idea-stealer uses your idea. He may not remember who said what, only that he was inspired! Limit the ideas you share at work if you don’t want them to be “company property.” For example, imagine you have a killer idea for an invention. Some businesses specify in the contract that anything you develop during the time you work for them belongs to the company. You might decide to keep your most creative thoughts to yourself until you have the freedom to develop it without anyone else laying claim.

Is there any other way you can deal with the situation without risking your position? In 1999, the Center for Academic Integrity concluded that honor codes that promote “honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility” make a significant difference in the behavior of students. The study further revealed that engagement influences how effective an honor code is. In one test, one group of students read an honor code before taking a test. The second group signed the code attesting that they read and understood it. While the first group was less likely to cheat than students with no honor code, the second group had no instances of cheating at all! What can you do to encourage others to be honest and fair when it comes to taking the credit? Perhaps it’s as simple as making them aware that it’s the right thing to do.

7 Irish Proverbs Adopted Into Pop Culture

When Saint Patrick’s Day rolls around, everyone embraces a little Irish spirit. Sporting shamrocks and shillelaghs and wearing a bit o’ green, friends come together to celebrate this most Celtic tradition — and no one celebrates like the Irish!

Given the enthusiasm with which America endorses this holiday, perhaps it’s no surprise that Irish culture has blended so happily with American pop culture. In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, here are a few examples of Irish wisdom and sayings that have come to be part of modern culture.

May the Road Rise Up to Meet You

Chances are you’ve seen this famous blessing stitched on a pillow at your Irish granny’s house or emblazoned on a plaque hung near her door. This blessing is a nod to the Celtic fondness for using symbols from nature to illustrate God’s relationship with man. Historians believe that invoking imagery, such as a welcome breeze or the warm sun, made the concept of an all-powerful Christian god more easily understood by common folk.

It Is Often That a Person’s Mouth Broke His Nose

Sure, this one plays into the stereotype of an Irishman’s passion for brawling, but this good advice applies to everyone equally. If you don’t want a punch in the nose, don’t shoot off your mouth. Words to live by, Erin go bragh.

A Son Is a Son ‘Til He Takes Him a Wife. A Daughter’s a Daughter All of Her Life

This nugget of wisdom — that any mother of sons will understand — comes from the New Testament in the Gospel of Mark: For this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife…and they shall be as one flesh. It took the Irish, however, to turn it into a snappy little rhyme.

The Older the Fiddle, the Sweeter the Tune

This charming sentiment has several subtle variations, but most recognize it to mean that most things improve over time, or that the best things in life are worth waiting for. This powerful idiom was immortalized in popular culture by Gus McCrae, the feisty hero of Larry McMurtry’s novel “Lonesome Dove.”

Slainte!

Pronounced slahn-sha, this classic Irish toast means “your health.” From the Gaelic word for “safe,” this pithy exclamation stands in for the wordier, “I drink to your good health.” To endear yourself to your Irish friends this St. Patty’s Day, grab a pint of Guinness at your local pub, clink bottles with your mates, and shout out a hearty, “Slainte!”

May the Cat Eat You and the Devil Eat the Cat

The Irish are masters of the elaborate curse, and you’ll really feel the burn if your Celtic acquaintance says this to you. Most save this double-barreled insult for the worst of characters. This one is considered worse than “May you have an itch and no nails to scratch it,” but not quite as bad as “May you be a load for four before the year is out,” with four referring to pall bearers at a funeral.

You’ll Never Plow a Field By Turning It Over in Your Mind

Many cultures have proverbs admonishing one that nothing gets done by just thinking about it. In fact, the Irish like this sentiment so much, they have several variations on the theme. Another popular Irish proverb along the same line is “There’s no use boiling your cabbage twice.”

There’s no denying the Irish have some of the most colorful idioms for imparting everyday folk wisdom and lore. This St. Patrick’s Day, celebrate Irish heritage — even if you can’t claim Irish ancestry — with a liberal sprinkling of common Celtic proverbs.

Do you have a favorite Irish proverb, prayer, or curse?