Have you ever looked back at a text, email or piece of writing that you have submitted (even after you thought you did some thorough proofreading) only to cringe at how many mistakes you made?

The truth is: Many of us have been in the same boat.

But to help you ensure that you avoid making these embarrassing mistakes (before there aren't any take-backs), media update's Lara Smit has put together five tips to help you.

Let's polish those pieces:

1. Give yourself a break before proofreading

We all know how it goes: When you're writing, your mind becomes a haze of words and punctuation marks. You know which ideas you want to communicate and you believe that's exactly how you're communicating them. This makes it really difficult to spot the mistakes that you're making while you're writing — or even shortly after you have written.

So, before you start reviewing your work, it's often best to take a break and give the editing part of your brain a chance to kick in. This helps you to look back at your work with fresh eyes that allow you to identify incongruencies — like the odd spelling mistake or missing commas.

2. Read your writing aloud

Often when reading, your texts your messages make complete sense in your mind. However, when you read your writing out loud, you realise that some of your sentences don’t sound quite right.

This is because reading your sentences out loud allows you to pinpoint exactly where you take breathing breaks and where your sentences become a bit too complicated and wordy.

Therefore, when reading your writing out loud, you can isolate places that require punctuation marks or where you need to break sentences and paragraphs apart. It also helps you to see where you need to rephrase your sentences to make them more clear and concise.

3. Make use of online tools

You may be an expert at editing, but you can't deny that there are occasions when an editing software like Grammarly picks up on some of the errors you missed. There are also occasions where a text requires a fair amount of editing without there being any red or blue lines after putting it through one of these programmes.

So, although using these programmes are a great way to quickly check your work for simple mistakes, they cannot be the only method that you use to proofread your work.

Therefore, as a general rule of thumb when using this software, always proofread your work thoroughly after processing it.

What's more is these programmes sometimes make unnecessary editing suggestions on your documents. This means that you have to be cautious before accepting the suggestions that they make on your writing and make intuitive decisions as to where to accept edits and where not to.

This being said, here's a list of editing software you can make use of:

4. Keep a list of common mistakes to look out for

Whether it's using semicolons in the wrong place, overusing commas or writing "you're" instead of "your" — every writer has their weaknesses.

And while we can't all be perfect, we can still be cognisant of our faults to ensure that they don't affect our future writing.

So, a fantastic proofreading hack that you can integrate into your work is to make a list of all your common blunders. This will serve as a great reference when reviewing your texts to help you keep an eye out for those usual mistakes you might've missed in the past.

5. Make your writing as simple as possible

This may not be a proofreading tip, but it sure will help make the proofreading process a lot easier for yourself.

In most circumstances, common writing mistakes occur when writers use complicated words or complex sentences that string together elaborate ideas and information.

Therefore, one of the easiest ways to minimise these mistakes is by simplifying your writing.

What's more is that by simplifying your writing, you will also make your texts more straightforward and palatable for the everyday reader — improving the overall quality and readability of your work.

Have any proofreading tips that you want to share? Let us know what they are in the comments section below.

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Keen to sharpen your proofreading skills a bit more? Then be sure to read our article, Punctuation series: How to use commas — in 200 words or less.
*Image courtesy of Canva