How to proofread your draft, one pass at a time

Reading a draft once from top to bottom while trying to catch everything tends to catch typos and miss the rest. Your attention stays on the sentence in front of you, so a paragraph in the wrong place, or a claim your source never made, goes by unnoticed. Separate passes, each looking for one kind of problem, give each problem your full attention.

Order the passes from large to small. Rewriting a paragraph undoes every comma you fixed inside it, so structure comes before punctuation.

Put some distance between writing and reading

Right after writing, you read what you meant to write instead of what is on the page. A night's sleep helps most. If you only have an hour, print the draft, or change the font and the page width on screen. Anything that makes the text look unfamiliar makes its errors easier to see.

Pass 1: the structure

Read only the first sentence of each paragraph, in order. Together they should read like an outline of your argument. If one of them summarizes a source instead of making a point, or two of them say the same thing, the paragraphs under them need work.

Then check the two ends. The introduction should promise what the body delivers, and the conclusion should not bring in a claim the body never made.

Pass 2: every claim against its source

This pass takes the longest, and nothing later in this list does its job. Go sentence by sentence. Whenever a sentence states a fact, a number, a finding, or someone's position, ask four questions.

1. Does the source say this? Open the PDF at the page you cited and find the passage.
2. Does it say it as strongly? A source that "suggests" something has not "proven" it, and a finding about one group of people does not cover everyone.
3. Is the quote word for word? Compare it with the original, punctuation included. If you cut words, mark the cut the way your style guide asks.
4. Is the page right? Page numbers copied into notes drift, and a PDF viewer often counts pages differently from the numbers printed on them. Cite the printed number unless your guide says otherwise.

While you are here, mark every sentence that makes a claim with no citation. Either it is your own argument, which is fine, or it came from a source you forgot to note. Find out which before you move on.

Pass 3: read it out loud

Read every sentence aloud at a normal speaking pace. Where you stumble, run out of breath, or have to start over to get the meaning, the sentence needs to be split, reordered, or cut. Reading aloud also catches missing and doubled words, because your voice will not skip them the way your eyes do.

If you cannot read aloud where you are, use the read-aloud feature on your computer or phone and follow the text on screen while it plays.

Pass 4: words and mechanics

Keep a list of the errors you make often. For many writers it includes its and it's, affect and effect, or then and than. Search the draft for each word on your list and check every hit in context.

Then look for:

• tense shifts, such as "the author argues" in one paragraph and "the author argued" in the next
• a key term that changes name partway through (choose one name and keep it)
• sentences that open with "This" and no noun after it, where the reader has to guess what "this" refers to
• abbreviations used before they are spelled out

For typos, start at the last sentence and work backward. Out of order, each sentence has to be read for its spelling, because the argument no longer carries you along.

Pass 5: format and references

Check what a reader sees before reading a word: the title page, headings, page numbers, margins, line spacing, and the word count against the assignment brief. Then go through the reference list. Every in-text citation needs an entry, every entry needs a citation, names and years must match in both places, and the list follows the order your style requires.

Run the spell checker last, knowing what it misses. It flags words that do not exist, so "form" typed for "from" and "trial" typed for "trail" pass it every time.

Plan the time

Five passes do not fit in the hour before a deadline. Pass 2 alone means reopening every source you cited. If time is short, do passes 1 and 2 and skip the polish, since a misplaced comma costs you less than a claim your source does not support.

Inkwise, in early access, suggests lines from your own PDFs and shows the file, page, and exact passage for each one, which gives you a place to start on pass 2. You still read the passage and decide what stays, and every claim in the draft is yours to check.