Posts Tagged ‘proofreading’

With technology doing a lot of the work for us, spelling, grammar, punctuation, we have become quite lazy in our own proofreading skills. It is still necessary to continue to read things ourselves to catch the errors that most computers and software doesn’t pick up.

Here are a few ways to continue to improve your proofreading skills:

• When you are proofreading your own work, walk away from it for at least a couple of hours and then return to it with a fresh mind. If you have time, try a full day. After sleeping on it, will help you identify errors or elements that you wouldn’t see otherwise.

• Read the article out loud to yourself.  Literally, read the words out loud so that if the flow of the sentence and the punctuation doesn’t produce a well worded phrase, it should probably be changed.  Yes, you will get coworkers looking at you a bit oddly, so if you want to avoid that, take your document home with you and read it in the bathroom while taking your bath or doing other things.  It’s amazing at what this little trick will do to help you find errors. If you can download and use them, here are two programs that can be used that will read your article back to you so you can concentrate on general elements and hear it being read back to you:

http://www.naturalreaders.com/ (Free Download and Pro version provides more options)
http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud/ (Free Trial)

• Read the article backwards.  Believe it or not, this will help you find misspellings as your eye focuses on the word and not the entire sentence.  You might even find another word that could be used instead of the common words you are using repeatedly, extending your vocabulary at the same time.

• Practice makes perfect and there is no substitute.  Pick up books, forms and so much more and continue to provide yourself with challenges throughout your day, which may or may not provide results, but will keep your eye and your mind in tune with knowledge of vocabulary, punctuation, sentence structure, grammar and spelling.

• Don’t rely on your computer or software to do all your proofreading.  There is no substitution for the human touch and even though technology has provided us with quicker ways to help us, we are truly, ultimately responsible for the results.  Computers aren’t the one’s whose reputation is on the line.

• Don’t edit your sentences right away.  Write a sentence or two or even a paragraph and return to it to edit everything at once.  Ask yourself several questions when doing so such as:

• Can my sentences be restructured (nouns, verbs and adjectives) to be clearer about its meaning?
• Am I using a word repeatedly? What other words could be used?
• Can I remove or add information without confusing the reader and still get the meaning across?
• Does my paragraph fit in the sequence of events or outline of the paper?

Another trick that may not necessarily be something that will help your skills, but will help your articles is let someone else read over it.  A second pair of eyes is always good and a third is even better.  Busy schedules may not always allow for it, so be careful when asking someone else to help you.  Your deadline may not fit in with their schedule, and you may find yourself in a bind if waiting on someone else to provide you with results.

These are a just a few ways of improving your proofreading skills.  Taking classes, practice and continued improvement of your skills takes time, so don’t get frustrated in your learning process.  Keep trying and as you improve you will find your eyes and mind become quite honed and in tune making your proofreading skills almost second nature.

Pro Typists are committed to providing professional transcribing, proof reading and content for the outgoing professional. Services are accurate, clean and concise with a productive staff that currently has a combined service record of 20+ years in the professional and corporate industries.

Currently our staff is capable of handling 24 hour turn around (not including weekends or holidays) for those who need expedited services. We handle all audio recordings and video recordings that can include, but are not limited to:

.mp3, .mp4, .wav, .avi, .wmv, .mov, .mpeg, .mpg, .wma .rm files

Professional Transcribers

We offer a convenient and easy upload capability to get your project to us and we are just a phone call away should you need that personal touch or assistance to get things done right the first time.

People who use our services are from all elements of corporate America, ranging from motivational speakers, authors, editors, sport-casters, seminar providers, teachers and college professors and more. Each one of them providing a range of subjects that are never too big or too small to transcribe for their future use in Internet Newsletters, book publishing, document production, thesis papers and so many more that we couldn’t even begin to list here.

Our pricing structure has no hidden fees, no set-up fees and once quoted for your job doesn’t change! Please see our rates page for more information on our pricing structure.

We provide transcription for all types of industries including:

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Sometimes it is just a matter of keeping things simple that helps.  Because of that, our rate schedule has changed a bit and we have simplified the way we price each project.  If you see our rates page, you will notice that you will see our basic rate, but if your project is NOT within that realm, we will quote it for you.  Because of that, we also guarantee that your quote will not change in the middle of the project!  We have a set list of questions that we will ask you before we ever determine the final cost of your project.

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Print mediums have guidelines and elements that should be followed in order to make things more legible and easier on the eyes for the individuals who are reading.  Even though some of these elements may have evolved over centuries, they are still very effective and should be followed should you wish to impact your readers.

1. Using “serif fonts” in the main body utilizes the human eyes ability to recognized the shape of words and not necessarily the letter by letter of each word. A serif font is a font that uses lines at the top and bottom of each letter to help guide the eye to each line easily and smoothly.  A san serif font usually forgoes that line and can be used for smaller areas of text such as headlines, bylines and picture captions. Excellent examples of good serif fonts are Garamond, Century Schoolbook or Bookman.
2. A “Lead-in” for the first paragraph of an article helps give a quick synopsis of what the article might be about, but also should be the ‘teaser’ that will get the reader to want to continue to read more.  Identify these first few lines with a subtle change in the font and layout so that it does stand out and leads the eye to it.
3. Avoid hyphenating words.  Using hyphens should be reserved for phone numbers in most instances and a few other rare  instances when it calls for last names and hyphenated combination words.  Breaking a word at a syllable usually can be avoided when playing with the leading and spacing of the lines.  This keeps the flow of the words and articles going smoothly for your readers.
4. Old habits are hard to break.  Including those that we had taught to us when the typewriter classes were taught to us in high school.  This includes the double spacing after periods and colons.  As a rule of thumb, any double spaces are now obsolete and professional typesetters don’t use them.
5. Full justification may look good but does make it harder to read.  Next time you get a chance, fully justify your article in your column layout and in turn look at the white ‘lanes’ of space that it creates.  This can be extremely distracting to the eye and also cause distortion of short words just to fill in the space of the line to even it up. Use left justification when you have long lines and be cautious in using full justification when you don’t absolutely need it.

All over the world we have over 6,500 language spoken.  Over 4,000 of those are used by millions.  However, 30 of these languages are predominately used today. English is only second to Mandarin Chinese.  Because of that, if you are using English, you are only exposing your words to only just a fraction of the worlds population because of no translation.

By transcribing your work, you will find that your ability to have your work translated might expose your knowledge, insight and education to thousands, even millions of others.

Dialects, phonetics, accents and so much more need to be taken into consideration when offering professional and accurate transcription.  A word out of place or a word misinterpreted and your element can be changed completely.  We want to make sure that doesn’t happen.  We take great care in making sure that your transcription is completely understandable in not only English but in any other language.