Proofreading. It’s one of the final things you are likely to do before declaring your book/short story/poem/article done. It’s one of the last hurdles to a finished piece of work. By the time you get round to it, you can sometimes be in a mind-set of simply wanting to finish your piece of writing once and for all – and quickly.

The desire to get something finished can lead to a rushed proofreading job that leaves your work not quite as good as it could be, and that’s a shame. Proofreading matters. OK, it can often seem a little bit like nit-picking, especially when you find yourself spending twenty minutes having a mental debate with yourself trying to decide whether it’s proofreading, proof-reading or proof reading (NB: I did not just do this. Much). But that nit-picking is important, as a single comma in the wrong place could change the meaning of a whole sentence – possibly a sentence that your story turns on, that it relies on to move forward.

Proofreading is also one of your last opportunities to catch any glaring errors in your work before declaring it finished. With any luck, any major clangers will have been caught early on in your editing and re-writing process, but there is always the chance of something slipping through the net. Sometimes it takes the close line edit of a thorough proofread to pick up on issues that you haven’t noticed until now.

Plus, the art of proofreading is all in the detail. It’s about making sure you’ve put apostrophes in the right places and used your semi-colons and commas correctly, and that your formatting of dialogue is consistent throughout. These might seem like relatively small issues in the grand scheme of writing and publishing a book, but we’ve all read things in the past that have been that little bit less enjoyable because of silly typos or mistakes that really should have been picked up before the work found its way to a paying reader. Make sure your own work doesn’t fall into the same trap.

What do you think?