In my first creative agency role, I found myself spending many hours poring over draft designs of hair and beauty magazines. I learnt a great deal very quickly, most importantly that I could not stand proofreading. Print may be dwindling, but writing for screen is booming and it’s full of mistakes. That’s why I’ve come up with five helpful proofreading tips for bloggers.
There’s far more content being written for screen than ever before. For every word committed to ink, it feels like there are 10,000 words being published for backlit screens of all shapes and sizes. But with a move away from print comes a parallel move away from the structures that gave us printed material to read.
Once upon a time, there’d be teams of people, including rigorous sub-editors and proofreaders, working to guarantee editorial worth. They’ve been replaced by software spell-checkers, which are cheaper and don’t do half as good a job.
During my brush with print, I worked under a fantastic editor, who knew good editorial style inside and out. I still feel a pang of shame whenever I see a typo in any of my blog posts. I’m quick to go back and correct it just in case she ever sees it.
Even though personnel may have diminished, the number of writers popping up has increased greatly. The internet is full of bloggers like me, and probably you. Even artificial intelligence is coaxed into writing content for us. We all have our place, and we all have the ability to make mistakes. So here are five helpful proofreading tips for bloggers you should consider.
Tip #1: Read backwards and catch every typo
This is part of what we used to call proofreading for literals. It’s literally the business of catching typos and seriously obvious mistakes and it’s probably the most important of these proofreading tips for bloggers. But if they’re so obvious, why do typos slip through the net so often? It has a lot to do with how our brains try to help us understand the written word.
Our minds are fantastic. As we read, our brains are making predictions about what words we should be seeing next based on the words we’re reading now. And sometimes, if there’s a typo that’s close enough to the word we’re expecting to read, our brains accept it as if it were typo-free.
This is not particularly helpful when we’re proofreading, especially if you’re proofreading your own writing. You know what your writing is about, your voice is obviously familiar to you, so it’s hard work stopping your brain from taking over and sabotaging your proofreading. Consider these lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody:
I’m just a poor boy nobody loves me
He’s just a poor boy from a poor family,
Spare him his life from this monstrosty
Easy come, easy go, will you let me go
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go
You may have spotted the typo anyway, which is ideal. But if you missed it, just read the passage backwards one word at a time. This breaks your brain’s ability to flow effortlessly through the text. It’s also a great technique for spotting spacing mistakes in punctuation , like that one.
Tip #2: Proof in print
Anyone who’s received more than a few professional emails will have at some point considered the environment before printing it out. Printing is dwindling in homes and offices everywhere and quite rightly. It’s so often a total waste of paper.
But I can guarantee that printing will have a massive impact on the success of your proofreading. I don’t know the science and I don’t know why, but you will always do a better proofreading job working with a printed piece than on-screen proofing.
In my early working days, all of our magazines were designed in Adobe InDesign. All of them could be read perfectly clearly either in InDesign or with a draft PDF. But you could guarantee that once you finished on-screen proofing, you could print out the same page you were sure was error-free and find two or three more corrections.
Of course, printing your blog posts out is not great for the environment. But if content is king on your next client web project, consider printing key campaign or landing pages and I guarantee you’ll be taking the red pen to it.
Tip #3: Proofread on the front-end and for devices
Web developers and designers have to consider different devices and screen sizes when they design web pages, and perhaps proofreaders should too. A big part of proofreading for print is looking at form and how the type flows through the design. It felt like we were forever red-penning widows and orphans (unsightly single words at the start of columns or the ends of paragraphs).
Layout is certainly less important when writing for screen. Web pages are responsive, so the text will flow differently on different screens. However it’s still essential that you proof your blog posts as they appear on the front-end of your site, i.e. not proofing them as they appear in the content management system.
Secondly, check your posts at different display sizes, either with different devices or developer tools in the browser. Hopefully you won’t find many problems when you proof for devices, but you may find a long heading that takes up lots of space or a link that wraps strangely and needs revising.
Checking your blog posts at different screen sizes could show you layout issues caused by your post content
Tip #4: Agree your style
This is one of my favourite proofreading tips for bloggers. There are so many valid approaches to writing that it’s not for me to give you pointers on your style. What you absolutely must do, however is be definitive and consistent in your style. This goes beyond deciding whether it’s colour vs. color, recognise vs. recognize or learnt vs. learned. This is about making sure you know whether you want to write spellcheck, spell-check or spell check. This is about deciding whether you’d describe the man as a deeply humorous eccentric or a totally whacky funny-guy.
Your style not only needs to be consistent within a single blog post, it needs to be consistent across your entire blog and even across all the writers contributing to that blog. This can be tough at times, but beyond scouring your blog’s previous posts for clues, there are shortcuts to navigating the style minefield.
I’d always recommend having a copy of New Hart’s Rules in a nearby bookcase, particularly if you’re writing for a British reader. American English writers could consider The Elements of Style and please don’t bother buying the wrong one. There are also many great online style guides freely available. For example, if you find the writing style of The Guardian newspaper agreeable, regardless of how you feel about the journalism, you can use their free style guide.
You don’t have to do absolutely everything these guides tell you to. You are always allowed to develop your own rules and your own style. As long as you are communicating effectively with a consistent style, you’re all good.
Tip#5: Swap your posts with a fellow writer
As I mentioned earlier, the hardest content to proofread is your own. Even after some time away from a piece, your style and tone of voice will be familiar and your brain will flow too easily through the copy.
Whenever we would proofread a magazine for print, the most important quality in a proofreader, after an understanding of grammar and style, was their lack of prior involvement in the project. We’d always draft in an editor that had had nothing to do with the editorial on the magazine. Their lack of familiarity with the work meant they needed to concentrate more to read the copy and, as a result, they tended to find more corrections.
The equivalent for us bloggers would be to swap posts with other bloggers before we publish them. Their fresh eyes are bound to have a worthwhile input. You could swap with other writers on the same site, which will cut out a lot of back-and-forth over style. If you’re working alone, find another writer that at least has an understanding of your field.
Sharing your work with a blogger that doesn’t understand your topic may be more trouble than it’s worth. Answering to queries that arise from a lack of understanding of the topic will be an unnecessary drain on your time.
Other writers may bombard you with unwanted recommendations to re-write and even give you changes that you might disagree with. Remember that a correction from a proofreader is like advice; you don’t have to take it. You’re still the writer, and probably the editor too, so the final decision is always yours.
Conclusion: Proofreading tips for bloggers
I can’t promise that these proofreading tips for bloggers will clear up all the mistakes in your copy, but it’s definitely worth adding these to your proofreading workflow when you next publish a blog post:
- Read passages backwards to find literal typos and some punctuation issues.
- Proofread key pages in print, you will find more corrections than on-screen.
- Check how your post content flows on the front-end of your website and at different screen sizes.
- Develop your writing style across your entire site and stick to it.
- Swap posts with fellow writers in your field to get fresh eyes on your copy.