Have you ever written content and felt that you did your best, only to post and later come to read and see errors flying around everywhere in your already published content?
Well, I have experienced it so many times, and it made me feel extremely bad. The impression it first gave me as the writer was that my content was poor, and I didn't give my work the proper attention.
When I started blogging, I was confronted with this challenge a lot. Thank God for constructive criticism, sometimes I won't even notice it, it is those who read my work that draw my attention to it, and you know that is somehow embarrassing.
So what is proofreading?
Simple, it is reading your content again, carefully reviewing it to correct the errors that you must have left in the content after writing it.
It is not possible to read your content just once and be able to spot all the errors in it. No matter how good you are, you might miss one error or the other; sometimes it can be a grammatical error, and other times it can be a spelling error.
As a writer, your content tells who you are. It is just like your outfit, those small errors are like stains on a white dress.
Your readers want to flow smoothly. They don't want to be obstructed by typing and grammatical errors. They dont want to be reading clustered words and clustered sentences without a proper paragraph to give them breathing space.
No one is perfect, that stands sure, but errors should not be scattered across your content. It gives you a bad name as a writer.
Your content may be juicy, but if it has a lot of wrong spellings or grammatical errors and the like, the quality would be reduced, and you know what happens to low-quality products? People tend to stay away from them.
Personally, whenever I am reading any content and I spot spelling or grammatical errors, my thoughts would be trapped there. Instead of focusing on the contents, what would be ringing in my mind is the error that I came across.
I will be trying to fix it in my head instead of trying to relate to the content. Sometimes the error gets so bad that one has to try to guess what the author is trying to communicate, and that's bad.
There are readers who cannot stand those errors. Once they go through your content and they discover one or more errors, they stop reading and stop visiting your blog.
So, as a writer, do your best to be an author who is obsessed with quality. Let your content be the type that will attract attention.
How Do I Proofread?
It is simple, before you publish your content, take your time and read it like three more times, that's too much, right? Maybe, yes, but it's worth it.
My coach was the one who gave me that idea of reading three times before hitting the publish button, although I didn't take it seriously until I joined the inkwell community, and I had the option to either adjust or leave. I owe the community a lot of appreciation for making me a better content creator.
Our problem most of the time is that we are always in a rush. You want to rush and post and leave, but why? You already took your time to write, why not do your best and make it perfect?
Some people say, “I don't enjoy reading my content.” Well, if you don't enjoy reading your work, what makes you think that others will enjoy it? Enough of the laziness.
You are not a machine, you are bound to make mistakes while writing. Read again, that word you are not sure of the spelling, go and google it. Don't be the type that is more interested in earning more than they are interested in giving quality.
I will tell you the truth, too many errors in a post spoil one's reputation, people will avoid your content. We are more interested in quality than quantity, but it will be excellent if you have both quantity and quality.
Paraphrasing is not accepted on Hive Blockchain, but there are tools that can help you correct your errors and not alter the originality of your work. I use Google docs and grammaly.com
These tools will underline spelling and grammatical errors for you; all you need to do is correct them using the necessary suggestions they will provide for you.
But even after using the tools, you still need to proofread because sometimes the suggestions will not go in line with what you want to communicate.
Let your work show beauty and perfection, we are not just here to earn but to learn as well. Take your time to edit your content before you publish them, remember that the way you write your content says a lot about who you are.
N.B: All Images Are Mine
