Proofread Essay for Spelling And Grammar
You've brainstormed, you've written and revised a smashing thesis, you've picked compelling examples and crafted exciting body paragraphs, and then delivered a smashing conclusion that's definitely going to convince your reader of your beauty, intelligence and wit. So you're done, right? Of course not! There's one more step to go, and that's to proofread your essay.
What is Proofreading?
Proofreading is the final step in revising your essay, where you check for grammar and spelling mistakes, missing words, and typos that you might not have caught while making other edits. It's also really tough! Mark Twain once wrote 'You think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes and vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along.' In other words, you've written the piece, so your mind tends to fill in the blanks even when errors are staring you in the face.
Why Proofreading?
I'm not going to lie to you. Lots of students skip or shortchange the proofreading step when writing their papers. Writing a good essay is hard work, and after developing and reorganizing and polishing your paragraphs and examples, it's easy to get too tired of looking at your own piece to want to proofread it. Can't you just turn it in? Won't your teacher understand?
That's a perfectly understandable way to feel, but it's the wrong perspective. Proofreading is important not because of what it adds to your essay, but because of what it prevents. And what it prevents is catastrophe: nothing less than the annihilation of all of your hard work because of a misused comma, a run-on sentence or an incorrect possessive. Sounds melodramatic, doesn't it? But take this passage from one of the stories in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
'Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.'
The sentence is firm, conclusive, and elegantly phrased. Now look at the same sentence with some proofreading errors:
'Life is infinitaly stranger then anything which mind of man could invent.'
Notice that the meaning of the sentence hasn't changed at all, but one misspelling ('infinitely'), one grammar mistake ('then' instead of 'than') and one typo ('the' is missing from the sentence), and the sentence has completely lost its power.
Remember that an essay is an argument that you are building for your reader, ultimately trying to persuade him or her of your point of view. By skipping the proofreading step, you risk letting silly mistakes slip through. Taken on their own, they may not matter much, but in the context of your essay, an error like exchanging 'to' when you mean 'too' can ruin your credibility. Proofreading allows you to maintain that credibility.