National Proofreading Day

International students are certainly familiar with writing essays, assignments, and dissertations. The moment you finish your assignment is what makes you feel the most comfortable. But don't forget that whether you're writing an essay for school, a report for a company, or even composing a text message or email, the most important thing is to proofread your text to make sure it's written correctly and clearly. This is where proof-reading happens. So what is proofreading? How important is it for your essay? National Proofreading Day is celebrated every year on March 8 to raise awareness about proofreading and to recognize its importance.

For those of you studying abroad, proofreading is an extremely important step because this is the polishing stage for the content before completing your article. Proofreading is the process of re-reading a lesson before deciding to submit it to a teacher and finding mistakes. These mistakes are often related to grammar, spelling, punctuation, text formatting, etc.

Proofreading is essential for any piece of writing whether it's a class essay, a job application, or a paper. Depending on the skill and budget of each person, you can choose to proofread your own articles or ask for the help of an expert.

Although Proofreading is also part of Editing, they are all different steps in the process before completing the article. Editing involves almost completely changing the content, structure and language. In contrast, proofreading focuses only on correcting minor errors and inconsistencies.

Usually an article will go through a pre-editing step to make sure the ideas and arguments are well presented, and see if the paragraphs and sentences are articulated fluently and coherently. To avoid minor errors you haven't noticed while editing, the proofreading step will "check" the last time that the page formatting, line spacing, wording errors, etc. are correct.

Basic proofreading skills are very important when drafting any article, to proofread effectively and quickly you should take a few steps:

Edit your post before proofreading

Before you move on to proofreading, make sure you re-read and edit your article as it will be a waste of time if you have to correct minor mistakes and may have to rewrite a whole paragraph when you're done. There are no fully edited articles. Proofreading should only be done when you have a final draft and are satisfied with it.

Pause work

As international students continue to write and read the same article for hours or even days, you will find it increasingly difficult to find mistakes. Before proofreading, take a break from the computer for a while to let your brain and eyes relax for about 30 minutes.

Using computer software

Currently, spelling checker software is pre-installed into word processing software, you can take advantage of them to help you correct errors more effectively. But don't rely too much on them to detect all errors. If you often misspell a word or some places it's capitalized, some places it's lowercase, you can use the Find and Replace function to fix those mistakes.

History of National Proofreading Day

The corporate trainer Judy Beaver is said to be the creator of National Proofreading Day. With love for her mother, she took her mother's birthday as National Proofreading Day.

Observing National Proofreading Day

On National Proofreading Day, if you're working on any writing or you know your friends are writing, take the time to proofread your writing or your friends’ writing to make sure there are no errors in all your writing, even if it's just typos and typographical errors. If you know good ways to proofread, share them with everyone on social media with the hashtag #NationalProofreadingDay.