Editing and Proofreading: Two Important Business Skills
The volume of writing has never been larger. With more companies opening around the world, more business writing is demanded on the market. This is where your editing and proofreading skills come into play.
With more writing being produced than ever before, the amount of low-quality content has also increased. If you want to make your writing stand out and catch the attention of clients and potential partners, developing editing and proofreading skills is essential.
Nonnative English speakers face an additional challenge. Unlike native speakers, they must work harder to master the English language—especially in a business setting. To become a better writer in English, you need to master the skills of editing and proofreading a text.
If you want to develop your English writing skills, you need to be persistent, consistent, and willing to improve. Just like any other skill, editing and proofreading cannot be improved overnight. Your time and patience are required. Fortunately, they will pay off.
Editing and Proofreading: What Are the Differences?
To become a better writer, you need to master the skills of editing and proofreading. To improve your English writing skills, you need to edit and proofread daily. However, an issue arises most times: people cannot tell the difference between the two.
In this case, the first task is to understand the differences between editing and proofreading.
What is the main difference between the two? While proofreading doesn’t require changing the text, editing does. When you proofread a text, you often look for typos, missing punctuation, punctuation used incorrectly, and formatting issues. It has everything to do with textual drafting errors. As you will see, it’s important to practice and master proofreading if you want to improve your English writing skills.
On the other hand, editing implies more. When you edit a piece of text, you change it. Maybe the diction isn’t the best, so you need to find a better word. Maybe a sentence is too lengthy. In this case, you, as an editor, need to cut that long sentence into smaller ones and ensure that the meaning and the flow aren’t altered.
There are various grammatical and style errors that you can make, and becoming a better writer means improving your editing skills. By doing so, you are improving your English writing skills because editing requires having a certain understanding of the language’s grammar.
You can check some of the most common grammatical errors in business English.
Remember! Editing and proofreading are two essential skills if you want to be a better writer and improve your English writing skills. Proofreading deals mostly with typing errors, such as missing commas and typos, while editing a text means more than that. When editing a text, more changes are required.
Why Editing and Proofreading Can Help You Improve Your English Writing Skills
There are many different ways in which editing and proofreading can help you improve your English writing skills. To show just how they can help you become a better writer, let’s imagine a scenario.
Imagine that you are trying to improve your English writing skills. You craft a 300-word text that you send to your best friend. Your best friend is a native English speaker; moreover, he is an English teacher.
The next day, your friend sends you the text back. You are furious. You’ve been improving your writing skills for some time, but you get back a paper full of red ink. At first, you don’t understand, but then your friend explains it to you.
For example, you may not be aware that in a compound sentence, you always put a conjunction, such as and, or, but, etc., between clauses, and that a comma goes before the conjunction.
“Andrew has written the email but Rebecca was the one with the idea.”
This sentence is improperly punctuated. It needs a comma (,) before “but.” You weren’t aware of that, but now, since your English friend explained it to you, you are more knowledgeable in the English language. From now on, you will do your best to place a comma before “and,” “but,” “or,” and other similar conjunctions.
Now, you understand an important punctuation rule, and it was all thanks to your friend’s feedback.
How can you make use of this?
Next time you are reading an English text, look after the use of commas and conjunctions. Can you observe the pattern? A comma always precedes a conjunction. If it doesn’t, it can mean two things:
a) The writer made a mistake
b) The conjunction doesn’t actually separate two independent clauses.
Ask your friend why a comma is missing there, and he will tell you.
Remember! Books, websites, and social media groups dedicated to learning and improving your English writing skills exist on the Internet. If you are dedicated to becoming a better writer, then forming an online community of like-minded people is your secret to success.
On the other hand, your English friend might have made other corrections to your texts that you surely do not understand.
Maybe you wrote a sentence such as:
“The report was reviewed by John, who is the CEO of the company.”
While your English friend will tell you that grammatically, your sentence is correct, it can become better. That’s why he wrote with a red pen the following:
“John, the company’s CEO, reviewed the report.”
Your sentence seemed fine, so why was it changed?
Your friend will start talking about the active and the passive voice. You remember something about it from your school years, but you are not quite sure.
He tells you that good writing is concise, and the use of the active voice makes it so. Your version used the passive voice, placing the subject (“John”) at the end. By turning it into an active sentence, it becomes more concise, more to the point.
Also, the phrase “who is the CEO of the company” is long. You need to trim it so that your text becomes easier to read. So instead, your friend suggests writing “the company’s CEO.”
Improving your editing skills takes time and practice. You need to have a good command of the English language, and that implies having working knowledge of the language’s grammar. In this regard, reading style manuals is a good idea if you wish to become a better editor.
How can you make use of this?
If we are going by our example, then properly and confidently using the active and the passive voice must become your goal. Read sentences out loud and ask yourself what voice the author uses. If it is the passive, then is there a good reason for using it? Can the sentence be more concise in the active voice?
Editing and proofreading are two skills that you need to master if you want to develop your English writing skills. The more you know how to use proper punctuation and spelling, the better you can become at using the language. The more you understand the language’s grammar and different style considerations, the more proficient you are in that language.
How to Edit and Proofread Your Own Writing— and Other Helpful Tips
Unfortunately, your English friend is not available all the time. You need to reach a point in which you have such a good command of the English language that you can easily spot typos, grammatical errors, and poor style choices. How can you do that?
There are a couple of things that you can do when you edit and proofread your writing.
Start with what you know.
For instance, if you just learned that a comma goes before a conjunction in a compound sentence, start looking for that pattern. You can make use of a tool such as ChatGPT at first. Request ChatGPT to type ten compound sentences so that you can observe the pattern better.
Then, ask it to write you pieces of text in which it purposefully makes that error. Your mission is to spot the errors and ask ChatGPT if you are correct.
You can also use online quizzes to practice your use of the comma. Ask ChatGPT to craft grammar and punctuation quizzes.
After you are confident enough in what you have learned, it’s time to work on a text written by someone else. This technique implies that you focus on one issue at a time, noticing the correct and wrong use of it in a text.
Break the text into manageable pieces.
On the idea of taking one issue at a time, it is a good idea to take each piece of the text at a time. Break the text into paragraphs, then into sentences. Of course, you can break the sentences into propositions and, finally, into words and phrases.
Start with the words first.
See if they are spelled correctly. Then, check if there are grammatical or punctuation issues within sentences. A string of sentences forms a paragraph. See how the flow works in the paragraphs. Lastly, see if the transitions between paragraphs are good.
Read out loud.
One old technique to check a text’s style is to read it out loud. If everything sounds right, then maybe you don’t need to edit it. Of course, as a nonnative, this technique is not always recommended. The way that you hear a sentence may not be the same way that a native hears it. It’s best to try and read the text out loud only after you have done editing and proofreading the text.
Make use of editing tools.
AI has come a long way in many fields of inquiry, and quality writing is no exception. For years, tools to help you edit and proofread better have existed, and they’ve become even more trustworthy throughout the years.
We recommend three such AI-based apps for editing and proofreading:
• QuillBot — based on the latest advancements in AI, it is a great tool that you can use for proofreading. You can use it for other purposes, such as translating or detecting a text for AI use or for plagiarism. However, we recommend it to you for its proofreading abilities, especially since you are trying to improve your English writing skills.
• Grammarly — this app is a veteran. It has been available for over a decade now, and it has become better by the year, thanks to artificial intelligence. We recommend you use it for its editing and proofreading abilities. The free version is more than you need to correct texts and learn along the way. However, with the paid version, you get more advanced editing recommendations that will help you develop your English writing skills.
• Hemingway Writer — a free app that you can use if you want to write like Hemingway. It’s free, easy to use, and offers sound editing advice. The app is most useful if you want to work on your copywriting skills.
These are a couple of tips that we can offer about editing and proofreading on your own. If you still want a helping hand, you can make use of a website such as Nyan-8.com. On this site, you can upload entries in various languages and allow other users to correct them. Moreover, you can correct their work. It’s a developing community with people from all walks of life trying to improve their English writing skills and become better writers.
Hiring Professionals: When to Use a Proofreading Company
Improving your English writing skills is an important part of your professional development. We hope that we have convinced you of the importance and efficiency of editing and proofreading in the process.
However, sometimes, you don’t feel ready to do the work. You don’t feel ready to proofread and later edit your business texts that will be seen by your clients and business partners.
That’s when hiring a professional becomes the smartest choice.
We at Thumos Writing Services offer editing and proofreading services to small- and medium-sized businesses just like yours. Contact us, and we will send you an offer right for your needs.
