How to Proofread Your Creative Writing More Effectively

Strategies for fiction and nonfiction writers, and poets, too

If only the world were a magical place where you could produce an error-free final product on your first draft of a poem, a story, an article, or any other writing project. Or hey, if you had an endless supply of money, you could have a professional proofreader on standby. In reality, it’s useful to have a toolbox of techniques that make it easier to proofread your own work.

With creative writing, it can be hard to focus in and find tiny mechanical errors as we may easily get caught up in the meaning of a piece and the emotional weight of its content. With practice, however, writers in all genres and at all skill levels can easily find and fix errors in their own writing.

Here are a few tips I’ve gathered during my 15+ years of teaching that can help you, too.

Don’t start proofreading too early

Try not to edit or proofread as you go: this makes it almost impossible to get a draft finished. Take your time, and complete your draft. Then edit for clarity, content, meaning, and so on. After that, it’s time to proofread.

When you start proofreading, you’re at the point where you already feel that your writing expresses your ideas, includes enough detail (and/or evidence and examples), and has a clear sense of organization and structure.

Slow down

A lot of mistakes slip by because writers don’t slow down enough to notice sentence-level (or smaller!) details. Proofreading is for the tortoise, not the hare. Look at every sentence, every word, and every punctuation mark.

Read aloud

If you haven’t tried this before, you might be amazed at how many errors you’ll catch just by reading your work out loud. It can be easier to hear errors that you couldn’t see, in part because we tend to read more slowly when we read aloud.

Sometimes people feel shy about reading out loud, but it’s worth the effort; I find lots of errors in my own writing with this technique. If you feel uncomfortable, wait until nobody’s home, or just close your door and pretend to be on a Zoom call.

You can also work with a partner for this technique: ask a friend or family member to read your work aloud while you listen and make notes about necessary corrections. Or try a free tool like NaturalReader that will read your text aloud to you after you copy/paste it.

Note: Reading aloud will also help you find places where your wording sounds awkward, so it’s a good technique for the editing phase as well as proofreading.

Try reading from bottom to top

After you’ve already proofread your work in the conventional way, from beginning to end, give your document a read-through where you start at the end and read back to the beginning, focusing on one sentence at a time.

When you read your work from beginning to end, you can get caught up in the flow of the content and just breeze through it, not noticing the spelling, grammar, and punctuation of each individual sentence. Reading from end to beginning can help give you the sentence-level focus you need to catch errors.

For a shorter piece like a poem, try reading each individual line of text backward, from right to left. This can be especially useful in finding spelling and capitalization errors, and looking at one line at a time helps you notice inconsistencies between lines or other issues with line breaks.

Print out your work

We’re used to reading on screens, but for years we’ve seen evidence that we don’t read as closely when reading from a screen as from a printed page. Also, it’s helpful to look at your work from a new perspective rather than just scrolling through the same document over and over.

I learned a tip from novelist and nonfiction writer Skye Moody to print out your work in a different font than you’ve been using as you edit on your document on your computer. Seeing the words in a different font can give you that little bit of distance you need to see your writing in a new way, and errors might jump out more readily.

You can use a ruler or blank piece of paper to cover part of the page, pulling the ruler or piece of paper down the page as you read to help you focus on each individual line of text. This tip will help poets in particular, but the tight focus on one line at a time will help anyone to zero in and find errors in a small, specific piece of a larger text.

You might also try moving the ruler or piece of paper up the page instead of down, if you’re reading a piece of text from end to beginning to look for errors.

Divide and conquer with multiple read-throughs

When it comes to grammar and punctuation, try doing separate readings for each. Read once just for errors in punctuation use, and read again for grammatical errors in areas like consistent verb tense and unclear pronouns. You could even do a read-through just for comma splices, run-ons, and fragments.

Customize your focal points based on known issues that you’ve experienced in your writing. For example, read once scanning just for spelling errors, and then have another look for commonly confused words (there/their/they’re, etc).

As textbook author Ann Edgerly Klaiman points out, dividing up your tasks and doing multiple readings “may actually be accomplished faster than trying to read for everything in one reading.”

Review grammar and punctuation rules as needed

Has it been years since you thought about the rules for using commas? Are you unsure what makes something a fragment instead of a complete sentence? There are lots of great online resources to help you brush up your knowledge.

My two favorite sets of easy-to-use practice exercises are from the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University, and the Guide to Grammar and Writing provided by Capital Community College in Hartford. Both sites also have instructional pages to teach about the different rules of grammar and punctuation. The time it takes to review a rule and/or do a little practice could save you a lot of hours of correcting errors over time.

Ask for help

After working through these strategies on your own, you may also want to ask someone else to have a look at your work; we all have stubborn errors we don’t notice ourselves but which someone else might notice right away. By proofreading your own work first, you’ve reduced the workload for your friend or family member who has volunteered to take a look at your writing.

It could be fun, too, to trade pieces with a writer friend or among members of a writing group. We have a lot we can learn from each other, and it’s nice to find opportunities for sharing ideas and mutual encouragement.

What strategies for proofreading work well for you? Please let me know in the comments. I’m always glad to hear about different techniques to try and share.