5 Tricks to Be More Efficient at Proofreading

As a freelancer proofreader, you are a business of one. As a business owner, efficiency needs to be among your top concerns.

The reason is simple: the more efficient at proofreading you become, the more clients you can serve, and the more money you can make.

Now that I’ve got your attention, how can you do this? What steps can you take to make your proofreading business more efficient? The possibilities are endless, but here are five tricks centered on the actual process of proofreading that you can implement today.

Always use a style guide and a dictionary

A school’s job is to prepare its students for the real world. And they generally do a great job at this.

But there is one area where the education system is less than helpful—testing. In every test I ever took in school, I was either allowed no notes whatsoever or at most a small 3”x5” index card for a handful of notes or formulae. 

Yet in 20-plus years, I’ve never had an employer put those same constraints on a work assignment. Employees are expected to get the job done using any and all resources at their disposal. As a freelancer proofreader, it’s no different. Your clients do not care how you get the job done—only that it gets done.

That’s why always using a style guide and a quality dictionary is critical. You cannot and should not try to remember every last grammatical detail or strange spelling. When in doubt, don’t try to wrack your brain to remember. Just stop and look up the answer to your question. This will save you time and stress in your proofreading.

Find the easy stuff first

The first thing I do in any document (after switching to suggesting mode) is search for extra spaces.

I like to do this because it gives me a quick win. And if I do happen to find any superfluous spaces, it’s a very simple operation to find and replace them all.

Once that’s done, I’ve gotten the ball rolling and some inertia behind me. It’s also helped me to ease into “proofreading mode” if you will. 

You might decide to add some other simple checks to the start of your review. You might go through all of the Grammarly suggestions, for example, or search for words you know the client often misspells or misuses.

Once all of these issues are addressed, it’s an easy transition to dig into the rest of the document.

Capitalize on your energy levels

There is a period of your day when you are the most awake and alert. If you’re a morning person, it could be from 8:00 a.m. to noon. If you’re a night owl, it might be 6:00 p.m. to midnight.

Whenever that time is for you, do everything in your power to dedicate that time to your most important work.

For me, my best time is before lunch, and my worst time is late at night. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to proofread an article after the kids go to bed only to get nowhere. But when I come back to it in the morning, I feel like I’m almost racing through it in comparison.

It really is quite amazing how much more—and better—work you can get done when you find your “zone” and focus on the important tasks then. If you can make a habit out of this, your efficiency will skyrocket.

Respect the law of diminishing returns 

You may be familiar with the law of diminishing returns. This rule suggests that past a certain point, your increasing efforts will bring ever-smaller rewards. 

Fellow proofreaders: you are not exempt from this law!

On average, you will find 80 percent of all errors in a text on your first proofreading read-through. After a second read-through, you should have found virtually all mistakes—let’s say 99 percent to be conservative. Does it make sense to do a third (or fourth, or fifth) read-through to catch that possible 1 percent of remaining issues? 

From an efficiency perspective, the answer is a resounding “no!” Your time would be better spent reviewing other documents, networking with potential clients, or even resting and recharging than spending hours pouring over a document without finding anything new to fix.

Develop a process and stick to it

All of the above tips about becoming more efficient at proofreading could really be encapsulated in this last section. 

Developing a proofreading process over time is the key to long-term efficiency—no ifs, ands, or buts about it. 

Every time you review a document, you should follow the same process. (If you need help developing your own process, read this.) Focusing on a process ensures you take the same steps in the same order every time. Since we tend to get better at what we repeatedly do, your process will actually help you dial in your proofreading. You’ll find the work getting faster and easier over time, which means you can do more in less time and even up your rates.

Next steps

These are five tricks I use daily to ensure that my proofreading business is as efficient as possible. Which of these will you implement first in your own business? Let us know in the comments, and tell us your best proofreading efficiency tips!

If you found this post helpful, subscribe to the blog to get future posts delivered right to your inbox!