The Proofreading Pulse

At some point, you may be faced with the task of writing something longer and more involved, like a capstone paper, thesis, dissertation, or long business report. But it’s OK. Your work will follow the same path as it would for any other writing assignment; it will just take longer and be more involved.

My two tips today deal with the most common mistakes in sentence structure I see here at ProofreadingPal.com: bad parallelism and bad sentence chronology. Big words, but easy fixes.

Before we consider the question of between vs. among, let’s look at the distinctions of degree that follow. When we speak of “more people” or “a larger number of people,” the meaning is functionally the same, but we choose the adjective based on whether we’re talking about countable objects or mass or abstract nouns. Between and among are also affected.

I see this one done incorrectly all the time—not just at work, but also in published writing. The problem doesn’t seem to be confusion between the subject “who” and the object “whom,” but confusion about how sentences work. So let’s start there.

Harvard is just another parenthetical author-date citation style. If you can learn a few key points, you can successfully cope with Harvard referencing.

Your PDF may not be compatible with future versions of PDF reading programs. To ensure your document remains accessible in exactly the same format, you need to create a PDF/A version of the file. By following some principles of interoperability, your file will remain as you intended no matter what program you’re using to open it.

I’m interested in writing about these four words in one post because, apart from being misspelled all the time, they seem to have nothing in common.

Scare quotes should rarely be used. For one thing, they frequently send the message that the writer couldn’t be bothered to state things clearly.

Expressions of comparison and contrast are a vital part of language. It’s useful to be able to set things side by side and describe how they stack up in terms of size, number, or degree.

The following come from my own mentors, most of them editors for publishing houses. I’ve found their advice to be solid gold, and these warnings have served me excellently as both a writer and an editor.

The authors of the leading academic style guide for the humanities write that “The problem . . . is the increasing mobility of texts. The sources with which we work are discovered in locations and formats different from those in which they were originally published, and we have no way of knowing today where those sources might end up tomorrow.”

A sentence is a complete thought, almost always with a subject and a verb. At its most basic, a sentence has a thing doing something or having something done to it. In a fragment, at least one of these elements is missing, and so the fragment can’t stand on its own as a complete thought.

There are many transition words and phrases out there. I’ll highlight some of the most common ones by the situation in which they may be used.

ProofreadingPal LLC paid out over $471K to work-from-home contract proofreaders in 2016, and we're looking to expand our network of professionals! Are you looking to make extra money with your proofreading and editing talents? If so, we'd like to learn more about you. Please visit our career opportunities page for application details.

People like to say, “I feel badly," but it's wrong. Let’s look at exactly why this is not an idiom, a turn of phrase, a colloquialism, or anything other than a flat-out mistake.

Let’s look at a word pairing that can trip up even experienced writers (and some proofreaders): the almost-twins affect and effect.

A good poetry editor fixes bad grammar just like a good prose editor does. But a better poetry editor must also pay attention when grammar is being manipulated to aid meaning.

Here’s a quick guide to how you restore individual editors to a document in Word 2007, 2010, and 2013 in Windows and 2016 in Mac.

Professional and academic documents demand the principle of “Keep It Simple.” While some document styles can take a more flexible approach, academic documents in particular should always be simple, easy to read, and visually uncluttered. Let’s take a look at why.

I recommend writing fanfiction for people who need to work on their dialogue skills, pacing, and character development.