The Proofreading Pulse

Google Docs (GDocs) is a free software application from Google. If you have a Gmail account, you have access to Docs. Just click on the “Drive” icon in the upper-right menu of your account or go straight to docs.google.com.

In some situations, however, a more collaborative process is not just appropriate, but critical. Let’s take a look at what collaborative editing is and how you can make use of it to produce the best writing possible.

Adverbs are modifiers used specifically to explain, describe, and define the way actions occur. They’re very simple things, which obviously means that using them can get complicated. Following these ten tips should help.

Microsoft Word’s autocorrect can it fix common spelling errors and automate routine formatting and capitalization functions. It’s also highly customizable and easy to use.

When hiring an editor for your writing, you first need to make sure you understand the different types of editing. Underneath the umbrella of editing, there are four main activities, ranging from intensive developmental editing to light proofreading:

First, ghostwriting isn’t a legitimate practice when it comes to term papers or other formal work done for course credit or academic advancement, like published research papers. Sorry, guys, but you need to do your own research and writing for that. Same with articles for trade journals and the like.

I spend a lot of my editing hours at ProofreadingPal dealing with wayward italics, so let’s talk about times when they are used properly and when they aren’t.

Let's talk about two marks that set off complementary information, phrases and clauses without which a sentence is incomplete: the colon and the semicolon.

Two schools of thought have helped define the English lit attitude toward writing description since the Modern Period. To oversimplify, we can use Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as touchstones.

In today’s post, I’ll look at three potentially problematic issues related to quoting and paraphrasing and give tips to be successful with each.

The problem with having so many choices in punctuation is that often even experienced writers aren’t sure which is appropriate in a given situation. And indeed, the choice is sometimes arbitrary. But there are some common guidelines and conventions to help you along.

Hiring an editor isn’t about getting someone to write your paper for you, and an ethical editor isn’t a writer for hire.

The most critical part of a PhD application is the research proposal and accompanying letter. These elements explain just what you plan to do for the next three to five years of your life, how you’ll contribute to the goals and recognition of the department you’re applying to, and why, exactly, you want to do something as crazy as pursue a PhD in the first place.

In a mathematical expression, numbers, variables, and operators act like the parts of speech. Numbers and variables are nouns; operational symbols may variously act as conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, or transitive verbs.

If you’re writing on a topic in literature, medicine, engineering, history, or anything else academic, you need to use outside sources to support your ideas, and whether you get a solid A or you flop depends a lot on how effectively you use your sources.

The audience must believe a villain would actually behave that way, which means understanding and even identifying with the villain’s motivations.

The optional comma can go or not go somewhere depending on what you think works best. It sounds great, but actually, it’s grammar’s version of giving you enough rope to hang yourself.

Using terms like "uttered," "exclaimed," or "interjected" can pull your reader out of the flow of your narrative and make them focus more on the words than on what you’re conveying with those words. And let’s not even get started on "ejaculated," the biggest dialogue-tag offender of all time!

Let’s focus on the pre-writing phase of your project and how list making can be a useful method for organizing your words, and with them your thoughts

I’ve already talked about the limitations of spell check, but grammar check is actually a trickier beast, sometimes offering what look like perfectly reasonable “improvements” to your work that actually are the opposite.