SOS Writing Proofreading and editing your own work

Proofreading and editing your own work

Scientific writing is often described as “boring” to read, but there is a special kind of satisfaction (and yes, even joy!) to be found a beautifully dense, informative piece of writing, where each word has been carefully considered and fulfils a definite purpose. I don’t know of any word to describe the feeling you get when you read a beautifully-written scientific paper, but if there isn’t one, there should be.

Before we start looking at how to proofread and edit, it’s important to take a brief look at the different kinds of editing, because each is applicable at different times in the writing process. Technically speaking, proofreading is the final read-through of a manuscript (of the “printer’s proofs” or “copy”) to find any small remaining errors, which are then edited before publication. However, it’s common in a lay setting to use “proofreading” to refer to any reading of a manuscript at any stage with the intention of revising the text. For convenience, that is the sense in which we will use the term proofreading throughout, rather than the purest sense of reading the final proofs from the publisher (sorry, editors!). The three types of editing applicable to most scientific papers are:

Developmental editing
Line editing
Copy editing

Developmental editing: This is the earliest type of editing you’ll do to your manuscript, and any reading at this stage will be done by your supervisor/thesis advisor (and possibly co-authors, although sometimes you may wish to hold them in reserve). At this stage of a manuscript’s life, any and all parts of it could change dramatically from your original version – and usually multiple times. For this reason, considering grammar or the niceties of language is a largely wasted effort at this point. You will be more concerned with making sure the structure is logical, the content is complete, and that any underlying weaknesses in the paper are found and addressed before too much work is done that Future You will have to re-do. I’m not going to cover proofreading for developmental editing here, because this is something that you and your supervisor (and possibly co-authors) should do between you. They will collectively have a lot of experience in navigating the publishing field, and since they know your work they are the best people to help arrange it so that it’s shown in the best possible light. Instead, we’ll look together at spotting common mistakes and how to fix them at the line/copy editing stage, since this is where you’ll have the greatest opportunity to hone your writing craft.

Every academic, waiting for their Ph.D. student to stop “editing” and submit already
stock image: Cottonbro/Pexels

Line editing: Once your manuscript is in a more completed state (at least at the paragraph level), you will be able to take a more detailed look at the actual content and how it’s written. This is where you ideally want to bring in your other co-authors to proof read since they should be familiar enough with the work to know what you mean to say (the intent), but unfamiliar enough with the actual writing (content) to spot where the two diverge. Proofreading at this stage is concerned with the actual skill of the writing: has the content been expressed clearly and concisely? Do the paragraphs flow logically from one to the next? Does the wording feel clunky or hard to read? This is where you’ll spend a lot of time fiddling with the specific wording of sentences in an attempt to express them as neatly and plainly as possible. It’s probably the hardest type of editing to move on from, because there are always changes you can make but at some point you have to stop messing with it and say “it’s good enough”. That point usually arrives sooner than you think (especially if you’re a perfectionist).

Copy editing: At this stage, proof reading is essentially concerned with the tiny details of grammar – consistent and correct use of verb tenses, punctuation, word meaning, typographical errors and so on. Most of the prestigious academic journals employ the services of copy editors after a manuscript has been accepted for publication to meticulously find and fix any such issues prior to publication – their reputations are important, and they cannot afford to publish error-ridden manuscripts. However, whether your chosen journal offers copy editing services or not, you should always make every effort to clean up your manuscript yourself before you submit it. Reviewers can be surprisingly picky about the quality of writing, including the presence of grammatical errors. I’ve heard many tales of papers being rejected and the authors told to have their papers professionally proofread before resubmitting. This can happen even after the author paid a professional to edit the manuscript for them! The lesson here is that the publishing process can be a source of endless frustration, no matter how carefully you edit. So do your best, make your submission as clean as you possibly can, but don’t obsess over making it perfect. A good copy editor will always find something to correct, no matter how minor.

Pre-training advice

When you do a literature review, you will be exposed to hundreds of journal articles and you can learn a lot about how to write (and how not to write) from them if you pay attention. In some papers, you’ll find everything properly labelled, the explanations make sense, and nothing is left to the reader to infer. Every detail of their experiment is explained, so that if you wanted to reproduce their results you would be able to do so easily. Sadly this is not the case for every article you read: peer review doesn’t always catch every poorly-written paper. You’ll always find at least one in any given literature search – a frustrating voyage through an ambiguous, detail-free, waffle soup. If you encounter either of these types of papers (fantastically good, or thoroughly awful) keep the details of them. You can study what makes them great or terrible, and arm yourself with this knowledge when you come to edit your own work.

One book I would especially recommend for the aspiring scientific writer is “How To Write Clearly” by Edwin A. Abbott. Although it was written almost 150 years ago, it’s a) comprehensive, b) well written, and c) available for free online from the Gutenberg library project (including in Kindle e-book format). The principles Abbott wrote of are still applicable today, particularly for scientists – for whom avoiding ambiguity is absolutely critical. Clarity is arguably the most important thing to aim for in your writing. His book may be a little dry and stuffy by today’s standards, but it’s still one of the best (and most accessible) instructional books I’ve ever found on the subject of English composition.

This last tip will take a long while to show any benefits, but is worthwhile nevertheless if you’re serious about improving your writing; read classic English literature. Find authors you enjoy from the 19th and early 20th centuries and read their books for the fun of it (the genre is less important than the skill of the author). This will, over time, improve the quality of your writing though exposure and osmosis. Seeing words placed in their proper context will greatly expand your vocabulary and give you fluidity in your self-expression. You’ll be able to develop a sort of “sixth sense” for what looks right or wrong when you see it on a page.

How to proofread your own work

I make the distinction because proofreading for someone else is considerably easier than reading your own work. You’ve never seen their manuscript, so it’s completely fresh to your eyes. When you spend a lot of time looking at the same words in your document, over and over again, they can become cemented into your brain. It’s hard to see mistakes then, because you’re so familiar with the writing that it just looks “right” to you. In fact, you may spot errors in these guides that I and my proofreaders just can’t see anymore! There are a few tricks that people use in order to give the brain a kick and force it to reassess the writing as if it’s new.

Work on something else first. If you go straight from editing to reading, your eyes and brain won’t see the errors.
Make sure you’re well rested. It’s easy to miss small details when you’re tired.
Change the font. You get so accustomed to looking at the work with the same font that again, it just looks right. If you normally use a serif font, change to sans serif. Some people swear by using comic sans. I can see the sense in that – it may look horrific, but it does force you to actually look at the text as if you’ve never seen it before. Just don’t forget to change it back when you’re done!
Print it out (especially if you usually read it on a screen). I do all of my proofreading on paper because it’s far less stressful on the eyes. Reading from a screen is fine for a few pages, but if you’re doing a detailed proofreading of a thesis chapter or dissertation, it can take hours (or even days).
Global search is your friend. Doing a global search and replace for common mistakes like “the the”, “and and”, etc., searching for your acronyms (so you can find and expand the first use), and searching for trash words like “very”, “really”, and “quite”, will save you a huge amount of time.
Only proofread for one thing at a time. For example, don’t check spelling and grammar at the same time as you’re trying to read for flow and legibility. If you have numerical results, make sure you do one clean sweep through your document just to check that all your numbers are correct. Work through any derivations. It’s just as easy to do a typo when reporting your numerical results as it is in text, but you really don’t want to get your numbers wrong.
If you’re not 100% sure of the meaning of any words, double-check their meanings. If the spelling looks wrong in its context, double check that too – sometimes spell-checking software will provide you with the wrong correction so don’t rely on them to catch every mistake.
Save your corrections until after you’ve finished reading and annotating your manuscript, otherwise you’ll get distracted by your own corrections!

Reading for line edits

Once you’re at the line editing stage, focus on the wording and construction of your sentences. Reading sentences out loud can help you to figure out if the wording is clunky (you’ll repeatedly trip over words), or if the sentence is too long (you’ll run out of breath before you reach the end), or if your explanations are confusing (you’ll lose yourself halfway through). Like Marie Kondo, we want to hold onto all the things in our writing that spark joy (details, facts, clarity, etc.) while ruthlessly getting rid of things that don’t (fluff, jargon, unnecessary waffle and padding).

For each paragraph, think about what the main point you want to make is, and then try to arrange the sentences to best express that point. In general, you’ll want to make sure that the first and last sentences are fairly short (not more than two lines), so that you’re not hiding your point from the reader. It’s hard to read (and even harder to enjoy) excessively long sentences, so if you really must use them, only use them in the middle of a paragraph. So, make the point very briefly at the start of the paragraph, follow it with supporting evidence and arguments, and make sure that whatever point you make at the end of the sentence is something that leads onto the next paragraph. If you have sudden changes in topic from one paragraph to the next, either think about the order you have your paragraphs in, or tweak the last sentence of the preceding paragraph to help lead the reader from one to the next.

Keep a dictionary and thesaurus handy (or use online ones), especially if you’re a native speaker. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to use the wrong word by accident (just because it looks vaguely familiar) and change the entire meaning of your writing. It’s especially common at the start of our writing journey, when we’re flailing around in a linguistic haze, grasping at the back of our foggy brains for intellectual-sounding words to try and convince people we know what we’re talking about. The problem is that your audience has been fitted with premium-grade BS detectors. You won’t impress them by stuffing your writing full of overly-long words, and they won’t be amazed at how smart you are. Especially if you’ve used the words incorrectly or in the wrong context. Keeping it simple and straightforward is always the better option. So, if you’re not 100% sure of what a word means, double check it, and replace it if it doesn’t mean what you thought it did. Being accurate will help you to be more concise, and being careful will help you to be more accurate.

Don’t delete!

You will end up revising your work so often that you’ll naturally start to refine your craft, but what to do with all the bits you don’t need or want anymore? Well, you can learn a lot from these rephrasings, so comment them out, write them down or keep them in another file. Definitely don’t delete them! What may not be appropriate for the paper you’re currently writing may well be perfectly usable in the thesis you’ll write later. Sometimes I’ve abandoned some phrasing, only to go back to it later after rewriting elsewhere – and decided that the original wording now fits better. Save yourself some time and a lot of headaches by keeping your rejected wording. By playing around with different variations you get progressively closer to your ideal wording. Besides, you never know if you might find a use for it in the future, even if it’s only to marvel at how far you’ve come as a writer.

Rephrasing for brevity or go back to Guides