Is it time to paint yet?

It’s always tempting to jump into proofreading too early. This is especially the case if you’ve given your paper to a professor or a peer for review, and it comes back with lots of word- and sentence-level corrections (maybe even in red ink). If you haven’t revised your paper yet, ignore these line edits!

If you think of the revision process in terms of renovating a building, revision is like moving walls around, whereas proofreading is like painting. You wouldn’t want to painstakingly paint a wall that’s going to be torn down any more than you’d want to spend time polishing a sentence that gets cut in revision. In short, make sure to revise before proofreading.

Once you’re ready to proofread, though, you need a strategy. The following pages offer tips and tactics to finalize your paper and get it ready to turn in.