Tag: clarity

Proofreading 3 ways

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment

Studying paraphernalia. A laptop, a cup of coffee, a couple of notebooks with pens and highlighters
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

It’s important to proof-read your assignments before you submit them. Here’s 3 ways to do it:

1. Ask someone else

They don’t have to know anything about the field. In a way, it’s better if they don’t. They’re not checking whether you’ve answered the question right, they’re just checking that what you have written makes sense. Ask them to look for any spelling or grammatical errors and anything they just can’t understand. If you have used jargon words they don’t know you should define those in your essay. Make sure you thank them – they’ve done you a valuable favour.

2. Do it yourself

It’s hard to proof-read your own work. If you just read it “in your head” as usual you’ll tend to see what you meant to write, or what you thought you wrote, instead of what you actually wrote. What I do to get round this is to read like a little child – I literally run my finger along each word and read out loud. This forces you to read what’s actually there.

3. Get your device to do it

Screengrab by Melanie Rimmer, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In Microsoft Word, select the “Review” menu and then “Read Aloud”. It will read your document aloud to you. Other versions of Word and other word processors have different ways of doing this: you can Google to find out how to do it in your software. There are also websites where you can copy-and-paste your text and they will read it aloud for you, e.g. this one https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/. Just like Option 2, your device will read what you actually wrote instead of what you meant to write, so any errors should jump out at you.

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Footnote. Muphry’s law states: “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”

How to Write Clearly

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
A young bearded black man reading a book outdoors near a lake
Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

The convention when writing student essays is to forget you are writing for your tutor or lecturer. After all, they already know all this stuff – they are probably the one who taught it to you. Instead you imagine you are writing for someone else.

Your imaginary reader is intelligent and educated, so you don’t need to dumb down your writing. But they are not expert in this field, so you do need to explain any concepts or jargon terms to them. You need to describe any experiments. They haven’t watched the module videos or read the textbook or the articles you have been given, so you need to summarise those in your own words.

You could imagine that your reader is a fellow undergraduate who is studying a different subject. Or you could imagine that you are writing for a past version of yourself, shortly before you began studying this module. So anything you didn’t know before you started the module will need to be explained.

When editing your essays, put yourself in the shoes of this imaginary reader and ask yourself “Would I understand this essay if I hadn’t studied this module already? Or am I assuming the reader already knows the things I know”? You may need to rewrite some parts to make it clearer.

The best way to check whether your writing is clear enough is to get someone else to read your essay, and ask if it made sense to them. If they couldn’t follow what you wrote, you may need to do some rewriting.

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