proofreading text on table in office

10 Effective Tips for Proofreading Your Dissertation

The dissertation is a huge job. If you have so many innovative ideas that you are able to write it – you are close to the last step named proofreading. If you choose another way and your request was to find someone to “write my dissertation for me,” you can skip the proofreading part and order such a paper online. However, you will still need to proofread it later as an additional guarantee. Proofreading gives a deeper understanding of the text in general and shows the common quality of writing. There are ten effective tips below that will help you with the final part of the huge step named defense of the dissertation.

  1. Don’t forget to leave enough time for proofreading. Majority of writers don’t follow their schedule. Don’t be one of them, and don’t ignore this important part of the dissertation – you can be a brilliant writer, but proofreading is still required.
  2. Be relaxed and prepared. Proofreading is a kind of work that needs concentration and attention. If you feel that something can interrupt you or you didn’t sleep good previous night, better don’t do it. 
  3. Breaks are important, don’t ignore them. When you read every sentence carefully are get bored and lose your goal to find mistakes every minute. So when you feel that you lose the meaning of the text, taking a break should be your first choice.
  4. Use only a final version for proofreading. To proofread your dissertation before it finished is a silly work. Even if you are sure that there will be no corrections of some parts, don’t proofread them separately. Remember that your work is one text, so don’t try to divide it.
  5. Check the formatting. Formating seems not necessary, but there are situations when without correct formatting dissertation is not accepted at all – well, 100% of cases. Use APA and MLA guides. Your writing is a titanic job, don’t destroy it.
  6. Use digital editing functions. We must be thankful for online services and built-in editing functions that fix our mistakes. They are helpful in every kind of writing. However, they are not perfect, so you must be careful with homonymous, for example. 
  7. Read aloud. It may seem funny, but will be helpful in two ways. The first one is that you can count the time for the presentation. You will see how many pages you can represent on time for thesis speech. The second one is that you can catch mistakes you didn’t notice while reading and writing. Speaking is another way of communication, so it gives more possibilities to check the text. 
  8. Print your dissertation for proofreading. This is one more helpful tip for a writer. It is a very strange fact but reading from the screen, and the paper gives different results. If you use both of these ways, you will be surprised how many typos and mistakes you will find with a simple pen in your hand.
  9. Check the punctuation. There are so many questions with punctuation. Online services are not perfect for this kind of checking, so spend enough time on this kind of checking. The main problem is when you change the sentence, the rules of punctuation change, too, and you must be careful with these changes. 
  10. Check numerical values twice. No program or proofreader can check numbers instead of you. Check them several times.

At the end of the list of tips, there is one more general tip. If you don’t feel confident enough to proofread your thesis or dissertation, use professional help. The help of proofreaders is useful for professional writers and beginners. The decision to delegate this part of the dissertation can save your time, and you will get a great result.