Tuesday, February 19, 2008

"100 Proof" - Week 4 Proofreading

The podcast titled "100 Proof," from the Grammar Girl website seems quite informal, yet at the same time was a quite informative. While listening and reading the podcast it was nice to hear that everyone seems to have the same troubles trying to proofread papers that they have written themselves. The anecdote given in the podcast about the Band of Kazakh was a fairly extreme example of the fact that as a whole, people do not do very good proofreading of things that they have written themselves.

The fact is that just as Grammar Girl spoke about in the podcast, humans are not perfect, and there will always be human error. However, after taking into consideration the fact that there will be some amount of human error within everything someone does, it also falls upon one's shoulders to try and eliminate as much of that error as possible. The tips given toward the end of the podcast actually seem to be quite good. After reading the tip about reading something that one has written from back to front, one sentence at a time, I did just that with fairly good results. After reading a blog entry from back to front I noticed a grammar error that I had not detected before then, as well as a few sentences that needed a little restructuring.

All in all I would say that the tips given were very helpful and I would recommend the podcast to anyone. This was the first time that I have heard or read any of the Grammar Girl tips and it seems like a very good resource for those that are either learning to write, or for anyone that is interested in learning to write better.

“100 Proof.” Grammar Girl. 20 Oct. 2006. 19 Feb. 2008.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/proofreading.aspx