Grammar errors can drastically spoil the quality of your content. While they can sneak past you and your proofreaders/editors, they can get caught easily by the readers – much to their disappointment and (in some cases) amusement.
Effectively checking for grammar errors in your content requires skill and effort. You have to learn how to develop this skill and how to make the effort properly in the right direction.
In this post, let’s take a look at some tips that you can follow to effectively check for grammar errors in your content. If you follow these tips, you won’t have to worry about your readers coming across mistakes and errors in your content.
Checking for Grammar Errors Like a Pro: Tips to Live By
Checking for grammar errors is typically done during the proofreading phase. Most of the tips below are going to be centered around that. But there will be some other stuff as well.
1. Clear up your own concepts before starting the checking phase:
You can’t really spot grammar errors if you are not aware of them in the first place.
If you read the content and come across an instance in the text that you may feel to be an error but aren’t sure, you should just…make yourself sure.
In other words, you should clear up any confusions you may have with regard to grammatical rules before starting your reading sessions.
You should specifically learn about some of the difficult grammar errors/mistakes like:
- Incorrect sentence fragmentation
- Incorrect uses of comma
- Incorrect uses of conjunctions
- Faulty parallelism
And so on.
2. Don’t proofread your content right after writing it:
Many people won’t think much of this tip, but it’s actually very helpful.
If you read your content immediately after you finish writing it, you won’t be able to spot the errors in it properly. Your mind will not be looking at the errors. Instead, it will be flitting over the words just to have them make sense.
On the other hand, if you write your content and then leave it for a little while before reading it, you give your mind a chance to forget the stuff. You will then be able to read the content more objectively, with your mind more primed for spotting errors.
Obviously, depending on your situation, leaving the content for a while may either be difficult or impossible. Think of deadlines and limited-time tasks.
Even if you give yourself a 20-minute window, it can be sufficient to read the content with a mind afresh.
3. When reading your content, do it out loud:
Yet another seemingly insignificant but helpful tip that you can apply to effectively check for grammar errors in your content.
Oftentimes, when you read something in your mind, you can fly over some of the missing words and punctuation marks without realizing it. Your mind can automatically fill in the spaces, making it look like the content is all.
When it actually isn’t.
To avoid having anything like this happen, you should read your content out loud. Even if your mind decides to skip something, your tongue won’t. You will continue in your droning read and easily find when an error surfaces in the content.
4. Have someone else proofread it for you:
This isn’t exactly a tip that you can follow to effectively check for grammar errors yourself. But it is still a good way to get them out of your content.
Having another person read your content can be a much better way to spot grammatical errors in it as compared to doing it yourself. For one, you are not as critical of your own work as another person.
A second person will more or less deliberately look only for errors in your content. This is why this tip is worth trying out.
5. Take the help of an online grammar checker:
Another good tip that you can follow to find grammar errors in your content is to use an online grammar checker.
Provided that you pick a good one, an online grammar checker can scan your content in seconds and point out all the errors in it.
This can be a good solution in two situations:
- If you aren’t confident in your own grammatical know-how to effectively find errors
- If you don’t have the time to do the same
It is, of course, advisable to read and re-read your content once you are done checking it with a grammar checker. Since tools are tools, they can get things wrong sometimes.
As for which tools you should use, we recommend Grammar Check. This tool is free to use, and it doesn’t require any signing up or anything. It’s fairly accurate as well, and it comes with a handful of useful features.
Also read: Discipline Essay | My Best Friend Essay | Water Pollution Essay | Yoga Essay
Conclusion:
Checking for grammar errors thoroughly and properly in your content isn’t that easy. There is always the chance of having some of them slip by and later get caught by the readers.
To make sure that this doesn’t happen, you should follow the tips that we’ve mentioned above.
