ABSTRACT
Editing is polishing and sharpening successive drafts to achieve economical, dynamic prose. Editing eliminates mechanical and stylistic infelicities and gaucheries in grammar, syntax, punctuation, and choice of words to make prose cleaner, clearer, lighter, smarter, tighter, and brighter. Some people have a knack for proofreading—essentially they have an ‘eye for detail’. Use the following strategies for finding typographical errors, irregular spacing, omissions, and errors in punctuation and spelling that one have missed at an earlier stage in the revising–editing process. Proofreading is the final check in the writing process; neglecting this stage can damage one's professional image and cancel out all one's efforts to produce a perfect document. Premature proofreading, like premature editing, is a waste of time. Read through the whole document one final time before proofreading to make sure that the argument is coherent.
