Your thesis will influence a major part of your university grade. Whether or not you need to get it professionally proofread (or perhaps you’re not allowed to hire a proofreader to look at it), you should still check it over yourself before submission. Wondering what to look for? Here are six tips from a professional academic proofreader.
Note: in a few places, I’ll tell you where you can find things in a current(ish) version of Microsoft Word; other word processors should have similar options. All screenshots are from Microsoft Word 2019, but if you’re using Word 2016 it will look much the same. I also assume your dissertation is being prepared for a UK university, although these tips should be useful wherever you are.
1. Check headings (of chapters, sections, tables, captions etc.). Scroll through, looking only at section headings. Are numbers in order and consistent? Have you got Sections 1, 2 and 3 in Chapter 1 but Sections 2.1, 2.2 etc. in later chapters? Is the style (italic, bold, underlined) the same across all headings at the same level?
Do the same with the titles and/or captions of tables and figures. I recently proofread an essay in which the tables were numbered as follows: 1; 2; 1.2; 1.3; 4; 5; 6; 8; 9 … The author hadn’t noticed that two tables had ‘decimal’ numbers, or that there was no Table 7. Easy to miss when the essay is being written in pieces over an extended period!
Remember: if you renumber anything in your document (or reword a heading), be sure to update any references to it in the text and table of contents. Your word processor’s search function is useful here. I also recommend making notes of any changes you make to headings, in case you need to search later for an old section heading you’ve since reworded.
2. Check references and in-text citations. Have you spelt every name correctly, in every mention? For works with multiple authors, have you used ‘&’ for some but ‘and’ for others? Pay attention to uses of ‘et al.‘ Have you been consistent with italicising it (or not!), and with whether or not you’ve included the full stop?
Make a list of in-text citations and compare it with the References list; do they all match up? Your word processor’s search function can be useful for all these points.
Pay attention to years of publication. If you’ve cited three works by Smith published in different years, but only two appear in the References, the years of publication can be the giveaway.
3. Check that each chapter starts on a new page. Rather than pressing Enter seventeen times, use Insert on the Word ribbon (or equivalent) to insert a page break; this will stop things jumping around quite so much if you have to make amendments to the text or layout later.
4. Check the spacing. Many universities (at least in the UK) will want double spacing. This doesn’t mean putting two spaces between each word. It means doubling the vertical space between each line of text.
You can change this in your word processor’s Layout (or equivalent) menu. Select the text, and in Word’s ribbon, go to Layout > Spacing and click the arrow in the bottom right. This will open a new menu; in the first tab, Indents and Spacing, under ‘Line spacing’, ensure that ‘Double’ is selected.
5. When the above ‘housekeeping’ is done, read the text. I recommend changing the format for this. You should already have everything double spaced, but making the text larger (and, perhaps, changing the font) will help your eyes to spot mistakes. Read slowly and methodically – out loud if it helps – paying attention to what’s actually on the page, not to what should be on the page. Reading paragraphs backwards – starting at the last word and working back to the first – can help.
After you’ve read through once, if you have the time to do so, put the essay to one side overnight (longer, if possible!) and read through it again later.
6. Finally, create or update your table of contents. Obviously, make sure you’ve returned it to the font and size you plan to submit it in before doing this, if you resized things for step 5. If you used the Word ribbon’s References section to create an automatic table of contents before checking your essay, you should simply be able to click ‘Update table’ and you’ll find that any changes to the wording or page numbers are updated.
Even small edits can have surprising knock-on effects with layout, so always make updating your table of contents the last thing you do before saving the final version of your essay.
A few bonus points:
– Open your word processor’s search function, type two spaces (nothing else), and search. Replace any results with a single space. Then run the same check again, and again, until it throws up no results, because each time it’ll only pick up double (but not triple, quadruple etc.) spaces. Even good typists are liable to double hit the space bar at some point in an essay of a few thousand words or more – I know I have!
– Check acronyms/abbreviations and capitalisation are consistent. And make sure you’ve set your word processor’s spell check to the correct language and region! If you’re at a UK university and have Word’s proofing set to English (United States), there might be lots of American spellings it isn’t picking up – and it might even be ‘correcting’ some British spellings to US ones without you noticing.
– Ensure any tables or figures appear as close as possible to their first mention in the text. If you mention Table 3 on page 13, but don’t display it until page 47, the reader can’t refer to it easily.
– Scan your eyes down the right side of the page, glancing at the ends of each line. Occasionally, you’ll find something that should be on the same line as whatever is at the start of the next line.
For example, perhaps in a citation one line ends with ‘p.’ and the next one starts with ‘32’, or an author called Al-Said has their name split so that ‘Al-’ ends one line and ‘Said’ starts the next. In these cases, a non-breaking space or a non-breaking hyphen are your friends.
In Windows, hold Ctrl + Shift while typing the character in question, and you’ll see that they now appear on the same line. For Mac users, Option + Space is the way to get a non-breaking space, but non-breaking hyphens seem to be more complicated. If you’re on a Mac and know how to get one, please share in the comments!
– Check dashes and hyphens! For parentheses – like this – or for spans of numbers (pp. 112–119), you should be using an en dash (or, for parentheses, especially if you’re using Oxford style or if you’re in the United States, an unspaced em dash), not a hyphen.
You can add these using Insert > Symbol, or using your operating system’s character map. Both options are also useful for lots of other things. For example, for mathematical symbols, you can also find proper multiplication, division and minus signs in the same place (although in most fonts, good luck telling a minus sign apart from a hyphen).
Infuriatingly, given the bonus point above this one, Word doesn’t allow us to type a non-breaking en dash! Come on, Microsoft …
I hope these tips help you proofread your essay. Keep an eye on this blog for more writing and editing tips in the future, and please feel free to share this post with friends if you think it might help them.
Need a professional proofread of your thesis? I’ve been providing academic proofreading services since early 2018, and have proofread essays on subjects from cultural influences on lyrics in salsa music to stock market liquidity, and from mobile money use in the third world to receptor kinases in moss. Take a look at what I offer students, or use the contact form to send me an email, and find out how I can help you.
Sam Kelly 