13 June 2008

An Example of Proofreading Comments

Below find the proofreading comments like those I left in a student's rhetorical analysis. I left the text I changed while proofreading in red, and I left comments like the following at the end of her documents. She can use my comments as a means of developing an error log, that is, a working list of errors for which she knows to look when proofreading. These are the kind of comments I am hoping you will provide for your groupmate's work:

1. I corrected a couple of run-on sentences. Run-on sentences happen when one combines multiple independent clauses into a single sentence without using a mark of punctuation and/or a conjunction. If you can figure out how to recognize what an independent clause is, I can show you how to recognize what you need to do to successfully combine two or more into a single sentence. It's an error I had to learn to look for in my own work.

2. I added periods to a number of your sentences. You had a tendency to leave off periods in the analysis section of your rhetorical analysis.

3. Once, when you confused "ethics" with "ethos," I corrected it.

4. I added a "t" to "daugher" to make it "daughter." Again, I can relate to spelling errors. I make them all the time. Learning to use a spell checker and an online dictionary and knowing to look were how I learned to correct *most* of my own spelling errors.

5. I changed "did'nt" to "didn't." Both of these last errors were easily recognized through the use of a spell checker. In this case, "n't" is the contraction for "not," and I just added it to the word "did." The apostrophe--the " ' "--shows you dropped one or more letters to create a contraction. It


I made my changes in red. I combined the technique of looking for a specific type of error--in your case using commas to combine sentences and using periods to end them--with the technique of using a spell check. I left errors for others in your group to correct. You would catch a lot of what I saw by always using a spell checker and by making a pass when you proofread looking specifically for punctuation errors. --Steve


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