Spellcheck catches misspellings and little else. It will happily approve a sentence that says the policy covers public liability for £5 million when the correct figure is £2 million. It has no opinion on whether the client's name is spelled correctly, or whether the link goes to the page it promises.

Proofreading is a separate pass with a separate purpose: checking that the words on the page match what you intended, in a document that is otherwise finished. Here is how to do it without reading the same paragraph nine times.

Proofread after a gap, not straight after writing

Your brain fills in what it expects to see, especially in text you have just written. An hour away helps. A night helps more. If the deadline is tight, work on something else for twenty minutes and come back with fresh attention.

Do not proofread at the end of a long editing session. Editing is structural work; proofreading needs a different kind of attention, and the two do not mix well.

Change the format

Print the page. Read it on a phone. Change the font size or the column width. Anything that disrupts your usual reading pattern makes errors visible, because you are no longer reciting from memory.

Reading aloud is the most reliable trick for catching missing words and awkward phrasing. Your mouth stumbles where your eye glides over the problem. Read it to a colleague if that helps you slow down.

Read backwards for spelling

Start at the last sentence and read each one out of order, checking only for spelling and typos. The meaning stops distracting you, and doubled words, missing letters, and stray characters become obvious.

This is tiring and works best for short pieces: headlines, button labels, form messages, the first paragraph. It is also good for names, which are the errors readers notice most and forgive least.

Check what spellcheck cannot see

  • Homophones: their and there, affect and effect, compliment and complement, principle and principal.
  • Names: people, companies, products, and places, checked against a source rather than memory.
  • Numbers: prices, dates, percentages, phone numbers, and totals that should add up.
  • Cross-references: see page four, the section below, the table on the right.
  • Links: destination, anchor text, and whether the page still exists.
  • Consistency: the same term spelled two ways in one document.

Take these one category at a time. A single pass that tries to check everything catches less than four passes that each check one thing.

The same word spelled two ways in one document is the giveaway spellcheck never flags, because both spellings are correct in some market. The British and American spelling converter checks a whole draft in both directions, including plurals and past tenses.

Verify facts, not just words

Proofreading includes the claims. Open the source for every statistic, date, job title, and quotation. Check that the figure in the table matches the figure in the sentence. Check that the client approved the wording you are attributing to them.

If a fact cannot be verified, remove it or replace it with something you can support. An unverifiable number is a liability that survives long after publication.

Spellcheck reads letters. A proofreader reads claims, and claims are where the expensive mistakes live.

Fix in order, then stop

Work in a fixed sequence: structure, then sentences, then spelling, then facts. Correcting typos in a paragraph you later delete is wasted effort. Read once for sense, once for language, once for details.

When you have finished, mark the document as proofed and note the date. If someone changes a sentence afterwards, the proof no longer covers it, and the changed line needs a fresh read.

Brief a second reader properly

Do not say can you have a quick look. Say what you need: check the numbers against the attached spreadsheet, confirm the client name and job title, and flag anything that reads as unclear. A targeted brief produces useful notes; a vague one produces silence or a rewrite.

Ask for two things at most. A reader given five tasks will do none of them thoroughly.

Keep a personal error list. Most writers make the same handful of mistakes repeatedly. Keep a note: the word you always mistype, the comma you always forget, the tense you drift into. Check that list last, against the finished document.

Ten minutes with your own list is worth more than an hour with a generic checklist, because it targets the errors you actually make.

  • Gap of at least an hour before reading
  • Format changed for the proof pass
  • Read aloud once
  • Backwards pass for spelling
  • Names checked against a source
  • Numbers checked and totalled
  • Links opened and tested
  • Facts verified or removed
  • Personal error list checked

None of this is glamorous. It is the difference between a page that reads as professional and one that quietly asks the reader to lower their expectations.