Once you’re satisfied with the organization and content of your writing, it’s officially time to proofread and polish it into a final publishable draft.
When revising, you were likely focused on organization and idea development. The ensuing polishing, or proofreading, stage involves more of the detailed editing of mechanics, spelling, grammar, typos, style, and formatting.
While you might have improved some of these areas during the revision process, you’ll now focus more specifically on the finer details. Of course, if you think of new ideas or rethink your organization, it’s not too late to revise those as well.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, software programs are becoming very adept at catching mechanical errors, such as spelling, grammar, and usage. This may happen as you’re writing or later when you’re specifically polishing things up and getting your copy ready to publish.
AI-empowered computer programs have been trained on billions of writing samples in order to recognize patterns and point out words, phrases, and other elements of usage, grammar, and style that seem out of place. This training makes them very effective tools for identifying potential areas of concern.
This is not to say that the computer will, or should, do all of the hard work of writing for you. On the contrary, you still need to identify your purpose, organize your thoughts, compose your message, ask the right questions, and develop your style.
You also need to review any automated suggestions that you may receive and determine if you agree with the proposed updates. It’s always important to remember that just because software suggests a change doesn’t mean that change is ultimately the best choice for your particular piece of writing.
Technology can, however, do a great job helping you with some of the mechanical aspects—saving you time that you can then repurpose toward your thinking and composition efforts.
Digital Tools to Aid in Proofreading
Word Processors
As with previous steps in the writing process, the simplest and most available tool can oftentimes be your best choice. That might be your word processor, as most word processors have powerful editing tools built into them.
Microsoft Word and Google Docs, two of the most commonly used programs, have a similar pallet of features. Both underline spelling errors in red and grammar errors in blue. By either right-clicking or hovering over those marked words, you can review pop-up windows of suggestions and update them on the spot. Click on a new spelling or suggested wording, and your sentence is instantly updated.
You can also track your changes, use the integrated dictionary or thesaurus, observe the word count, and translate your work. These features can be turned on and off or edited as desired. In Word, you can access these under File > Options > Proofing. In Docs, you can find these settings under the Tools menu.
Grammarly is a very popular “freemium” product, where you receive some features for free, while other features are premium and require payment.
Grammarly allow you to check spelling, grammar, and punctuation at no cost, and the latest version also allows you to generate new text with 100 AI prompts.
With the paid version, you can also access a variety of premium features, like sentence rewrites for clarity and conciseness, tone adjustments, plagiarism detection, word choice, unlimited and personalized suggestions, and generation of text with 2,000 AI prompts.
While revision tools generally require the paid version, proofreading and polishing tasks can largely be completed with the free version.
To more seamlessly integrate this tool into your writing process, you can install the Google Chrome extension or the Microsoft Word and Outlook add-in.
This website lets you write like Ernest Hemingway—simple, direct, and concise. If that’s what you’re looking for, this might be the right choice for you.
The site offers both a writing and editing mode. You can compose on the site in the writing mode or paste in text from another program. Once your text has been composed or pasted in, you can switch over to the edit mode to have your writing analyzed.
The analysis provides a readability level, word count report, and color-coded feedback. Yellow indicates that you should consider shortening or splitting a longer sentence. Red means that a sentence is very complex and potentially confusing; you can rewrite it until the red disappears. Purple indicates words that have similar synonyms to consider. Finally, blue highlights adverbs, passive voice, and qualifiers that may be weakening your overall writing.
You can either use the Hemingway app online for free or purchase the premium version and install it on your PC or Mac for additional functionality. The paid version also lets you export your edits, while with the free version, you’d need to copy and paste in your text.
This program is similar to Grammarly. It allows you to analyze the first 500 words of your writing for free. You can either use the website version or the Google Chrome extension to analyze your writing.
You can write directly on the site, copy and paste your work into the editor, or upload your writing to preserve formatting. With their grammar and spelling checker, ProWritingAid provides you with analytics on readability, sentence structure, and overused words. It will also conduct a style analysis that identifies various style elements, like passive voice and verb choice.
With the free version, you can access several types of reports and view suggestions that you can either accept or reject.
This simple website is mostly a writing analysis tool, and it helps you improve your writing by highlighting potential problem areas for your review.
When you click the Submit button, you get an analysis on your writing in multiple areas, including voice, wordiness, sentence variety, transitions, run-on sentences, grammar traps, and more. Adjustable sliders let you alter the analysis thresholds.
When you click on the analysis area, it shows you where these potential problems appear in your text and provides an explanation of why it might be a problem, along with suggestions for how you might improve that piece of writing.
Generative AI
This approach leverages the use of chatbots, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude.
Because generative AI has learned how to not only produce but also recognize quality writing, it can be a very useful tool for reviewing your writing and offering feedback. You might think of it as your virtual proofreading partner.
To use generative AI in this way, paste or upload your writing into a chatbot and then give it directions for what type of review and feedback you’re seeking. For instance, you might tell it to act like a friendly high school English teacher, and then ask it to review your writing for something specific like redundancy, clichés, or grammatical errors. The more specific your request, the better the feedback you’ll receive.
It can also be a good idea to ask your chosen chatbot what it needs from you to help it best meet your needs. For instance, when ChatGPT was asked for suggestions about how to craft an effective prompt that would help facilitate the proofreading process, it suggested a four-step process:
- Provide the text clearly.
- Paste the full text that you want reviewed. If it’s long, consider breaking it into sections.
- Clarify your intent.
- State the purpose of the piece (e.g., blog post, formal email, essay, script).
- Note your audience (e.g., professionals, students, the general public).
- Indicate the tone.
- Do you want it to sound formal, conversational, or persuasive?
- Explain what you want.
- Do you strictly need a grammar and punctuation check?
- Would you like suggested improvements to clarity and conciseness?
- Is a rewording of certain text needed to sound more polished?
- Is a complete rewrite necessary?
ChatGPT then proceeded to offer a longer list of possible questions that might be asked:
- “Can you tighten the language without losing meaning?”
- “Does this flow logically?”
- “Where could this be more concise or engaging?”
- “Can you suggest stronger verbs or imagery?”
- “Does this tone match a [professional/inspirational/casual] audience?”
- “How can I rewrite this to improve clarity?”
- “Which parts are redundant or unclear?”
- “How can this sound more [active/precise/compelling]?”
By crafting the prompt thoughtfully, you can guide the AI through assisting with the proofing process, without it doing all the work for you. That way, you and your students will still be fully invested in your writing and make your own decisions about what edits to incorporate.
If you use this strategy with students, you may want to provide the questions and prompts for them to use with the chatbot. They could then copy and paste the prompt that you’ve given them into the chatbot along with their paper.
You could also consider creating a student-facing custom chatbot that uses your defined parameters, with SchoolAI being a potential option for this. With a custom chatbot, students can simply paste in their papers and get the customized feedback that you’d like them to have. They get the feedback without needing to devise their own prompt.
As with anything AI-related, you’ll need to determine how comfortable you are with having students use this and at what stage in their writing development it seems appropriate.
Whatever you choose, it makes sense to be upfront with students about how they should and shouldn’t use generative AI. This will help with creating and maintaining an open and trusting classroom. In fact, the Laguna Beach Unified School District in California has developed a really powerful Google add-on called AI Trust You, which facilitates this sort of transparent conversation between student and teacher.
While similar, each tool offers something slightly unique. It can be beneficial to explore several different tools to discover what seems to be a good match, and oftentimes, the best way to do this is actually using the tools yourself before rolling them out with your students.
It’s perfectly fine to begin with something simple, such as the features integrated into your word processor, before branching out from there as needed.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
Extend Your Learning
- How to Self-Edit Your Manuscript Like a Pro (free course on Reedsy, taught by Lisa Lepki)
- Teaching Writing or Editing Writing? (Susan Barber via Edutopia)
- Teaching Your Students to Edit Their Work (The Daring English Teacher)
- Scribbr (official website)
- QuillBot (official website)