I was the editor, and Marge, a former Marine sergeant, was the secretary in the public information office at another Big Ten university. We both proofread the employee publication that I edited each month. She could proofread circles around me. “How do you do that?” I asked her. “It’s simple,” she said. “I just read syl-la-ble by syl-la-ble.” That advice has served me well for more than 30 years. It’s especially useful if you are proofing something that you’ve written. Because you know what it’s supposed to say, you tend to read what’s in your mind. Reading syllable by syllable rather than word by word or phrase by phrase slows you down enough to catch small errors on the page (or screen).

Of course, this kind of proofreading won’t catch dangling modifiers or awkwardly constructed sentences, but those tasks are in the domain of editing, not proofreading. Some people used to advocate reading sentences backwards to catch errors. That method generally nets only spelling errors, and a spellchecker can do that more quickly for you these days. And we all know the fallacy of relying too heavily on a spellchecker, which can trip you up with homonyms, missing words, and other errors that a careful proofing will catch. Give syl-la-ble by syl-la-ble a try and let me know what you think.