welcome back at least I hope this is back because this is one of the final or possibly the final video in this particular series in this video I want to focus on proofreading I'm so instead of a presentation with bullet points coming in or explain things to you what I'm going to do is just look at a page literally one page cut out of each of four different laboratory reports that were submitted by students in my class last semester so we're going to take a look at for actual cases of student writing and take a look at and see where are there problems or things that could be fixed or things that could be done better so the idea is when you are going to be writing something you there are three stages the first stage is planning you need to figure out what you're going to write the SEC second stage is actually writing it and then the third stage is checking to ensure that it's correct and that could mean many and does mean many different things but basically it falls into the category of proofreading proofreading is where you check your work to make sure that everything is correct so that your formatting is correct that your word choice is correct that you've included the correct information and so on it's checking to make sure it's all correct so whenever you write something even if you're writing an email to your mom you should proofread before you click the send button at anything first class you definitely should proofread it proofread it again fix it some more sleep and then proofread it yet again and fixes some more before you actually turn it in trying to write your assignment the night before it's due and submitting it pretty much guarantees there will be lots of errors in your assignment do things a little bit early professors generally do not mind if you turn things in early and in fact if they do that's still not a big deal finish it early and then just relax just don't forget to submit it at the correct time so in this video let's do some proofreading okay so let's take a look at some student writing the examples that we'll be looking at today are from the prior to making these videos so this is actual student writing don't worry too much yet at least about the exact words I'm not going to be able to point out every every single error or problem with word choice and grammar and so on but let's take a look at this from the perspective of proofreading so maybe this imagine this is your report or a cage in your report or maybe a friend has asked you to proofread their report for them we're like you do is actually just take a look at this image take a look at this writing and tell me or at least tell yourself what's wrong what needs to be fixed as a proofreader as you look at this what do you see you're like oh there's probably a mistake there's probably a problem now if you're thinking well how can I tell what the problems are the writing's too small i'm watching a video and it's too blurry i can't read the words then actually you're missing a number of important points of proofreading proofreading is much much more than looking for grammar problems or for punctuation problems you have to look at everything including the formatting so when i look at this literally before i start looking at individual words the first thing i noticed in a particular case of this page was it looks like we have full justification straight left edge straight right edge in this paragraph but left justification a jagged right edge and a straight left edge less justification down here so it appears that there's an inconsistency in terms of justification now as I've said in their prior videos in general you should be using left justification but if you want to be using full and your professor is ok with that then of course that's fine but whether you're using full or left in either case you must be consistent one of the most important aspects of proofreading is to make sure that the writing and the presentation is consistent so it is very wrong to have one paragraph fully justified and one paragraph not that's considered more wrong than doing it one way consistently or the other way consistently so how would you go about fixing this well if you're in your word processor normally you just click anywhere inside the paragraph so in this case I've clicked inside the word acceleration but anywhere in the paragraph and there's usually buttons that are available for setting your justification it depends on your word processor it may depends on your operating system there might be settings somewhere in one of the menus for this but somewhere there will be a way of setting justification sometimes called alignment so if you look here you can see that the full justification button is pressed and indeed it looks like it's fully justified all we have to do is click on the left justification button and voila it's now corrected now of course if this paragraph had full justification then what about on the next page and the page after that and a page after that this is a problem that for some reason occurred so you really need to check this paper carefully to make sure everything is justified in the same way preferably that would be left to justification another way you can fix this is you can select everything so I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut to select everything in the document and then you can go and set left justification this is good because this will fix all of the paragraph simultaneously but the bad thing is as you may have noticed the equations that were censored the headings that were centered say get moved to the left as well and you do have to then go back to each one and set it in this case sensor justification same thing for the method and then fix those so you can either select all or you can do them one by one but you need to make sure that all of your paragraphs are justified the same way preferably with left justification ok so we fix that problem as proofreaders what do you see is additionally a problem here well my answer is I'm looking at this paragraph and the font looks very large compared to the font down here or maybe that small compared to that one and as I look at it I got to have this this impression that the letters are actually slightly different shapes so rather than a font size problem I think a different font maybe being used so click anywhere in one of the paragraph so here I'm clicking on the word gravitational in this paragraph and check the font here century font is being used now as I said earlier times new roman is your safest font and probably what you should always be using but century is also acceptable so that's not necessarily wrong which is not preferred it's not wrong though now let's click anywhere down in this paragraph and check again Times New Roman so century is being used at the top and Times New Roman at the bottom as I mentioned earlier consistency is very important this is inconsistent and this would make someone who's reading it thinks that the writer is very careless that they've just cut and pasted their report together that they don't pay attention to details and in the case of writing a laboratory report the last thing you want to do is give the impression to your professor that you are not paying attention that you are not being careful so this is really bad because even before your professor starts reading the report they see the justification inconsistencies they see the inconsistencies in the font and they're thinking boy this student isn't doing anything right and so they have a very negative view of you before they even start grading so tactically that's a very unwise thing to do so when you proofread check for consistency make sure you're following the correct approaches so in this case this is Times New Roman which is what i recommend people use so we could go and just select the parts that are in the other fonts and change it but oh wait that's also in century too isn't it it's probably better to just go to your edit menu and select all or use a keyboard shortcut and select all then go to your fonts and select whatever you want now if up near the top the font it doesn't appear that you're looking for then what I recommend is move your cursor down into the fonts list and then type a letter on your keyboard so Times New Roman starts with T so either hit T or you as the next letter in the alphabet so I'm going to hit you on my keyboard and it will then jump to the names of the fonts that start with you in this case there aren't any so it jumps to V but it's looking right below the t's and there that displays them very nicely for me and I can say oh there's times new roman i do not have to go into the submenu and most word processors i can just click here and societal ected all everything is now changed to Times New Roman ok so we fixed v we found and fix the justification inconsistency and now we found and fixed the font inconsistency now again looking at it do you see any problems out actually reading any words just looking at it do you see any problems well I do see one more and this one it's not as obvious but it's obvious enough that any proof reading should catch it I'm looking at the indent of the first line of this paragraph that looks awfully short it's a very small indent closer to what you'd see in Japanese writing but in English writing we always indents by a half an inch or one point two seven centimeters if I look up here that was about the same as down here it's not exact but it looks pretty close so that again looks a little bit short and then here there's no invent now that might be intentional because it might be that this is part of this paragraph that this whole thing is a paragraph so that might be okay but these look a little bit short so let's for fun let's just click down here at the word in I'm going to move the cursor with the arrow keys JB in front of the eye and what I want to find out is how did the students create the in depth because there's multiple ways you could do it so I'm going to hit the left arrow on the keyboard okay we can see it as a space there I'm gonna do it again that's two spaces I'm going to do it again that's three spaces ok so this student types three spaces and then started typing their paragraph that's too little in the case of English right just for a quick check for consistency I'm going to do the same thing up here and we move up to where it says when I mean hit the left arrow once and nothing happens I'm clicking nothing's happening what does this mean this means inconsistency so this students for some paragraphs hit the spacebar on their keyboard three times and other times they use the word processors paragraph formatting features let me pull up the paragraph formatting for you and show that to you so if you go to edit to format paragraphs or I use the keyboard shortcut to bring this up you can see that it deals with formatting of paragraphs there's lots of things you can set right now we're looking at indentation specifically for the first line and we can see that the students set it for 1.5 characters not 1.5 centimeters but one point five characters which is wrong you should not do it that way it should be done in centimeters and it should be 1.27 I'm going to cancel this and then move the cursor down into this paragraph and pull up the paragraph formatting and we can see that there is no special indents they did not set a first line indent there was none so again we can see they're doing things in consistently this will make it much harder for people to do revisions later so you really want to be consistent this is one that maybe the reader won't notice as an inconsistency because these look about the same but it is an inconsistency and it will be harder to fix so for this one to fix it we would have to do something like just delete three spaces and then put in a tab I hit the tab key once and here i think i'll do is i'll bring up that paragraph formatting and i'll just select the first line indent and i'm going to fit it to 0 ok so that moves back over and then i'm going to hit a tab to move that in ok so one tab this is what i recommended in my prior video that you should just use one tab and the reason is because most word processors by default have the tab set at one point 27 centimeters however this students for some reason possibly by accidents changed the tabs this little right-handed arrow symbol shows where the tab mark is and this ruler is marked out in centimeters so we're actually too far in so or maybe we're actually too far back for something but we definitely have a misalignment going on here so let's grab that tab just going to grab it with the curse I'm clicking once and holding now let's just move that back to about 1.2 5 centimeters ok and it's been corrected but it's only been corrected for this paragraph it didn't do this one so let's do that fix I'm going to select all and now let's grab the tab so it will affect everything all paragraphs moves out to 1.25 and now they've all been fixed now technically this is still wrong it's 1.25 rather than 1.2 seven centimeters but it's close enough to probably no one will notice the error so those are three problems we've had and notice we have not had to look at a single word we have not read anything all we did would look at the paper and saw oh the justification is inconsistent oh the font is inconsistent oh the paragraphs are miss indented these things that need to be fixed during proofreading even before you start looking at the individual words and fixing problems with singular or plural fixing problems with punctuation or fixing grammar or other word choice errors and confusing sentences and so on okay that's all i wanted to say for this particular example but don't worry i have three more examples so let's take a look at another student's submission okay so if we take a look at this one what do we see this is again a sample of student writing from the prior semester so take a look at that take a moment and do you see any problems hopefully that's all the time you need to notice because we just pointed it out again we have the same problem here here we have full justification yet down here we have left justification this is inconsistent inconsistency is considered very bad in scientific writing so we need to make it more consistent and ideally I'm going to select all and then I'm going to select less justification and then this method heading that moved so I'm we move that back to censored there we go okay and now we have the justification fixed some of you might be noticing oh the word methods that heading is not in bold it depends on your class and where you're submitting your work I do generally recommend that you put the headings in bold but that will vary a lot so check with your professor if you're doing this for a class to see what they like okay let's actually start looking at some of the words I'm not going to in this video take the time to read all the sentences and point out all the problems but i just want to point out the type of thing that you might want to be looking for carefully when you're proofreading okay so let's go down okay blah blah blah blah let's start here so they the student has written something and then they said therefore the gravitational acceleration is given by and blah blah blah there for two words but the words therefore is one word we're there for is one word now notice a spell checker will not find these incorrect words because these are words the words there is a word the word for is a word so your spell checker will not check this when you're proofreading you need to notice these kinds of problems and correct them to the correct words so when somebody reads a report that has this type of error in it again the message it gives to the reader is ah the writer is not careful the writer is careless the writer does not check their work so it's very very important that you not rely on spell checkers to make sure you have the correct words you need to check the words yourself every single word that's some go down a little bit look at something else here ok so the materials and this experiment included an H type stand the clamp older a clamp blah blah blah blah blah ok let's look at this paragraph here ok so they said the students and wrote wrote at first probably the law there at first of the clump had to be attached to the H type stand clump a clump is a bunch of things stuck together very very different than a clamp which is something that grabs on to or holds things but clump is an English word so the students correctly use the word clamp in one place but i assume accidentally use the word clump in another but that's wrong this will confuse your reader and even if it does not confuse the reader the reader will be thinking oh this students did not proofread their paper and thus have a negative view of the author and if it's a professor who's giving you a grade you do not want them to have a negative view of you so you need to check every single word to make sure it's correct in this particular paper I was a little amused by one more of these types of word errors because I'm a bit of a fan of science fiction fantasy type things and of course that means I like Harry Potter as you know Harry Potter is a witch then measure the amount of time which it takes to complete that's the wrong which the students presumably immense WH IC H ok pronounced the same way but very different the other spelling is a person who has magical abilities this one is a very different word so again these word errors where it sounds right or it sounds close it's not good enough when you proofread you must check every single word make certain that every word is the word you intended to use make sure it's spelled correctly after verb make sure it's in the correct tense if it's a noun make sure that it's singular or plural whatever is correct for your situation but you need to check every word individually some people think oh if I use a spell checker that's all I need and the answer is no that's not all you need which as in like Harry Potter was a word there and for our words clump is a word but all of these things need to be fixed before you submit your reports ok let's take a look at a third report ok so what do you see when you look at this report or these lines from this report well the first thing I noticed because I always before I look at the words I look at the shape I look at the basic formatting is again we have something really weird going on so we have these lines look at the size of the lettering and then suddenly right about here it gets small the shape of the letters looks pretty similar but the size doesn't let's click over here where Times New Roman font 12 points that's good times new roman is what i recommend and 12 points is what you should pretty much always use when you're writing it almost anything in English let's click over here like you know as a trial let's click on the word trial and it still Times New Roman that's good but the font size is 11 so it looks like the za is kind of small yep that's still 11 and as we go into the word although it jumps to 12 so the student I have no idea how or why but in the middle of a sentence changed the font size so I'm going to keep saying these things but I want to make sure you understand it when a professor sees something like this the first thought is wow that is careless and you don't give an A to students that are really really careless so you're really hurting yourself when you make little mistakes like this as far as why did it suddenly become an ellipse in point font I don't know but actually this look like it's bigger again doesn't it let's click over here and see yeah it's back to 12 so this sentence in the middle suddenly goes to 11 I don't know why if I was to guess I would speculate that the student copied and pasted it from another document and they did not adjust the formatting after doing that but it's really strange because it's right in the middle of a sentence but this is what was submitted okay so since pretty much everything should be in a 12-point font why don't we just select everything so I'm using my keyboard shortcuts select all you could of course as I mentioned before go to your edit menu and select all so everything selected and then we'll go up to the font size box and usually 12 point is listed if the size you want is not there for some reasons like it for some reason you wanted a 19 font size you would normally would not want this but you can just click in the box type the number and hit return but if there's a drop down menu that's usually the easiest so we'll set everything to 12 okay so now as you can see the size has been corrected and because we select it all first everything in the documents has now been corrected with regard to that error so one of the problems here was the font okay so what else is a problem let's take a look at some of the actual wording again there's material before this mrs. towards the end of the introduction and the student is about to tell us what their hypothesis is for the experiment and they wrote my hypothesis is that although the trial is done with blah blah blah okay my remember no I know we know you know our none of these words my is one of those words so this needs to be reworded so instead of my hypothesis is that it should be something like it was hypothesized that okay so it was hypothesized that okay so move it to the passive voice so any place you see an i/o we am I an hour a you look and see if what a passive voice type thing fix it so it was I patha sized that although the trial is done blah blah blah much better from a scientific writing perspective okay what other things do I notice here normally when i'm reading i would actually reading from the beginning reading word for word but for this video i just want to focus in on a few particular items let's take a look at this next sentence here and each value of gravitational acceleration that was calculated in this experiment you know whatever does their say and each value you might not know it if you weren't taught this before but there's a very odd rule for English which is that in formal writing and ideally in all speaking and writing we never start a sentence with the word and or or but the three primary conjunctions are never used as the first word of attempted so we need to do something to get rid of this it's not grammatically incorrect but when people see this in writing they think ah this person doesn't really know English very well so no and or or but as the first word of a sentence now there's two primary ways of fixing this kind of an error one is just to use a different word that has the same meaning so instead of Ann's you can often use additionally so additionally each value of gravitational acceleration that might be one approach another approach might be sometimes to just delete the word entirely and in fact in this case that's what we can do here so let's just delete the word okay each value of gravitational acceleration will be calculated with the following equation okay so sometimes you can just delete it it's really not needed but if the word is needed usually you can replace it with something else so for and additionally is an obvious choice if you're trying to get rid of the word or or the word but maybe however or although or on the other hand there's a number of options that are available so think about when you see and or or but starting a sentence you need to get rid of it and if you need the meaning just pick a different word or term that does that for you okay that's what i want to show you in this report but don't worry we have another one that i want to show you okay in this example again what do I see or what do you see when you first look at it there might not be any obvious problem before you start looking at the words but there are a few little details that might be done differently in sort of the big picture so one thing I'm looking at is we have the word introduction so it's a section heading saying it's the introduction and if we scroll down a little bit then there's the methods section now this students chose to use a larger font let's click on that for a minute an 18 point font for their headings while using a 12 point font for the main text that's not necessarily wrong but traditionally you'd use the 12 point font for all of your headings you just make them in bold or italics or maybe both depending on what your professor likes or what the publication where you're trying to publish normally does but there's another issue and that is the beginning of a document is always the introduction and because the beginning is always the introduction the custom has developed in English writing that you do not use at a heading for the introduction you literally just delete it you skip it so since everybody knows the first thing is the introduction you do not need the heading for introduction many people would not consider it wrong to include but traditionally it would not be there as I was mentioning the other headings usually you'd want them to be in the same font and font size as the rest of the document and you'd probably want them centered and you probably want them in bold but again if you've been given instructions on how to format your documents obviously to follow those instructions but when you do not have instructions same font same font size sensor the bold would probably be the best choice for your section headings ok let's start reading it this as you know is the introduction it's not a middle page it's actually the very beginning of the report let's just read the first sentence in the case of using a vertical spring to measure gravitational acceleration gravity acting on the weight is equal to the spring restoring force my response to that sentence is huh what what on earth is the students writing about remember when you write a laboratory report or a scientific article or essay you are writing for somebody who does not know what you're talking about so how did they start in the case of using a vertical spring what's a vertical spring I I don't know okay to measure gravitational acceleration oh so now I'm guessing maybe a vertical spring is a spring that's up down instead of sideways so a spring oriented vertically to measure gravitational acceleration but wait a minute why on earth or how would you use a spring to measure gravitational acceleration I have no idea well that means I lack the backgrounds but the students the writer is supposed to give the backgrounds so what's going on here they're assuming way too much the very first sentence assumes the reader understands what they mean by vertical spring it assumes that they know that the reader knows that you could measure gravitational acceleration with a vertical spring and it then goes on to say gravity acting on the weight the weight which wait what wait is this is this a weight hanging from the spring is it the weight of the spring if it's not clear the student is assuming the reader is familiar with the research and they already know all of this stuff but they don't they often will not know now your professor if it's a laboratory report probably will know but remember that when you write a laboratory report you are writing for the naive reader you're writing for someone who has never taken the class who has never seen the experiment who is in a different field and thus will not know the background so when I started to read this report this was submitted in one of my classes the very first thought I had when I finished the first sentence was okay well we're not my wife my first thought I guess was well this is not going to be an a because the student simply made huge assumptions about the background knowledge of the reader you should not do that there should be at least a paragraph telling me what is gravitational acceleration there should be another paragraph talking about how a spring can be used to measure a gravitational acceleration and during that I might it might introduce what the weight is but if not then we need more information before we even talk about the weight because otherwise the reader doesn't know what wait you're referring to so remember when you're writing a report it's for the naive reader someone who does not know what you did who does not know why you did it and you need to explain the background in the introduction so here the entire introduction was one paragraph so obviously too short there should be a paragraph on gravitational acceleration there should be a paragraph on using Springs to measure it there should probably be IC with that we have some symbols coming up leading to some maybe equations so should probably be oh yeah there's an equation down here so we should have a paragraph on the equations that are used so this needs major expansion in fact it should be deleted and completely rewritten in a logical order involving at least three paragraphs probably know how few more than that because you then have a paragraph on what the hypothesis of this particular research was so they'd probably be at least four paragraphs so this needs a lot of work but the problem the key problem is assuming your reader knows more than they do so always be careful when you're writing to make sure you write for the naive reader so during this video we've looked at some examples of student writing and some problems that should be noticed during proofreading so we've seen problems with fonts being the wrong fonts or inconsistent fonts the wrong size or inconsistent sizes justification that was either incorrect or inconsistent and as well as a few other little things the use of headings where you put them where you don't how you format them not starting sentences with ands or or buts and of course checking individual words to make sure they're the correct words now this is just a little video on proofreading proofreading is much much more than I can do in a little video so what else do you look for well after you've done checked all the formatting and it seems to be correct you'll want to check every word I mean literally you go through and you read every word make sure that the correct words checks the sentences to make sure they're grammatically correct and that the punctuation is correct and check to make sure the paragraphs are in a logical order the information is being presented and of course make sure that you're presenting the right information and that you're presenting the right information in the right places so for example backgrounds on the method would appear in the introduction possibly so about how would you use a vertical spring to measure gravitational acceleration well the general approach might be talked about in the introduction but the detailed approach would not appear in the introduction it would appear in the materials and methods section so make sure the correct information is in the correct place what else would you look for watch your verbs make sure your tenses are correct of course your nouns singular and plural make sure that it's whatever is correct for the situation you're in also make sure your article usage a and and the za is correct and if you're Japanese and saying but in English that's so hard well what should you do my recommendation is when you're writing your introduction or preparing to write your introduction you're hopefully reading other people's research don't read other Japanese people's research read stuff written by people from the UK or the United States or some other place where English is the primary language and look and see what are they using how are using the articles a and and what terminology are they're using learn the terminology and then you can improve your writing by modeling it on native speakers that's one way of doing it which i think is probably the most effective you can also learn all of the rules and be very very careful as you check to make sure you're following all of the rules don't forget to check the punctuation that all we have to do that at all in this video but you need to make sure you're using the correct punctuation in the correct places because punctuation carries meaning it conveys meaning it's not just something that's there to be pretty so make sure you understand punctuation and when you proofread you check it now if it sounds like boy proofreading going to take a long time the answer is yes if you want to write well you will actually spend the most time planning your writing you'll spend a little bit of time writing and a moderate amount of time proofreading revising and fixing so you literally if you have your plan of what you're going to write and you write that all out in your word processor if that took you let's say three hours you're proofreading should probably take six you're literally should be spending more time proofreading then you spend writing because you need to check everything and to check it carefully and after you've checked it on screen and it seems to be perfect make a print out because odds are when you look at a hard copy a printed copy you will find more problems then you could find on screen so proofread print and proofread again hope this helps your writing do this for your Japanese as well do this for English do this for all languages do it for everything so I hope these videos have helped you in improving your writing I hope you'll remember what's being taught here and make good use of it and good luck luck in the rest of your lives which will involve a lot of writing [Music] you [Music]