Proofreading tip – checking for mistyped words

Who proofreads the student reports in your school? As a teacher, do you need to check reports you’ve written yourself? Or are you in charge of proofreading all the reports for a form or year group?

If the reports are in a suitable format (including Word and Excel), it’s a good idea to run a spellcheck to make sure there are no typos in the reports before they’re sent out. But there are some mistakes that spellcheck won’t be able to find. This happens when you accidentally type another word that’s also in the dictionary.

For example, if you meant to type ‘from’, spellcheck will underline ‘fomr’ but it won’t pick up on ‘form’, because form is a valid word. You might notice the error as you’re reading through, but if you’re checking a whole set of fairly similar teacher comments, you could easily miss it: your brain wants you to see the word that you expect to see, not the one that’s really there.

So, what can you do to catch those kinds of momentary slips?

One way to pick up on these mistakes is to use the ‘Find’ tool in Microsoft Word. Before you start reading the reports, search for words that you know are often mistyped, such as those containing very similar letters. Then you can check each instance to make sure the right word has been used for each context.

Here are some of the mistyped pairs that we’ve often found when checking school reports for School Proof. You could use this checklist as a start and add any others you find as you go along.

In this first list, the word on the right is usually correct in school reports. (Check each context carefully, though – for example, the RS teacher won’t be talking about Jesus and his disciplines!)

Typed	Should be
contentious	conscientious
defiantly	definitely
die to	due to
disciples	disciplines
fight phase	flight phase
flare	flair
god	good
illicit	elicit
priories	priorities
rigor	rigour
understating	understanding

And here are some pairs where either word may be correct, depending on the context.

Typed	Could be
adverse	averse
chose	choose
discreet	discrete
form	from
he	she
phase	phrase
practice (noun)	practise (verb)
promoting	prompting
subtitles	subtleties
there	they’re/their
through	thorough
your	you're

Make sure you search for each word in each pair, because which one is right will depend on the context. You could also search for acronyms that are often mistyped, such as ‘GSCE’ instead of ‘GCSE’ – spellcheck won’t pick up on these unless you add them to the dictionary.

Speeding up the checks

• If you can, collate the reports in one file before you search for the word pairs. This saves you having to check for each pair separately on every teacher’s comment or every student’s report.
• If you’re working in Word, get the program to highlight all the words you have searched for. This allows you to do all the searches in one step and then scroll through to check each word is right for its context. We’ll explain how to do this in another post.  
• If you’re working in Excel, the ‘Find’ tool isn’t as easy or quick to work with. It’s often less time-consuming to copy the text into Word and run the searches there. You can then make any necessary changes to the Excel file.

We hope these proofreading tips help you spot those tricky words that are often missed. If you have any more to add to the list, please let us know!