Proofreading assignment

So I listened to grammar girl's podcast on proofreading where she offered a few tips on doing a better job of proofreading one's own papers. Her tips were to read my work backwards, read my work out loud, always proofread a printed version of my work, and give myself some time. I decided to test out her strategies on my diagnostic essay since it was the paper that my English teacher was judging my writing ability on.

I was feeling fairly confident about the paper because I have already gotten into the habit of reading my papers to myself out loud. I learned this technique from my 9th grade English teacher, and I found that it truly does help find mistakes, especially in the fluidity of my writing.

So I started by trying the reading backwards technique, and of course in the first paragraph (which was actually the last paragraph in my paper) I found that I had accidentally added an "a have" that didn't need to be there. I was pleased however, to find that there weren't many mistakes in the rest of the paper. The only other thing I did notice was that I switched narrative forms from 3rd to 2nd person in the middle of my paper, and then switched back. I think Grammar Girl's fourth factor is what helped me catch this mistake. The fact that I hadn't read the paper in a little while allowed me to focus better on finding the errors.