It’s the final countdown

You have finally arrived at the point of your last read through. At this point, we are not interrogating intellectual ideas, linkages or sentence structure and so on. We are trying to read it as though we are coming fresh to it.

You might want to ask someone else to read it in addition to yourself. Your job is to check for typos, infelicities in the text, and other basic errors. Things where you may have written {insert ref here} and in fact never inserted ref here. There comes a time when we simply cannot see these things as our eyes are gliding over all too familiar text.

This is deep work. You need one long session to complete this task, uninterrupted.

Pay particular attention to data points, charts, tables and titles where you have probably skimmed the text a thousand times without really reading it.

Run the spell check. Make sure the text is as professional looking as it can be. This is no time to turn in sloppy work after all the hard intellectual grind.

TODAY I WILL…

• Turn on my time tracking software;

• Proof read the whole text (on paper) in my writing slot of 2 hours 15 minutes;

• Make checkmarks against the errors, typos and so on;

• Amend errors on the computer;

• Give the paper to someone else to check for typos.