 After revising your paper and possibly your thesis, it's time to review your paper for style. Academic style is something that can be different from discipline to discipline. A scholarly journal article in psychology will have a different style than one in history. However, there are some generalizations we can make. First of all, make sure to use written and not spoken language. You should not have a tone that is too casual, but neither should you try to sound too fancy. You should write like yourself. You should use the fewest words possible that allow you to fully express your ideas. Coherence and concision are always important. And, except in certain situations, you should avoid using passive voice. This slide shows a couple of simple examples on how passive constructions can be rewritten to use active voice. Active voice results in sentences that are more direct and are clearer. Make sure you check with your professor for other stylistic conventions that you should be aware of for the paper that you're writing. After revising your paper's ideas and style, it's time to do some final proofreading and editing. There are a few different things you should be looking for. Errors may be hard to spot since these may reflect a convention of grammar or spelling that you're not aware of. This is where getting another reader can be helpful. Another reader can help you spot patterns that show up in your writing. Everybody makes mistakes in their writing, and I'll try to suggest some ways you can spot those. Lastly, you should also be aware of stylistic errors. These may not be incorrect in terms of grammar, but are things that go against the stylistic conventions of a particular discipline or form of writing. The next two slides give 10 proofreading strategies that can help you spot all three of these kinds of errors or mistakes. First and foremost, make sure that you finish revising. You don't want to go through and fix mistakes for something that will be rewritten anyway. Prioritizing errors can be useful. Go through your paper once looking for the most important mistakes, particularly those that may have been identified by your professor or things that make your meaning difficult to understand. Two of the most important techniques for proofreading are to read your paper out loud and to read it backwards. Reading out loud can be especially effective in helping you identify where your writing is choppy or where you'll want to revise the style. Reading backwards may seem strange, but it's probably the best way to spot mistakes. When we read for meaning, we tend not to notice mistakes since we're focused on the flow of the writing and making sense of the argument. But if you read the last sentence first and then the next the last sentence and so on, you're reading less for meaning and can more easily spot misspellings and easy grammar and punctuation mistakes. These other strategies can also be effective, especially getting another reader. But it's also important to take a break and to get active. This can help you clear your brain and come to your paper with a fresher perspective.