Contrary to commonly shared beliefs, repeated reading of the same text reinforces errors and avoids their discovery. The reason is that we, whether we want to or not, predominantly focus our attention on the information context of the given text instead of focusing on the sentence structure, readability, and grammar.

In the following is provided a list of techniques that enable us to proofread an important publication: article, review, book chapter, book, or others. Hopefully, others will provide a range of other approaches that can be utilized in proofreading.

• It is recommended to use a spellchecker, which is often built into the editor in use, to regularly check spelling mistakes.

• Regular grammar and logical consistency checkups of each sentence should become a habit. Rereading of the text is making the bread and butter of scientific writing.

• Making gaps between writing a text and its revision(s) in the length of one day, one week, or one month is desirable. Memories made during the preparation of the text are erased in this way. Everyone can easily spot mistakes.

After finalization of the entire text, the following steps are recommended to do in order to improve the text even further:

• Using an automatic spellchecker is a must.

• Using one of the freely available or paid high-quality online grammar checkers is absolutely necessary.

• Personally, I have found very useful scrambling sentences of the input text (Word or LaTeX format) extremely useful. In this way, the original red herring of the story is completely obliterated. I wrote a simple Python program to scramble the input text. From my experience, such scrambled text enables easy localization of logical errors of low level and grammatical errors.

• From the last two years' experience, the above-mentioned scrambling techniques enabled me to make fewer mistakes in the first place. Repeated errors are spotted, memorized, and avoided in the future texts.

• This replaces, to a certain extent, the presence of a human teacher.

• Use of different graphical templates to write the text, and the final stage, importing it into a by-the-journal-required template, enables breaking down the stereotype of reading the identical text repeatedly. Break our habit and allow revealing large-scale stylistically & conceptually based mistakes.

The task of the above-mentioned approaches is to break the flow of the ideas in the text and hence, break our stereotypes, which inevitably creates blindness to our own mistakes.

I always leave the paper for a few weeks, then read it again, this makes eror stand out more. This also helps with the overall structure of the paper and the order the points are arranged. Then my wife with a masters in languages who also has a reasonable understanding of science reads it, and tells me what makes poor sense to her, then I reword it until she believes it is clear. Then I pass it around the other authors (other than the parasitic ones we were occasionally forced to include) for their comments and changes.

In a general sense, it is difficult to advise anything here. Imagine that you asked Leo Tolstoy how he wrote "War and Peace". I think it would be difficult for him to answer this question. Of course, skill is polished over time. The general answer is that you need to be very deeply immersed in the subject of the study. Then the prerequisites for a clear presentation arise. However, for example, Hegel and Marx were obviously deeply immersed in the topic, but "Phenomenology of Spirit" and "Capital" were written in a terrible, ponderous language. Preliminary communication with potential readers or reviewers personally brings benefits to me, if of course this interaction or influence occurs at a sufficiently high level. It becomes clearer to me how the text should be improved, both in form and content. Here, for example, the psychology of the editor's attitude towards you is also important. If you see that a person is sincerely and professionally trying to help you in the process of improving the presentation, then you try to respond in kind. In other words, the feeling that you are participating in some common cause personally inspires me to improve myself. As an example, I can cite the advertisement of my recent article, when the editor of the magazine simply asked me to write about a complex thing as simply as possible. And asked me to do it in a week. I was so inspired that I did it all in one night.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1071278

Jiří Kroc Special thanks

If you use Microsoft Word, it has a nice feature called "Editor" that can perform several checks on your text like spelling and grammar.

Submitting a manuscript to a journal requires more than strong research—it demands clarity, precision, and academic professionalism in writing. Proofreading plays a vital role in ensuring that your work is well-received and free from language-related distractions. But what’s the most effective way to proofread a manuscript before submission?

While AI-based tools like Grammarly, QuillBot, and similar platforms are increasingly popular for spotting grammar and spelling errors, they have limitations. These tools often fail to understand academic tone, discipline-specific language, or complex sentence structures. More importantly, excessive use of such tools may unintentionally increase your manuscript's similarity index, as some journal editors have flagged high overlaps due to AI-suggested rewrites.

To avoid this, researchers should adopt a layered proofreading approach. First, conduct a self-review to catch obvious mistakes and ensure logical flow. Then, perform a line-by-line reading focused on grammar, punctuation, and transitions. Finally—and most effectively—engage a professional academic proofreading service. Human editors understand nuance, field-specific vocabulary, and the stylistic requirements of target journals.

By combining thoughtful self-editing with expert review, researchers can improve their manuscripts significantly, reduce rejection risk, and maintain academic integrity. A well-proofread paper reflects the quality of the research behind it.

https://www.proof-reading-service.com/products/manuscript-editing