Unfortunately, many writers lose interest when they read advice about polishing the mechanics of a document because they think that people do not notice mechanics or that their administrative assistants will take care of mechanical problems.

First of all, people do notice “the small stuff.” Judge Wald, of the D.C. Circuit, has recommended that counsel “proofread with a passion”:

You cannot imagine how disquieting it is to find several spelling or grammatical errors in an otherwise competent brief.

Fairly or unfairly, many readers see mechanical mistakes as a sign of overall incompetence; too many typographical errors may lead the judge to mistrust the validity of the legal analysis. Justice Ginsburg has observed that if a brief is “sloppy” in regard to mechanics, “the judge may suspect its reliability in other respects as well.”²In a 1994 case, a federal district judge dismissing a complaint ordered a sanctions hearing for the plaintiff’s attorney, noting that the attorney’s mechanical errors were evidence of a lack of due care:

[Counsel] continues to submit documents to this Court with grammatical errors and misstatements.... Moreover, throughout the Amended Complaint [the attorney] repeatedly refers to his client as “he” instead of “she.” These types of errors strongly suggest that [the attorney] has not taken the appropriate care to avoid errors before submitting documents to this Court.³

To take a more practical view, failure to take care with polishing may cost you money. In a case that received wide publicity (including a story in the New York Times), an attorney whose courtroom work was praised had his fees for his written work cut in half — from $300 to $150 per hour — due in large part to sloppy proofreading.⁴ When he was interviewed about the case, the federal judge who decided on the award of attorneys’ fees commented that “no matter how good you are in front of the jury, most of your reputation’s going to be built on what you write.”⁵

The second reason you must learn polishing skills is that you probably cannot afford an assistant who can do this level of polishing.

Polishing is hard for the same reason that revision is hard. Most people don’t really see their writing when they review it. Instead, they see the document that they meant to write; their short-term memory interferes with their ability to see typographical errors or other problems. For that reason, this chapter identifies some objective methods for polishing that will help you to break up that relationship between your short-term memory and your document, and help you to catch mistakes in both your writing and your analysis.

The best way to proofread effectively is to put your writing away for a while. If you’ve ever gone back and read a document that you wrote last year, or even last month, you’ve probably noticed several mistakes or style problems that you missed when you wrote it. If you are trying to polish a document that you wrote this morning, your short-term memory makes it hard for you to see your mistakes. It knows what you wanted to say, and it tends to gloss over the mistakes.⁶ Therefore, if you can get a draft done a week before your deadline, don’t reread it and edit it every day. Instead, wait three days and do a thorough edit, and then wait three more days and do a final edit.⁷Even a little time can make some difference. In a crunch, that might mean taking a 15-minute walk and then coming back to edit, but taking some time can make a difference.

A second effective polishing technique is to “start in the middle” when reviewing your work. Most writing teachers find that mechanical mistakes and other weaknesses show up more often in the second half of the document than in the first half. That’s because many writers get bored with editing or polishing as they get closer to the end of the document; many give up before finishing the job. Even conscientious editors should give fresh eyes to different parts of the document at different times.

Generally, it is ineffective to proofread by reading the entire document very slowly once or twice, trying to catch every type of error. Instead, you should read the document through several times on the computer and several times in hard-copy form. Make surgical strikes, focusing on only one or two aspects of the document at a time. For example, you can review the document once just looking at citation form, another time just looking at topic sentences, and so on. This chapter discusses proofreading techniques for both the digital and hard-copy versions of the document.