Abstract
An experiment is reported that tested the effectiveness of a common proofreading strategy known as team proofreading. Subjects in 32 pairs proofread a series of passages containing misspellings; one subject read out loud to a partner who followed along silently, both looking for errors. In a control condition both subjects read passages but did so separately Analysis showed that two proofreaders working on the same passage detected significantly more errors than one proofreader working alone. However, team proofreading itself was not shown to be effective for detecting misspellings, because two readers detected just as many total errors when they read separately as they did working as a team. In addition, reading out loud was not shown to be a beneficial element of team proofreading. The results suggest that having multiple proofreaders is a beneficial strategy for detecting misspellings, bur that it is not necessary for readers to work interactively as a team to accomplish this.
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