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Cómo corregir un manuscrito
Proofreading a 300-page manuscript isn't the same task as proofreading an email, just done more times. At that length, the real risk isn't a single missed comma — it's drift: a character's eye color changing halfway through, a timeline that quietly stops making sense, a name spelled two different ways forty pages apart. Here's how to approach it without losing your mind by page 150.
Separate proofreading from editing entirely
By the time you're proofreading, the manuscript's structure, plot, and prose style should already be settled. If you're still rewriting scenes or reconsidering the ending, you're editing, not proofreading — and mixing the two means you'll miss typos because you're distracted by structural questions, and vice versa. Do them as separate passes.
Build a style sheet before you start
Professional proofreaders keep a running style sheet for exactly this reason: a single reference document listing every character name and spelling, place names, invented terms, capitalization choices, and any deliberately unconventional grammar (a character who speaks in fragments, for instance). Without one, you have no way to catch "Kathryn" becoming "Katherine" three chapters later — you'd need to remember it, and nobody remembers three hundred pages of detail.
Read in smaller chunks than feels efficient
Attention degrades over long stretches, and manuscript-length documents make that degradation easy to hide from yourself — you can convince yourself you're still reading carefully at page 200 when you're actually skimming. Proofread in sessions of 20-30 pages with real breaks between them, not because it's faster, but because your error-catching rate genuinely drops the longer you go without stopping.
Check continuity separately from prose-level proofreading
Do at least one pass focused purely on continuity — timelines, physical descriptions, character knowledge (does a character react to information they haven't been told yet?), and object permanence (a coat left in one room shouldn't reappear on the character in the next scene without explanation). This is a different kind of attention than catching typos, so don't try to do both in the same pass.
Search for your own known weak spots
Every writer has patterns they overuse or consistently get wrong — a particular word repeated too often, a tendency to comma-splice, a specific homophone mix-up (its/it's, affect/effect). Use your word processor's search function to hunt these down specifically, rather than hoping you'll catch them by eye in a general read-through.
Use a tool for the sentence-level pass, save your attention for continuity
Grammar, spelling, and awkward phrasing are exactly the kind of issue an AI proofreading tool catches reliably and fast — which frees up your own attention for the harder job only a human can do well: tracking whether the story itself still makes sense. Run chapters through Proofread Bot for the mechanical pass, then spend your own re-read focused on continuity and voice.