Free online proofreader

Examples

Proofreading examples

Three everyday texts with the kind of mistakes the proofreader fixes, and nothing else.

Illustrative examples. The proofreader fixes errors and leaves correct sentences alone, so what changes depends on your text.

Proofreading guide

What does an online proofreader do?

Proofreading is the last check before a text goes out: you look for typos, spelling mistakes, grammar slips and punctuation errors, and you leave everything else alone. It's different from editing, which questions structure, argument and style. A proofreader assumes the text already says what you want and makes sure it says it correctly.

humai's proofreader works the same way. Paste your text and it corrects what's actually wrong: misspellings, its/it's and their/there mix-ups, verbs that don't agree with their subjects, missing or misplaced commas, run-on sentences, doubled words and capitalization. Correct sentences stay exactly as you wrote them, informal ones included, and every fix shows up highlighted in the changes view.

That makes it useful right before you hand in an essay, send a job application, publish a blog post or reply to a client. It checks up to 3,000 characters at a time for free, with no sign-up, and up to 20,000 on Pro.

Unlike a basic spell checker, which flags words that aren't in its dictionary, the proofreader reads whole sentences. It catches “could of” and “there going”, where every word is spelled correctly but the sentence is still wrong.

How to proofread your text online

Four steps. The free version doesn't need an account.

1. Paste your text Copy the paragraph, email or essay section into the box, or load a .txt or .docx file. The free plan checks up to 3,000 characters at a time.
2. Click Check text The proofreader goes through it sentence by sentence and returns a corrected version, usually within a few seconds.
3. Review the highlighted changes The changes view shows what was removed and what was added. Correct sentences are left alone, so anything highlighted deserves a quick look.
4. Copy the corrected text Switch to the clean view and copy the result. For longer documents, check them in sections and then read the whole thing through once more yourself.

Proofreader, paraphraser or humanizer?

If your text only needs its mistakes fixed, the proofreader is the right tool. Here's how it compares with the other two.

Proofreading last is a good habit: after paraphrasing or humanizing, a quick check catches anything that slipped through.

Common mistakes the proofreader fixes

Most errors in finished texts aren't the kind a spell checker catches. They're real words used in the wrong place, and punctuation that changes how a sentence reads. These come up most often.

Sound-alikes: its and it's, your and you're, their, there and they're, then and than, affect and effect, lose and loose. They're all real words, so they slip past a dictionary check.

Subject–verb agreement: “The results of the study suggests” should be “suggest”, because the subject is “results”, not “study”. A long phrase between the subject and the verb makes this easy to miss.

Comma splices and run-ons: “The deadline is Friday, I'll send it Thursday” joins two full sentences with only a comma. The proofreader fixes it with a period, a semicolon or a conjunction, whichever changes your sentence least.

Missing commas after an introductory phrase (“After the meeting, we…”) and before “and” or “but” when they join two complete clauses, plus missing apostrophes in possessives (“the company's policy”).

Capitalization of days, months, names and titles; doubled words (“the the”); and typos like “teh” or “recieve”.

What it doesn't do is rewrite correct sentences just because they could be phrased differently, or swap your informal words for formal ones. One thing worth checking yourself is whether you've used American or British spelling consistently. Pick one convention per document and stick to it.

Proofreading vs. editing: what the tool won't do

A proofreader works at the level of sentences. It won't tell you that your second paragraph belongs at the end, that your argument skips a step, or that your introduction promises something the essay never delivers. That's editing, and it still needs a human reader: you after a night's sleep, or a friend who'll be honest with you.

It doesn't check facts either. If you wrote that the Berlin Wall fell in 1991, the proofreader will make sure the sentence is grammatical and leave the date alone. Numbers, names and dates are kept exactly as you typed them, because changing them silently would be worse than missing an error.

Style is your call, too. If you want your text to sound more natural or less stiff, that's a job for the humanizer; if you need different wording, use the paraphraser. The proofreader's job is narrower and, for that reason, safer: it only touches what's wrong.

For high-stakes documents such as a thesis, a contract or a book manuscript, an automated check is a good first pass, not a replacement for a professional proofreader who knows your field and your style guide.

A quick proofreading checklist

Before you submit or send anything that matters, run through this list. It takes five minutes and catches what tools and tired eyes miss.

Run the text through the proofreader a few paragraphs at a time and read each correction. If a change looks odd, look up the rule instead of accepting it blindly.

Read the corrected text out loud, or at least in your head at speaking pace. Awkward sentences and missing words are much easier to hear than to see.

Check what a proofreader can't: names spelled the way their owners spell them, figures that match your source, and dates and references in the format your course or publication requires.

Look at headings, captions and bullet points separately. They're easy to skip and often hold the most visible mistakes.

Finally, reread the first and last sentences. They're the ones readers remember, and the ones most often rewritten at the last minute.

A note on AI and proofreading

The proofreader runs on a language model, so you're using an AI system. It's good at the common errors listed above and occasionally wrong on borderline cases, such as optional commas or sentences whose meaning depends on context. Treat each correction as a suggestion you can see and check, not a verdict.

Spelling and grammar tools are widely accepted, but some courses ask you to mention any AI tools you used, even for language editing. If yours does, the disclosure helper under the result gives you a sentence you can copy and adapt.

Your text is sent to the AI model provider only to be checked. If you're not logged in, we don't store it.

Online proofreader: questions and answers