Producing a high quality product is a given these days. With all competition out there, you have to look great in every aspect. Proofreading all copy is extremely important and here are some tips to help you to proofread your own work:Read through your copy next day -- many times your eyes tend to 'deceive' you by reading what's supposed to be there rather than what may actually be there! Reading it a day or two later helps you to look at your copy with a fresh perspective!
Use 'spell check', which is available on most programs. Although they're not perfect, they will help you to find many errors.
Print it out. Reading it in print can many times help you catch things you didn't catch on screen.
If at all possible, have someone else read it. They can catch sentences that may be too long, be unclear, etc. You know point you're trying to make in your copy, but if others don't understand it, rewrite it so it's more clear to everyone.
There are a lot of questions about hyphen (-) versus dash (--) and here's basic rule:
A hyphen is used when you are putting two words together or adding a prefix to a word.
Here are some examples: twenty-four, re-signed or long-time.
A dash is used when you're interjecting into a sentence (such as, "I love taking dog for a walk -- especially on warm days -- because it is great exercise for us both.").
In many programs a dash will look like a long hyphen instead of two hyphens next to each other. Dashes are also many times used in place of parentheses in more informal writing.
Punctuation inside or outside quotes? Here's basic rule for this one: if you're using a comma or a period, they go inside closing quotation mark. Colons and semicolons go outside closing quotation mark.
Question marks and exclamation marks are different and depend on how they are being used. If you are directly quoting someone and a question mark or quotation mark is needed because what you're quoting is a question or exclamation, it would go inside quote.