Once your report has the right words in the right order you still need to check it for mistakes. This requires a close-reading of the text and it can be difficult to see mistakes when you are so familiar with the text. Here are three simple ways that can help you spot mistakes.

1️⃣ Change the colour, font and/or size of the text.

If you have used a serif font try changing to a sans-serif or fixed width font. Changing the way your text looks helps you get some distance from the original text.

2️⃣ Use your ears instead of your eyes.

You could do this either by reading the text aloud or using a text-to-speech service to have it read to you by your computer.

3️⃣ See the invisibles.

The default option in Word is not to show the non-printing characters such as spaces, tab characters, page and section breaks and paragraph end-markers. On the Home toolbar there is a button with what looks like a backward P on it (the symbol is called a pilcrow). Click that to toggle the formatting marks on and off.

With invisibles toggled on you will see where there are multiple spaces instead of single spaces and where multiple carriage returns have been used to force a line onto a new page instead of using the page break command and so on.