Using NotebookLM to Proofread Your Own Work

This weekend, I finally completed a review of the Rogue C# series and the Kindle edition is now live on Amazon.com. While the actual development of the game itself is nowhere near complete, you can now have an offline version to read on your Kindle or other eBook reader. The EPUB and PDF editions remain available on LeanPub.com and have been updated to the new version.

I actually do my own copy editing and proofreading and it’s a serious challenge. Despite my best efforts and a pretty decent command of the language, typos do get past me. I was amazed how many times my fingers mixed up “its” and it’s” throughout the series. I found the occasional “the the” in there, too, along with misspellings and other errors. These can be understandably off-putting to readers and leave a general bad impression of the work.

Microsoft Word has a spelling and grammar checker but spell checkers are notorious for not catching correctly spelled but misused words and, in a programming tutorial like this one, there are a lot of false positives. The grammar checker likes to enforce its own style, too. Before I uploaded the new version, I thought to upload the PDF to NotebookLM and see what it would find. NotebookLM is usually more of a study tool that is good for analyzing information from multiple documents but I wanted to see how it would handle proofreading.

It did a surprisingly good job, catching items that I’d missed even when reviewing the material months (arguably years) after I wrote it. The PDF edition is 268 pages in length so it was a bit of a challenge for NotebookLM to parse, but it did provide a listing of all the errors it found, along with links to the specific locations so I could find them easily. Aside from spelling and grammar, NotebookLM is good for verifying coverage of concepts within a document and can analyze the work for other potential flaws, like contradictory or unclear statements.

In my latest video, I demonstrate how you can use NotebookLM to proof your own work, using the Rogue C# PDF edition. The site also has tools like the mind map that can break down the source into specific concepts and might offer a useful perspective on how it covers various ideas. Its usefulness as a copy editing and proofing system might be limited only by your willingness to ask it the tough questions about the quality of your own work.