Verify is quite a technical word but it means simply “check”. And when you are working – at school, at college, or later when you’re at work – it’s really important to check what you have done. Even if you are really concentrating on what you are writing, or the maths problem you’re working out, it’s easy to make little mistakes.
Everybody makes mistakes, there’s nothing wrong with that. But because everyone makes mistakes, we all need to check our work before we hand it in. So after you finish each sentence in a piece of writing, look at it closely. Does it make sense? Are all the words spelt correctly? Have you used the right punctuation, and made sure you have capital letters where they need to be? At the end of your piece, read through the whole thing again to check that it makes sense and you’ve said everything you wanted to say.
When you’re doing a maths problem, keep checking that you haven’t misread the question, written the wrong number, put the decimal point in the wrong place, or made a little mistake somewhere in your calculations.
It sounds like a lot of extra work but it really doesn’t take that much more time. And, if you make a habit of checking your work as you go along, and again at the end, you’ll soon get better and quicker at doing it. It’s amazing the difference that checking your work can make.
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