Abstract: Nonlinear Galerkin methods utilize approximate inertial manifolds to reduce the spatial error of the standard Galerkin method. For certain scenarios, where a rough forcing term is used, a simple postprocessing step yields the same improvements that can be observed with nonlinear Galerkin. We show that this improvement is mainly due to the information about the forcing term that is neglected by standard Galerkin. Moreover, we construct a simple postprocessing scheme that uses only this neglected information but gives the same increase in accuracy as nonlinear or postprocessed Galerkin methods.