Academic editing refers to proofreading services designed specifically to correct and improve academic documents. These documents might include journal papers, master’s theses, research papers, college application essays, and so on.
Academic editing offers can play a major role in ensuring that you complete and submit academic work that you can take pride in. Many writers may think that such assistance may be too expensive to be worth it.
However, there are several benefits associated with academic editing. These include completing your thesis on time or getting published in high-end journals. Here is a brief list summarizing the benefits associated with professional proofreading:
It saves you time
It improves your writing
It makes your writing seem more professional
It expedites your academic success
So how do you go about deciding when you need professional help to correct your manuscript? Also, where do you go to get professional assistance? And what should you look for in a good academic editor?
In this article, I will tell you all you need to know about academic editing and what to expect from an academic editor, and where to find the best offers.
What is academic editing?
Academic editing refers to checking and correcting academic documents. These documents could include master’s or dissertation theses, journal manuscripts, white papers, and so on.
These offers could include correction for:
Style and tone
Grammar
Sentence structure
Clarity
Academic editing can be thought as existing in different stages and tiers. These tiers or stages are based on the level of modification required to be carried out on the document before making it ready for submission.
On the one end, we have developmental editing, which may require significant changes to the conceptual development of a document. And this level of correction may occur even before the document is completed.
On the other end, we have proofreading, which is the final stage of the process. This includes making minor changes, such as correcting spelling and punctuation errors.
There are more or less six different types of editing. They include:
Developmental
Substantive
Copyediting
Mechanical
Proofreading
As I mentioned earlier, these levels can be seen as a continuum. Developmental editing can be seen as the most conceptual and proofreading being the last stage of the process. Below is a diagram showing the various stages of editing.
The different tiers of academic editing
Figure 1 shows editing as a continuous process. However, in reality, most authors do not go through all of these stages. Writers may seek professional help at any stage of the process.
For example, a senior or experienced author, who has published several papers and who is writing for a target journal may simply need copyediting and proofreading assistance. However, a more junior author may need both developmental and content editing.
Let’s look at each of the various stages of the process in turn.
Developmental editing
Developmental editing is the most drastic stage of the process. It may involve having the entire manuscript written because the overarching concept, idea, or story was not well thought out.
In some cases, developmental editing may apply even before the manuscript is written. For example, an editor may leave extensive commentary and suggestions for the outline of a manuscript.
In the field of academics, a developmental editor would most likely be an SME or subject matter expert. A developmental editor can be described almost as playing the role of an adviser in academic settings. They provide advice on how your introduction can be improved or what essential literature is missing in your literature review.
Substantive editing
Substantive editing involves organizing and presenting existing content. It is not as drastic as the developmental stage. However, it includes:
Rewriting to improve style
Rewriting to improve clarity
Rewriting to give greater structural integrity or coherence
Adjusting or recasting tables
This type or level of correction implies major modification. Before an editor goes ahead with this stage, they need to ensure that they are on the same page with the author.
In fact, the editor should even think of submitting a sample of the work to obtain the approval of the author before going ahead with substantive editing throughout the entire manuscript.
Copyediting
Copyediting is also referred to as line editing. It deals with paying attention to every word and punctuation mark in the manuscript. However, unlike substantive editing, it doesn’t involve rewriting.
To carry out proper copyediting, the academic editor needs to:
Have thorough knowledge of the style to be followed
Have confidence in their ability
Be willing to make quick and logical decisions
Be willing to defend their decisions to the author
Mechanical editing
Mechanical editing refers to consistently applying a specific style to a manuscript. Style refers to rules regarding:
Capitalization
Spelling
Hyphenation
Abbreviations
Punctuation
In addition to this, mechanical editing also involves paying attention to usage, grammar, and syntax.
Proofreading
Proofreading can be described as the process of carefully examining all the components of a text to find errors and mark them for correction. All the stages of correcting a manuscript require proofreading.
However, here, by proofreading we mean correcting and double-checking the final version of the manuscript. This stage of editing is usually carried out after your manuscript has been converted into the format that it will be published in.
In the case of academic authors who wish to get published in journals, this would be the PDF format of your manuscript after it has been accepted for publication in your target journal.
Our academic editing prices begin as low as $0.02 per word. Contact us to learn more. |
Who needs academic editing?
Academic editing has grown into a lucrative industry. Its rapid growth is based on the growing demand from academic professionals who speak English as a second language.
The types of people who need such professional assistance include the following:
1. ESL (or English as a second language) university students
These are university students who study abroad in English and who need English language support. They might need such support in writing their theses, college papers, or even writing their college essay applications.
Academic writing is difficult for everyone. However, for ESL students, it poses several unique challenges. An academic editor can help provide these students with the confidence that they have the ability to produce and submit work that they can take pride in and that meets the standards of the universities that they attend.
2. University students in general
ESL university students are not the only ones who require editing help. Such services can be useful to any university student who has limited time to go over their own work or who struggles with writing English well.
Editing work for such students is wide-ranging. It can include academic essays and capstone projects. For master's students, it could also mean help in editing their theses. For PhD students, thsi help would cover their dissertations.
3. Academic professionals
Academia can be a competitive industry. Professors and lecturers very often can only get promotions after publishing academic papers in high-quality English-language journals with very high English language standards. To do so successfully, they typically pay for academic editing, especially if they are ESL professionals.
Other academic professionals who may need academic assistance are medical professionals. These could be practicing doctors who have to report special medical procedures that have value to their profession. It could also be medical professionals involved in carrying out lab-based research or clinical trials.
The work they carry out will have to be published in English-language medical journals, and they would need professional English editors to make their work submission-ready.
4. Professionals who need grant writing assistance
Grant writing is a form of academic writing that can be quite challenging. Non-profits and university research departments frequently rely on such a skill.
There are often strict requirements that come with requests for proposals (or RFPs), such as a limited word count. An academic editor may be able to edit grant proposals to meet these requirements.
5. Professionals who need help with white papers
White papers are a type of paper that are a mix between academic and business writing. These documents are typically informative and loaded with statistics.
White papers can include information and data about a new product for business purposes. Or they can include information about a development project by an NGO such as the World Bank or FAO (Food and Aid Organization).
Instead of journals, such papers usually target the general public or a more sophisticated B2B audience. Academic editing can help you hit just the right note between using technical jargon and appealing to a non-technical audience.
An academic editor can significantly improve the quality of your academic writing. Most people, whether or not they are ESL speakers, are surprised to find out just how much these type of services can help.
This is because an academic editor has a specific set of skills that are typically taken for granted by the average non-professional or even professional writer. So exactly what should expect from an academic editor?
What to expect from a professional academic editor
An academic editor brings a specific set of skills to your academic document. You should expect for your edited manuscript to be free of spelling, grammar, and typo errors.
Here is a list of other things that usually come with hiring an academic editor:
Direct changes to your document to improve clarity, flow, and readability
Tracked Word revisions that allow you to see and review changes made by the editor
Formatting citations and references to meet the guidelines and expectations of your target journal
Comments on missing or confusing information and how the document could be improved
A brief summary of how document has been changed and any major concerns that require further attention or work
1. Affordable pricing. Because of the intense competition, proofreading and editing prices can be relatively inexpensive. With standard turnaround times of three to seven days, you can expect to be charged around only $30 to $45 per 1000 words.
2. Access to skilled proofreaders and editors. Proofreading websites or companies use both in-house and freelance editors. These freelance editors are located throughout the world. They have to go through challenging qualifying tests and training before they start working for these companies.
3. Speedy and convenient services. These companies offer rapid turnaround times. Their turnaround times range between four or even two hours and two weeks. They are usually web-based and you can upload your document and pay for these services 24-7.
4. Educational resources. By educational resources, I mean resources that support students to become successful academics or scholars. The ideal proofreading company is not content with editing or proofreading your document.
Instead, they offer a wide range of useful resources, such as blogs and YouTube videos, to help answer or explain any difficult questions you have about academic tasks and writing.
What types of documents qualify for academic editing?
Academic editing encompasses a wide range of documents. These are academic documents related to university coursework, journal publications, and writing academic reports. They include the following:
Academic essays meant to complete coursework
Journal articles
Master’s theses and PhD dissertations
Research projects
Book chapters meant for academic books published in journals
Academic books
White papers for business products
Conference Proceedings
Conference posters
Conference presentations
Of course, many scholars can complete or submit these documents on their own without the assistance of an academic editor. However, there are specific advantages and talents that an academic editor brings.
This is a specialized service that improves both the language and structure of your document. Besides that, it can simultaneously strengthen, streamline, and emphasize your ideas and arguments, while making sure your paper meets the strict formatting requirements of your target journal or required coursework.
There are several benefits to hiring a professional academic editor. They are as follows: 1. They provide a fresh set of eyes; 2. They provide expertise and experience; 3. They help you to become a better writer; 4. They ensure stylistic consistency; and 4. They save time and money. To learn more, please check this prior article: Benefits of Hiring an Editor.
AI-powered academic editing software
AI-powered proofreading is becoming more and more popular. Several academic editing services provide the option of AI editing. A good example is WordviceAI. You can check out my review of both their proofreading services and product here: Wordvice Review.
Other companies that provide these services include Sribendi, Scribbr, and PaperPal. The pricing for their proofreading software is subscription-based. This means you pay for it on a monthly basis. Scribendi charges $5.99 per month. For Wordvice and Scribbr, prices can start as low as $9.95/per month. Now, is this type of AI-powered proofreading software useful?
Well, this depends on several factors. AI-powered software is heavily influenced by the quality of its "input." This input can also be referred to as "training data." Now we do not need to get too technical here. Training data is the data used to teach the AI how to make corrections.
This means that the software is only as good as the data it is trained on. In the case of academic editing companies, they have access to high-quality data. They are editing companies with several hundred editors who have edited millions of words over the years.
These editors are highly trained and experienced in academic editing. Therefore, the resulting AI software can be described as being fit for purpose. Training data for this type of software involves feeding it with a massive volume of examples of high-quality editing content.
By editing content, I mean the several thousand, if not millions, of corrections and suggestions that the hundreds of in-house and freelance editors who work for these companies execute daily. These academic editing companies review and correct several hundred million words annually.
As a result, these models tend to be more impressive than alternatives such as Grammarly for academic editing. However, many of these proofreading software tools are best used by professional editors. They help these professionals become more efficient by speeding up the editing process.
In my personal opinion, they are not yet at the stage where an ordinary student or academic writer or layman can rely only on proofreading software without professional assistance from an academic editor. However, there is a generation of AI-powered tools that do more than editing.
AI-powered writing assistant tools
These new tools have been closely associated with the rise of generative AI. They can be properly labelled as AI-powered writing assistant tools. The most prominent of them is QuillBot. These tools don't just stop at proofreading or academic editing.
They also provide assistance with paraphrasing and summarizing academic content to avoid plagiarism. The ethics of using such AI-powered tools to conduct your academic work is up for debate. Some universities, after all, do not allow students to write academic essays using AI.
Well, in any event, these AI tools have you covered. After paraphrasing your content, they use AI detection features to "prove" that your content is human-written. So, it's a case of using AI to generate AI content. Then using that AI to prove that it's human written. In short, it's not entirely a trustworthy process.
Let's take a brief look at how this type of AI-powered assistant tool helps with academic writing. This is an example of paraphrasing from QuillBot. The content on the right is original, and the one on the left is paraphased:
The paraphrased result isn't bad. However, it's far from perfect. We can even say that AI has improved the content to some extent. The first sentence comes across as more complete and with better context than the original. “With big data and crowd computing in the contemporary business environment” sounds like something is missing. QuillBot is able to catch what is missing: “the prevalence of big data.”
This makes the wording sound more fluent and natural. However, there is an error. The phrase “significant early findings” appears to be a direct or literal definition of “preliminary results” from the original passage. It makes zero contextual sense here.
This suggests that you cannot rely on these AI-powered tools alone. Even after using such applications to help write your academic essay or thesis, you would need professional academic editing assistance to ensure that the final product is submission-ready.
Academic editing sample
Academic editing samples can help give you an idea of what to expect from professional editing services. I have provided here an example of the academic editing services offered by EminentEdit. However, before you download this sample, here is a quick summary of what proofreading and editing involves:
Editing using Word's Track Changes function
Commentary to explain corrections
Comments to make suggestions for improvement
Comments to ask for clarification
A professional editor has to balance between making direct and extensive changes to a manuscript with giving the writer the option to make these corrections on their own. Leaving the writer with clear and easy-to-read comments will make it easier for them to make these changes.
Proofreading sample |
Pricing for academic editing services
The cost of academic editing can range between $30 to $60 per 1000 words. At EminentEdit, we charge a rate of $30 per 1000 words or $0.03 per word. However, generally speaking, the charge you pay for editing depends on the field that you are writing in and the type of editing service you choose.
The choices include hiring an individual freelance editor or choosing from one of the several online editing companies that offer editing services. To determine the price for professional editing services, I relied on the EFA or the Editorial Freelancers' Association. Their rates are based on responses from their polled members.
The rates from the EFA are not too far off from the rates offered by the various online editing companies throughout the web. The table below provides the various academic editing rates in various fields of academia. In short, according to the EFA, you should expect to pay between $0.03 and $0.06 for academic editing.
Type of Academic Editing | Price Per Word |
Humanities | $0.03–$0.05 |
STEM | $0.03–$0.06 |
Medical | $0.049–$0.05 |
Legal | $0.04–$0.14 |
The table reveals that the editing rates for STEM are slightly higher than those for the humanities. However, they both start at around $0.03 per word. Medical editing has a similar upper rate as humanities and STEM. However, its starting rate is slightly higher at $0.049 per word. Read on to see how these rates compare with those offered by EminentEdit.
EminentEdit's pricing for academic editing services
At EminentEdit, we understand the importance of completing and submitting your academic writing projects on time. We are a small team of editors who have experience in both publishing our own academic work and helping dozens of academic authors get published.
So, we know exactly what it takes to get your thesis ready for submission. We know exactly what it takes to get a academic documents ready for submission. Our academic editing services cover developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading. In short, we guide and accompany you at every step.
More importantly, we offer these services at a reasonable price. Take a look at our price sheet below:
Type of Editing | Description | Price Per Word ($) |
Copyediting Lite | Line-by-line editing to improve sentence structure, syntax and idiomatic English usage. It also includes thorough proofreading and commentary. | $0.03 |
Copyediting Plus | Line-by-line editing to improve sentence structure, syntax and idiomatic English usage, and reference editing and formatting | $0.04 |
Proofreading | Proofreading to correct punctuation and grammar. | $0.02 |
Get in touch for help in editing your manuscript |
Our services don't just start with proofreading the final product. It also includes help from the very start, such as editing and double-checking your thesis proposal. Our editing services include the following:
Academic essays and capstone projects
Theses and dissertations
Journal manuscripts
White papers and grant proposals
Substantive editing to improve the quality of your writing on a sentence level
Extensive commentary and recommendations to improve your work
Proofreading to make sure your writing is grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation
So feel free to get in touch through our contact page here: CONTACT US AT EMINENT EDIT. Good luck with your research writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, May 15). Academic Editing: All You Need to Know. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/academic-editing-all-you-need-to-know |
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