Professional proofreading services can be just the edge you need to achieve academic success. However, proofreading services aren't enough. You need the best proofreading services to support your academic work.
Many writers think of it as something unnecessary and perhaps too expensive. However, this is the wrong perspective to take on editing and proofreading services. There are several advantages to editing that can save you time, improve your writing, and expedite your academic success.
A wide range of people can benefit from professional proofreading services. They include:
Students who speak English as a second language (or ESL)
Academics who want to publish in journals
University students who struggle with writing in general
Master's and PhD students who need guidance in writing their theses or dissertations
Which category do you belong to? Whichever it is, professional proofreading and editing services can do alot for you as a student or academic:
It saves you time and energy
It helps carry the quality of your manuscript to acceptable standards
It improves the chances of your manuscript being accepted by journals
It increases the chances of your thesis or dissertation being completed on time
It increases the chances of your thesis/dissertation being completed at the highest quality
So how do you determine or get the best proofreading services? In this article, we will cover all the benefits of hiring a professional editor or proofreader and how to make sure you are signing up for the best proofreading services.
1. A professional editor provides a fresh set of eyes
Manuscript writing and editing can be very involved and tedious work. It often takes several intense hours of academic writing, editing, and proofreading, which can be quite exasperating. Eventually, you will get sick and tired of that manuscript. You need to take a break. At this point, you’re too familiar with the text and too biased against it to see either its flaws or room for improvement.
A professional editor who provides the highest quality proofreading services comes with a novel point of view since they are coming to your manuscript as an unbiased professional, and also because they are seeing your work for the first time. They can read it with brand-new eyes, which enables them to spot trouble areas that you’ve missed.
What does this mean? Well, it could mean that your interpretation of results may need to be expanded or perhaps your literature review may not be sufficiently updated. Or maybe you repeat yourself too much.
Let's say you are writing a grant proposal for example. Your audience might not be too technical, yet the language you use is too jargonistic and goes over their head. The best proofreading services will help you hit just the right tone for that type of audience.
2. The best proofreading services bring expertise and experience
Proofreading services allow you to benefit from years of experience and expertise to your academic writing. Of course, it might be tempting to hire that friend who likes to write or who has a blog for a hobby. Resist that temptation.
A professional editor and proofreader understands the assignment and will deliver. They have likely edited several dozens if not hundreds of papers for that particular journal that you are aiming for. Or they might be a published academic author themselves.
Maybe they know how arduous the review process is. They know what reviewers want and expect from a research paper. And they know just how to do just the right manuscript editing and proofreading to increase the chances of your manuscript being accepted.
Being a successful academic is not a one-man job or project. It is not something that you can do solo. It is a collaborative effort that includes you, your advisor, and other research colleagues. Your professional academic editor can also be part of that collaborative team.
3. A professional editor can help make you a better writer
The best proofreading services do not simply correct your errors. They provide critical feedback, which if followed can help you slowly evolve into a better writer or editor of your own work over time.
Writers don't take kindly to unkind and unhelpful commentary; a professional editor can give you helpful and useful feedback without being offensive. Academic writing is long and grueling work. You stayed up late for several hours weeks at a time to finish that thesis or journal paper.
You drank gallons of coffee and lost hours of sleep. Maybe even your wrists and shoulders are sore from all that typing and your eyes burn from staring at the screen for so long. So someone causally dismissing your work as not being good enough can be jarring and even discouraging.
This is where the professional proofreading services come in. A professional editor knows how to provide just the right feedback. Editors worth their salt can provide useful commentary and feedback that will show how your work can be improved or expanded. This advice will not simply apply to just one manuscript but to your academic writing in general.
Maybe before encountering an academic editor, you did not understand the importance of differentiating between UK and US English and being consistent in that regard. Maybe you did not know the difference between using an academic tone and a more informal tone in your writing. A professional editor can help point these things out without being rude or uncouth.
4. Editing and proofreading services ensure consistency
A lot of the requirements for academic writing is about consistency. Journals and other institutions that deal with academic essays often require strict standards in terms of consistency. There has to be consistency in:
The English used, that is, US versus UK English
The citation style (i.e., APA or MLA, or CMoS)
Formatting (i.e., line spacing, font style and size, indentation, etc.)
Academic tone
Ensuring this type of consistency is tiring. An editor providing the best proofreading services has the work ethic and experience to implement the required English usage, punctuation, tone, and formatting throughout your manuscript.
In addition, professional editors often have tools that can enforce formatting consistency with little effort. For instance, PerfectIT is an editing and proofreading tool that can implement consistency in spelling and academic tone by, for example, US versus UK English or enforcing a formal tone (e.g., using "moreover" instead of "besides").
Trying to ensure that your manuscript is consistent manually by yourself can be quite tedious, consuming, and even discouraging. Your time could be better spent.
5. A professional editor saves you time and money
There is an opportunity cost to editing and proofreading your own work. Perhaps, your time would be better spent doing other things. Maybe you are a student and you have other assignments and courses to attend to. Maybe you have a part-time job that you need to be at. Or maybe you are a researcher juggling more than one project at a time.
Spending all this time and effort on personally editing and proofreading your manuscript means your projects suffer. In short, you pay an opportunity cost. This cost could include things such as your other research projects suffering from being delayed. You may lag in your courses or you could make less money from your work.
Hiring a professional editor might on the surface seem expensive, but when you take into account the time and money saved overall, it might just be worth it. Just think of it as a sort of delegation of tasks. You can focus on your job as a researcher, while the editor focuses on fine-tuning your writing.
This is why it's not enough to simply hire proofreading services. You should hire, instead, teh best proofreading services. This means a company or editor who sees himself as contributing to a greater whole or a greater goal.
Such a greater goal could include your thesis being completed on time or your manuscript being successfully published by your target journal.
Who needs proofreading services?
Proofreading services has grown into a massive industry. This is because the demand for it is booming. Its main market includes students and academic professionals. These could be ESL students who don't speak English as a first language. It could also include native English-speaking students who need help with their research writing.
In addition, academic professionals who want to publish in journals and PhD and master's students writing their theses may also require proofreading services. Here is a list of the types of people who need academic editing and proofreading services:
1. ESL (or English as a second language) university students
These are university students who study abroad with English as the language of instruction. Such students might need English language support. This includes support in correcting their theses, research papers, or even writing their college essay applications. They struggle because English is not their native language.
They might be able to grasp scientific concepts and write quite well. However, they might need help in correcting their syntax and making their English writing sound more natural. Not being a native English speaker should not stand in the way of you excelling in academia.
2. Non-ESL University students
Proofreading services can also benefit native English speakers. ESL university students are not the only ones who require editing services. Editing and proofreading 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.
3. Academic professionals
If you're in academia, then by now you should know that it is a highly competitive industry. As a professor or lecturer, you can only get promotions after publishing academic papers in high-quality English-language journals. These journals have quite high standards in terms of teh quality of English they allow. To ensure that you meet the quality standards of your target journal successfully, you should hire the best proofreading services.
4. Professionals who need grant writing services
Grant writing is a cornerstone in academics. Many academics and non-profit organizations rely on grant funding for their organizations and work. Grant writing is a form of academic writing that can be quite challenging. There are strict requirements that come with requests for proposals (or RFPs), such as concise language.
This means a limited word count in a document that is often packed with dense and complicated information. An academic editor will be able to edit grant proposals to help meet these requirements.
5. Professionals writing white papers
White papers are a type of professional document usually written by businesses trying to promote a product or service. It is normally targeted toward B2B professionals or highly informed and knowledgeable consumers. They are usually informative and packed 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).
Such papers are usually meant for the general public or a B2B (or business-to-business) audience, as opposed to journal publication. Academic editing can strike just the right note between being technical and appealing to a non-technical audience.
Final thoughts on getting the best proofreading services
As mentioned earlier, research is usually a team effort. Let a professional editor be part of your team. They provide a fresh pair of eyes and can leverage their experience and expertise to lighten your workload and expedite the process of you getting published or achieving overall academic success.
Here at EminentEdit, we offer the highest standard of proofreading and editing services. Our offer for editing includes:
Professional proofreading services for grammar, punctuation, and fluency.
Substantive editing, which includes restructuring sentences to make it sound like natural English
Proofreading services to meet the style guide of your target journal of thesis rubric
Developmental editing to show what major changes are required in your manuscript
I'm Mel, the lead editor for EminentEdit. I have worked for over five years for various professional editing services. In the process, I have edited over five million words. What sets EminentEdit apart from other proofreading services is that we don't shy away from having direct communication with our clients before going ahead with editing their documents.
Here is a brief list of how we go about offering the best proofreading services here at EminentEdit:
Thorough editing and proofreading for all manuscripts
Editing to make sure you sound like a native English speaker
Editing and proofreading according to journal style guides
Pricing at the industry standard of 30 USD per 1000 words for standard services
Rapid editing ranging from 12 hours to 7 days
Ensuring that there is extensive commentary to show how your manuscript can be improved
Help with answering at least one round of reviewer questions for journal manuscript editing
Feel free to click the link above. You can go ahead to upload your document or we can set a meeting on Zoom before we proceed with your order. Rest assured, we will go ahead with your order only after there is a complete and common understanding between the editor and writer. Good luck with your research writing.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, ). Why You Need the Best Proofreading Services. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/why-you-need-the-best-proofreading-services |
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