In short, no. Many students worry about their work not being ‘academic’ enough but we are a believer in plain English and think that verbose language is often used to mask weak content. If you always use the same connecting words or appear to have a preference for certain phrases, we might make suggestions of synonyms or other ways of putting things, but We won’t edit the language if what you have is clear and correct
Yes, We do offer plagiarism checking service in different languages like German, French and English. We are here to help our clients and especially students for their academic thesis and assignments. The cost of our services is far better than anyone and the quality of work also has an impact on our clients.
Our standard proofreading service does not include implementing formatting from scratch, though we will pick up on inconsistencies, for example in use of capitals or italics, and we will check that numbering of headings and sections is correct.
Formatting from scratch can be included in the copy-editing service but as many universities have set guidelines on this, plus it adds to the time it will take for us to do the work and therefore increases the cost, we tend to recommend that you do this yourself and let us focus on the language.
This is one of the most frequently asked questions we receive and unfortunately there’s no single or simple answer. We have written a few posts about the ethics of proofreading for students so there is more detail in those but the simplest answer to the above question is for you to check with your university or education institution. Even then, some departments or schools within a university might have different rules so it might be best to check with your supervisor. In our experience, most universities are happy for students to get their work proofread but not all are, and some also have specific guidelines for the proofreader to consider.
We don’t like emphasising what our services don’t include but since this blog post is hopefully all about clarifying the terms we use, We figure it is best We are clear.
None of the three services include heavy rewriting or fact-checking, unless explicitly requested. If heavy rewriting is required, We would recommend a final proofread after our file has been checked and all queries and new content checked by the author.
Regardless of whether you ask for a proofreading, proof-editing or copy-editing service, We run a series of tests that include checks on consistency of proper nouns. This means we will hopefully spot anomalies in the way someone’s name is written and will do an internet search to see which is correct, but we do not externally cross-check all authors’ names in reference lists unless this is requested.
Though we have a lot of detail on my Academic Services page about our proofreading and copy-editing services for students and academics, We thought it would be useful to provide a table here to show the different levels of work involved in either a proofread or copy-edit. We have also included details for our proof-editing service, a relatively new term that seems suitable for authors wanting a one-stage process for their manuscripts.
As We emphasise elsewhere, we only proofread work to be submitted for assessment, but We can proofread, proof-edit or copy-edit PhDs that have passed their vivas and are due to be published, journal articles, book chapters and complete books.
By academic services, We include work for students (predominantly postgraduates), academics and people publishing non-fiction manuscripts.
