Dissertation Editing
Professional editing for your dissertation, thesis, or course paper is an important element of success in your academic career. Our Developmental Editors and Comprehensive Copy Editors have worked with students on hundreds of papers, theses, and dissertations and know what you need to succeed.
We provide both developmental editing and comprehensive copyediting. Upon submission, we will conduct a diagnostic review of your work to determine if developmental or copyediting is more appropriate for your needs, and provide a cost estimate of the editing process for your project.
Developmental Dissertation Editing
Developmental editing, sometimes called substantive editing, assists you in developing your project, and concentrates on the focus, development, and organization of the project. This editing can start very early in the writing process, sometimes before drafting has begun. Developmental editing may require more than one round to fully address issues and does not include copyediting or proofreading. Our editors will assist you in improving your focus, development, and organization, and in meeting the expectations of your readers.
Our Developmental Editors assist you to focus by helping you to:
- Conceptualize your project to fulfill the assignment or purpose of the paper
- Create or sharpen your thesis statement or argument
- Shape the significance and justification
- Ensure unity of the project
- Attend to the academic audience and academic discourse community
Our Developmental Editors assist you to develop your writing project by helping you to:
- Expand the focus
- Incorporate evidence, support, and sources
- Identify gaps in content and suggest ways to fill those gaps
- Balance the argument
- Provide background and context
- Ensure paragraph unity and progressive development
Our Developmental Editors assist you to organize your writing project by helping you to:
- Create an outline or template for the project
- Revise outlines as the project progresses
- Arrange and reorganize points and sections
- Provide transitions from one subject to the next
- Create headings and ensure heading hierarchy
- Check the introductory and concluding paragraph or sections for accuracy and value
- Develop flow, pacing, and direction
Comprehensive Dissertation Copyediting
Copyediting ensures that your writing meets the required standards of your advisor, program, or department and focuses on style, conventions, mechanics and grammar. This editing takes place after developmental editing or on drafts that are complete. Our comprehensive copyediting goes beyond the level of copyediting from most other writing sites and includes line editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Comprehensive copyediting may take more than one round because of the back and forth process of editing and correcting. Our goal is to complete it in a single session, but a second round may be necessary for proofreading. This editing concentrates on the secondary elements of writing.
Our Comprehensive Copy Editors address style and mechanical issues and:
- Diagnose and suggest revisions of style, mechanics, sentence structure, and flow
- Attend to consistency of style, tone, and voice
- Edit for passive or active voice, as appropriate
- Suggest titles
- Attend to the academic audience, including jargon issues
Our Comprehensive Copy Editors address convention and disciplinary issues and:
- Edit the paper to conform to the standards of academic writing and disciplinary conventions
- Attend to grammatical errors
- Fix spelling errors (including hyphenization and capitalization)
- Correct punctuation and mechanical errors
- Properly format the fonts and tables
- Ensure alphabetical and numbering sequence accuracy
- Integrate and cite sources properly
- Format headings
- Format to meet the requirements of style manuals such as MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian
- Format to meet your university or department’s formatting manual
- Format and label figures, tables, charts, and other graphics
Our Comprehensive Copy Editors address proofreading issues and:
- Crosscheck references and citations
- Identify errors and correct references and citations (via Web searches)
- Flag missing or incorrect reference information that cannot be found easily and properly format that information when the correct information is supplied
- Create and format the table of contents
- Conduct a final proofreading to ensure a clean final copy, including correcting typos and editorial errors, word breaks, missing or incorrect punctuation and word spacing, spacing, widows and orphans, and page numbering
