What Your University Actually Permits an Editor to Do to Your Dissertation

Four institutions, four positions

At the University of North Texas, a student may use an editor, paid or unpaid, on a final critical essay, thesis, or dissertation. It is permitted only if the major professor and the Director of Graduate Studies approve it. The approval form must be submitted before the topic proposal is approved. The student and the editor both sign an agreement limiting editorial intervention to citations, grammar, style, formatting, and overall clarity and structure, and stating that the intervention will not pertain to content. The student keeps copies of all drafts carrying editorial annotations and acknowledges the editor's role in the acknowledgments. The editor works exclusively with the student and may not contact the major professor, the committee, or the administration.¹

At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the position is delegated rather than centralized. Responsibility for editing theses and dissertations rests with the student and the individual departments and programs, and a department may prefer that a student employ a professional editor. Some departments keep lists of editors the department has approved.²

At Syracuse University, the institution supplies the editor. Its graduate editing service accepts thesis and dissertation chapters and articles for publication, and declines resumes, coursework, and comprehensive examination responses. Editors work on sentence-level issues of grammar, clarity, and awkwardness or tone, returned as tracked changes. The service does not assess the disciplinary strength of the writing, and it tells students that whether to accept any suggested change is theirs to decide.³

At the University of Michigan, the published requirement concerns attribution rather than permission. Students are responsible for consulting their faculty advisors to make sure citations and acknowledgments are complete and accurate. The student must be the primary author of any collaborative work, and contributions by others must be explicitly acknowledged. Failure to acknowledge all sources and contributions is treated as a serious matter.⁴

What the four have in common

Read together, those four positions agree on more than they disagree on. Every one of them draws a line at content. Every one of them puts the decision with the student's own department or advisor rather than with the editor. Three of the four require the arrangement to be visible, either to the advisor in advance or to the reader in the acknowledgments.

The professional side of the same line is published as well. Editors Canada states that graduate students must obtain written permission for professional editing from their advisor, specifying what the editor is allowed to do. Where limits have not been specified, the guidelines say an editor should not go beyond simple correction of grammar, idiom, punctuation, spelling, and mechanics.⁵ An editor working to that standard and a student working to the North Texas form are describing the same job.

The questions worth asking before any money changes hands

Four questions settle almost every case, and they are answered by the institution rather than by the editor. Whether outside editing is permitted at all. Whether written approval is required, and from whom. What the editor is permitted to touch. And whether the editor must be acknowledged in the finished document.

Two of those have consequences that cannot be repaired afterward. An approval that had to be obtained before the topic proposal cannot be obtained after the defense. An acknowledgment that was required and omitted is a defect in a document that has already been deposited.

Where an editor stands in this

An editor is not in a position to grant permission and should not be asked to. What an editor can do is work inside whatever limits have been set, keep the record that most of these policies expect, and say plainly when a request falls outside them. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, data, and correspondence with a committee.

EditFast works from a permission form where one exists, and from the department's own written policy where one does not. Where neither exists, the conversation with the advisor is the first piece of work, and it belongs to the student.

The policies quoted here were current when this article was written, and any one of them can be revised without notice. The reliable move is to read the version your own graduate school publishes this year, rather than the version a colleague described two years ago.