Dissertation and Thesis Clients Editing and Proofreading Services

You are three years into a doctorate, your written English is not the problem you were told it was, and you have found somebody who edits theses. The question you cannot quite ask is the only one that matters: how much help is allowed? Nobody has given you a straight answer, your supervisor was vague, and the university's policy uses the word "proofreading" as though everyone agrees what it covers.

We work with doctoral and master's candidates on the parts of a thesis where language, structure and clarity can be improved without touching the scholarship — sentence-level clarity and grammar, consistency of terminology and formatting, reference and citation formatting, chapter and section signposting, abstracts and summaries, tables, figures and their captions, and the readability of the discussion and conclusion. Our editors work inside a boundary we will state plainly.

Where the line sits is the thing we want to be clearest about, because your degree depends on it. What we do: correct grammar, punctuation, spelling and consistency; make sentences say what you meant them to say more directly; point out where a paragraph's meaning is unclear to a reader; flag where a section's structure makes an argument hard to follow; check that formatting and references are consistent; and tell you when we cannot understand something. What we do not do: write or rewrite your argument; add, remove or reorder your ideas; supply analysis, interpretation or conclusions; generate content, including from your notes; fix a claim that is not supported by your evidence; or improve a sentence in a way that changes what it asserts. Where a sentence is ambiguous, we tell you and you decide — we do not choose the meaning for you, because the meaning is the scholarship. We also record what we did: on request we provide a statement of the service, listing what was and was not edited, that you can give to your supervisor or your institution. Most universities permit language editing and require it to be declared; some restrict it further, and a few prohibit it for particular programmes. Please check your own regulations and tell us if they are narrower than the above — we will work to whichever is stricter.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished work and unsubmitted chapters. We are editors rather than supervisors, examiners or academic advisers, and we offer no view on your research, your argument or your findings. What we can do is make the writing clearer without becoming a contributor to it.