Doctoral Candidates Editing and Proofreading Services

In the viva, somebody will ask what your contribution is. Not what you did — they have read what you did — but what the field now knows that it did not know before you started, and why that matters. Four years of work, and the answer has to fit in ninety seconds. Candidates who cannot give it are usually not short of a contribution. They have never been made to write the sentence.

We work on what doctoral candidates write — thesis chapters and full drafts, contribution and originality statements, abstracts and lay summaries, introductions that frame the whole thesis, literature and methodology chapters, discussion and conclusion chapters, upgrade and progression documents, viva preparation material and anticipated questions, publications drawn from the thesis, and fellowship and job applications built on it. Our editors work on the claim your thesis is making.

The contribution claim is the spine of a doctorate, and its failure is describing work rather than asserting a result. "This thesis examines the relationship between X and Y in Z" tells an examiner what you looked at and nothing about what you found. We work through these so the claim is stated as what is now known, in one sentence somebody outside your subfield could repeat, since a contribution that requires three sentences of set-up is a contribution you will struggle to defend; so the sentence names what was previously believed or assumed, because a contribution is a difference and a difference needs a before; so the strength of the claim matches the evidence — established, suggested, or consistent with — given that examiners test the gap between what a thesis claims and what its data supports, and this is where vivas become difficult; so the boundary of the claim is stated, covering the population, the period, the setting and the conditions under which it may not hold, as a candidate who states their own limits is not being caught out by them; so the second and third contributions are ranked below the first rather than presented as equals, because a thesis with four equal contributions reads as having none; so the same sentence appears in the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion in compatible words; and so the "so what" is answered for somebody who does not share your assumptions. Claims written this way hold up in the room.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unexamined theses, chapters and applications. We are editors rather than supervisors, examiners or academic advisers, and we offer no view on your research, your findings or your originality. What we can do is help you write the sentence you will be asked for.