ESL and International Students Editing and Proofreading Services

Your English is good. Your marks say otherwise, and the feedback says things like "unclear argument" and "needs better structure", which is not a language problem and is not a thinking problem either. It is a convention problem: you have been taught to build an argument in a way that is entirely coherent, and the person marking it is looking for a different shape and has never been asked to notice that the shape is a convention.

We work with students writing in English as an additional language on the parts of academic writing where conventions do most of the damage — essay and thesis structure, paragraph construction and topic sentences, signposting and transitions, the placement of the thesis statement, hedging and the strength of claims, integrating and citing sources, the difference between summary and analysis, and clarity at sentence level. Our editors work on the conventions nobody explains.

The structural expectations of an English-language academic argument are what most often stand between a capable student and a good mark, and they are rarely taught because the people marking absorbed them invisibly. We work through writing so the argument's position is stated early rather than reached at the end, since many rhetorical traditions build towards a conclusion and English academic prose expects it in the introduction — this is a convention, not a superior method, and knowing it is a convention makes it easier to adopt; so each paragraph opens with the claim it makes rather than with the evidence or the context, because a marker reading quickly takes the first sentence as the paragraph's point; so the reader is told what is coming and why at each transition, given that English academic prose is unusually explicit about its own structure and this feels repetitive to writers from traditions where it would be condescending; so the strength of claims is calibrated with hedging that signals judgement rather than uncertainty, as under-hedging reads as overclaiming and over-hedging reads as having nothing to say; so sources are used to support the student's argument rather than sequenced to demonstrate reading, because the commonest structural criticism is that a paper summarises the literature instead of arguing with it; and so the student's own voice is kept, since the aim is a paper that meets the convention rather than one that sounds like everybody else's. Writing worked on this way is marked on the thinking.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unsubmitted work and feedback from your institution. We are editors rather than tutors, supervisors or examiners, and we offer no view on your argument or your marks — and we work within whatever your institution permits, which you should check and tell us. What we can do is make the conventions visible so you can use them deliberately.