Graduate Students Editing and Proofreading Services

The feedback says the literature review is descriptive. You read forty sources, summarised each one accurately, grouped them sensibly by theme, and cited them properly — and the comment is that it does not do anything. This is the most common criticism in graduate education and almost nobody explains what the alternative looks like, which is why the second draft is usually the same review with more sources.

We work on what graduate students write — literature reviews and their argument, research proposals and their framing, essays and term papers, methodology sections and their justification, conference abstracts and posters, chapters and dissertation drafts, supervisor-facing documents and progress reports, applications for funding and fieldwork, and presentations of work in progress. Our editors work on the review that has to argue rather than report.

The literature review's argument is the skill graduate work is really testing, and its failure is organising by source or by theme rather than by claim. A review that says what each author found is a bibliography in paragraphs. We work through these so the review is organised around the disagreements in the field rather than the topics in it, since a field's structure is its arguments and the reader wants to know who disputes what; so each section makes a claim about the literature — that a consensus exists and rests on one dataset, that two traditions have never spoken to each other, that a finding has been repeated without being retested — because these are claims a reader can accept or challenge and a summary is not; so sources are grouped by the position they take rather than by date or method, given that chronological reviews describe the growth of a literature and thematic ones describe its furniture; so the gap is derived from the argument rather than asserted at the end, as a gap announced in the final paragraph looks like a gap chosen first and justified backwards; so what the reviewed work does not claim is stated where it matters, since overreading a source is the second most common criticism; so the student's own position becomes visible without being announced; and so the review ends where the research question begins. Reviews written this way get read as scholarship.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unsubmitted work, drafts and supervisor feedback. We are editors rather than supervisors or examiners, and we offer no view on your argument, your sources or your marks — and we work within whatever your institution permits. What we can do is help the review make a claim.