English as a Second Language Students Editing and Proofreading Services

A student writes an essay that builds carefully towards its conclusion: the background first, then the competing views, then the evidence, and the argument itself in the final paragraph. That is how they were taught to write, and they were taught well. The marker's comment says the essay lacks focus and never takes a position. The student took a position and stated it plainly. They stated it where their first education had taught them a position belongs, at the end, and a marker trained in a different tradition had stopped looking for it by the second page.

We edit what students write in English when English is not their first language — coursework essays and assignments, lab and field reports, reflective journals, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, presentation scripts, discussion posts, applications for placements and exchanges, and the emails to supervisors and tutors that go with them. Our editors work on writing that will be marked by someone reading for an argument, and reading quickly.

The structure of an English-language essay is what determines whether a marker finds your argument or records that you did not make one, and its failure is a position placed where your first education put it rather than where this one looks. We work through these so the argument appears in the opening paragraph rather than arriving at the end, since a marker forms a view of what an essay is doing within the first hundred words and reads everything after that as evidence for or against that view; so each paragraph opens with the claim it intends to support, given that a marker skimming for the shape of an argument reads first sentences and can miss a point made only in the middle of a block; so the connections between ideas are carried by the words English uses for them — however, because, which means that — because English prose puts the logical relation on the surface instead of leaving a reader to infer it from the order in which things appear; so your own view is separated from your sources by reporting verbs that carry a stance, such as argues, claims or demonstrates, since a marker cannot credit a judgement they cannot tell you made; and so the grammar is corrected without the sentences being flattened into something simpler than your thinking, given that an essay rewritten into short safe clauses reads as a smaller mind than the one that produced it. Essays edited this way are marked on the argument they contain.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including drafts, feedback and marks. We are editors rather than tutors, and we do not write your work, supply your arguments or research your topic — what help your institution permits is yours to check and yours to observe. What we can do is make sure the argument you built reaches your marker in the shape English asks for.