ESL Academic Writing Editing and Proofreading Services

A researcher submits a paper reporting a real result, carefully obtained, and writes that the data proves the mechanism they have been investigating. In their first language that is the ordinary way to report a solid finding, neither boastful nor tentative. The reviewer reads "proves", checks the sample size, and writes that the conclusions are overstated and the analysis insufficiently critical. Nothing was wrong with the analysis. One verb, chosen at the strength that would have been neutral elsewhere, had told a reviewer to go looking for a fault.

We edit academic writing produced in English by researchers and students whose first language is another — journal articles and revisions, conference papers and abstracts, theses and dissertations, literature reviews, grant and fellowship applications, research proposals, responses to reviewers, and the cover letters that accompany a submission. Our editors work on writing that will be read by a reviewer weighing whether a claim is supported.

The calibration of a claim is what determines whether English academic prose reads as confident or as careless, and its failure is a strength of statement that was neutral in your first language and reads as overreach in this one. We work through these so each claim is pitched to what the evidence can carry — shows, suggests, indicates, is consistent with — since a reviewer who finds one overstated sentence begins reading the rest for further overstatement; so hedges are used once and deliberately rather than stacked, given that a sentence which may possibly suggest that something could perhaps occur has reported no finding, and a paper with no finding has no contribution to weigh; so the contribution is stated plainly in the abstract and again in the conclusion, because those are the two places a reviewer decides what the paper claims, and a contribution left implicit is one they have to reconstruct for you; so limitations sit next to the claims they bound rather than being gathered into a paragraph at the end, since a caveat that reaches a reader after they have already accepted the claim has not done its work; and so the articles and prepositions that carry meaning are corrected precisely, given that "the effect" and "an effect" name different things in a results section, and a reviewer reads whichever one you wrote as the one you meant. Papers edited this way are assessed on their evidence.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, manuscripts under review and reviewer correspondence. We are editors rather than co-authors, statisticians or research advisers, and we offer no view on your methods, your results or where you should submit — we do not alter what your data says, and what editorial assistance your journal or institution permits is yours to check. What we can do is make sure a claim arrives at the strength you intended it to have.