Editing your thesis or dissertation can streamline the process of submitting the final version of your thesis or dissertation manuscript. The editing process can reveal minor and major flaws that when corrected can increase the chances of successfully completing your thesis or dissertation on time.
More than that, a proper editor can provide you the proper guidance and assistance that is required to smooth out your manuscript writing process. You may need this guidance for a variety of reasons. It could be that you are a good scholar, but lack confidence in your academic writing skills.
It could also be that you may not be a native English speaker. In either case, a professional editor will provide manuscript review, changes, and commentary that can shore up your writing. Editing your thesis manuscript can be done through either one of four options:
Editing by yourself
Using paid AI proofreading software
Hiring a personal professional editor
Contracting from a big online editing company
In this article, I talk about when it is appropriate to use professional editing providers as opposed to editing by yourself. Plus, I explain how the advantages and disadvantages of using each of the four options. Lastly, I describe what goes into editing a thesis manuscript and the various stages or types of editing.
Benefits of professional editingÂ
There are several benefits to hiring a professional to edit your thesis. The pros of professional editing include 1. A fresh set of eyes; 2. Expertise and experience; 3. Help in becoming a better writer; 4. Ensuring consistency; and 5. Saving time and money. To learn more, please check out the following article: Benefits of Hiring an Editor.
The advantages of academic editing lie in the fact that professional editors can approach your work with a lack of bias. This is due to their extensive experience and expertise, which give them the benefit of distance.
As a result, professional thesis editing may play a crucial role in ensuring that you can complete your post-graduate program on time and that your thesis or dissertation meets the requirements of your university. After all, a master's thesis or dissertation may be the most important project in your academic life and even career
Thesis or dissertation editing can range from light proofreading of your final draft to heavy restructuring of your content, otherwise known as developmental editing.
First, let's take a look at what is included in professional thesis editing:Â Â
Proofreading to fix grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors
Ensuring stylistic consistency to meet the requirements of your target journal or university rubric
Improving clarity, structure, and tone
Improving the language of non-native English speakers
Tightening or strengthening the arguments you make
Most students or academic professionals are advised to edit their thesis after writing it. Such advice often goes something like this. When writing the first draft of your thesis, you should not focus on writing the perfect document.
Instead, the focus should be transforming thoughts into words on the page. Every student and academic should go through this process or heed this advice. However, this type of self-editing may not be sufficient.
Sometimes, you need a fresh set of professional eyes to make sure that you produce the best possible version of your dissertation or thesis. Let’s look at the benefits of hiring a professional editor for your thesis.
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Hiring a Thesis editor
When hiring a thesis editor, you should take into account several factors. This includes 1. The experience and specialty of your editor, 2. The type of editing service you require, and 3. Whether or not you want to work with an individual editor as opposed to an agency.
Let's begin with the last. How do you decide where and from whom to get editing services? Before we proceed, this article is designed to give advice for both dissertation editing for PhD students and thesis editing for master's students. However, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, we also mean dissertation editing when we say "thesis editing," unless otherwise specified.
There are two main options for professional editing services:
Hiring an online editing company or agency
Hiring a personal editor
Online editing companies are companies that provide editing services for theses and other academic documents. They usually use anonymous editors, or at least editors that you can't communicate directly with.
On the other hand, personal editors work for themselves and you deal with them directly. Let's take a closer look at the differences between these two options.
1. Professional editing companies
There has been a rapid increase in editing companies to meet the growing demand for proofreading. Dozens of these thesis editing service companies exist. In fact, they are not even thesis editing companies per se.
They are academic editing providers that work on a range of academic documents, including scholarly books, journal manuscripts, and conference papers, in addition to reviewing and correcting thesis manuscripts. These companies differ in how they operate. However, they have a few commonalities.Â
Most have headquarters located in a major city. Nonetheless, they use both in-house and freelance editors. These editors have to go through rigorous and difficult qualifying tests. This is before they undergo thorough training to get them ready to edit your thesis manuscript or other academic document.
This training means that most of these companies offer high-quality services. It also means that you typically end up with a manuscript or document being edited skillfully and quickly at a relatively low cost. By paying only a little, you can end up with a document with substantial improvement.
Most of these are online companies. They allow you to upload your documents to their websites, pay electronically, and have a fully edited paper returned to you between one week or four hours.Â
2. Personal thesis editor
A personal editor is in the ideal position to edit your thesis. By personal professional editor, I mean someone who offers proofreading assistance under their own name. That person could be a solopreneur with a professional website, which you could use to contact them for their services.
It could also be someone who has been recommended to you because of their past work for others. Take me for example. I worked for more than five years for several professional proofreading companies. In that period, I edited more than five million words I now offer proofreading services through this website, EminentEdit.Â
Although I work with other editors, most of the time, authors who work with me are free to directly communicate through online meetings via Skype, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams. Of course, they can also use more conventional means, such as email or phone.
To be fair to these online editing companies, they provide a competent service at a reasonable price. However, they operate at such a massive scale, that there is no time or room to connect with authors and give them the peace of mind that the most important project in their academic career is in teh right hands.
At EminentEdit, we make sure that you have direct access to the editor working on your document. We also try our best to ensure that you get the same editor from the beginning of the editing process to the end. This ensures clear communication, a coherent edit, and peace of mind for you.
Types of Thesis Editing
The different types of thesis editing depend on the tiers of manuscript editing: 1. Developmental editing, 2. Copyediting, and 3. Proofreading. To learn more about this, check out this article: Manuscript Editing. For thesis editing, terms like developmental editing and copyediting have a specific meaning. Let's look at what developmental editing and copyediting and proofreading would mean in terms of thesis editing.
What is thesis developmental editing?
Developmentally editing a thesis means hiring an editor to make significant corrections even before the manuscript is completed. This could mean hiring a professional editor to revise and correct your proposal. They would give advice on what is missing in your literature review, whether or not the scope of your study is too broad, or whether or not your rationale or hypotheses are strong and coherent enough.
To be honest, a good master's program means that you would not need a developmental editor. Developmental editing would be the job of your advisor. Another closely related service related to developmental editing is academic coaching. This is a type of service where a professional coaches you to become a better academic writer or researcher. Again, a competent advisor would likely eliminate the need for such a role.
The point of a master's program is to ensure that you receive proper training to become a competent researcher or scientist. Such a goal would be achieved through a combination of your own initiative and mentorship from a properly chosen advisor.
However, not everyone has the good fortune of being paired with an effective advisor. A developmental editor will help in giving you proper guidance to ensure that your manuscript is on the right track even before you have completed your manuscript.
What is thesis copyediting?
Thesis copyediting would involve correction on a completed manuscript. The depth of correction depends on what you expect from your professional editor. A thorough copyediting service would include:
Align title order and apply consistency in font and headings
Review and correct errors in spelling and grammar
Improve clarity of language
Ensure correct captions for figures, tables, and graphs
Verify the accuracy of in-text citations matched against references
Highlight where jargon is overused or inappropriate
Suggest changes for repetition
Enforce academic style guidelines or other academic rubric
The last part of the editing stage is proofreading. To be honest, there is no clear-cut difference between copyediting and proofreading. Technically speaking, the proofreading stage occurs when correction occurs on the last version of your manuscript just before publication, or in this case, we should say submission.
What is thesis proofreading?
Proofreading is the final stage of editing for your thesis or dissertation manuscript. To be specific, it is that stage of editing just before your thesis is submitted or published by your university library. This is where teh editor or proofreader combs through your document to find the smallest errors. These errors include:
Punctuation errors
Stylistic errors, for example, consistently using US as opposed to UK English
Slight errors in grammar and spelling
Spacing errors in the text
In short, we are talking about the type of errors that may have been missed during the earlier copyediting stage. In some cases, the editor directly makes these changes. In other cases, they leave comments and notes and leave it up to the author of the thesis or dissertation to make these changes.
Also, most editing takes place in Microsoft Word, where Track Changes can be used. However, the proofreading stage can deviate from that norm. Because it is the final stage before publication, your thesis editor may have to edit the manuscript in the format that it will be published in. This could be PDF. In other cases, it is Latex.
Ideally speaking, the editing process should be a productive back-and-forth exchange between the author and the editor. Such an exchange can take place:
Over the phone
Over text messages
Over videoconference meetings
Over emails
Through comments left in the Word document
It depends on whatever the two of you find the most comfortable or productive. This is one advantage of working with an individual editor as opposed to an agency or company. When working with a company, you can only communicate through middlemen.
If your thesis needs further rounds of edit, you may even end up with a different editor for each separate round of edit. The proofreading stage is a culmination of all the editing stages that went before it.
Therefore, it would be better if you had one editor from the very beginning of the process to the very end. This will result in a manuscript review that is more complete and coherent.
Coaching vs. editing vs. ghostwriting
Now we need to be clear about what thesis editing is and what it is not. Thesis editing means reviewing and correcting a completed version of your manuscript by a professional editor. This correction takes the form of proofreading and copyediting for style and language.
Developmental editing at the proposal stages may be acceptable. It may also be acceptable for professional developmental editors to give advice on how to drastically improve your manuscript. However, they will not do it themselves.
In fact, this type of drastic editing may even go against the ethical guidelines set by your university. Let's look at editing adjacent services. They include 1. Coaching and 2. Ghostwriting.
1. Thesis coaching. Thesis coaching is a service that is closer to mentorship than editing. This is where a senior academic coaches and teaches you how to write academic writing in general and our thesis in particular. Ideally, this is the job of your postgraduate program. However, some students may feel that their program may be inadequate in that regard.
As a result, they may hire private professional coaches to help. Such coaches take on the role of a traditional adviser, in addition to that of a personal tutor. They teach the basics of thesis and academic writing, as well as how to conduct professional academic research.
Lastly, they also provide accountability services to students. That is, they make sure that students writing their master's thesis or PhD dissertation stick to goals and objectives related to completing their thesis on time.
2. Thesis ghostwriting. Should you hire a ghostwriter to write your thesis on your behalf? Well, you could, but should you? There are severe penalties for hiring someone to write your thesis or dissertation. The whole point of writing a thesis is to demonstrate your ability as a competent researcher and scholar.
Hiring someone to write your thesis defeats the whole purpose. As I said, there are severe penalties for ghostwriting your thesis. For one, you can get expelled from your postgraduate program. It doesn't end there. Let's say you got away with hiring a ghostwriter. In the future, if it is revealed that your thesis was ghostwritten, then this could seriously injure your career and reputation.
In the modern world of politics, we have numerous leaders and politicians who have had to resign after such a revelation. Therefore, always remember the line between copyediting services and thesis ghostwriting services.
You should have appropriate expectations from your editor. Their job is to provide professional review and correction of your manuscript within the ethical guidelines of your university, department, or program.
A thesis editing sample
A thesis editing sample can give you an idea of the level of editing services that we offer here at EminentEdit. I have provided an example of a thesis manuscript from a master's student. Here is a quick summary of what traditional editing involves:
The use of Word's Track Changes function
Commentary to explain the corrections made
Comments for improvement and suggestions
Comments asking for unclear issues to be clarified
A professional editor has to choose between making direct and extensive changes and allowing the author the option to make these corrections on their own. A professional editor who knows how to write clear, polite, and easy-to-read comments makes it easier for authors to make these changes on their own.
To get an idea of what thesis editing entails, check out the thesis editing sample below:
What are the costs?
The cost of editing your thesis or dissertation manuscript can range between $30 to $70 per 1000 words. At EminentEdit, we charge $30 per 1000 words. However, generally speaking, the charge you pay for editing depends on the choice of services you make.
You could choose between hiring an individual personal editor, or you could elect one of the many online editing companies that offer proofreading services. To determine the price for professional editing services, you can depend on the EFA, known as the Editorial Freelancers' Association, which polls its members to determine the prices they charge.
The other option is examining the prices offered by various editing companies throughout the web, which I have done in the following article: 10 Best Proofreading Services In 2024. The price range for the various online companies is quite high. Therefore, I went with the median value as opposed to the average value. In this case, for an online editing company, you can expect to pay about 39.50 per 1000 words.
If you choose a personal editor, then you should rely on rates according to the EFA. The rates below show these rates for the various types of editing. In short, according to the EFA, you should expect to pay between $45 and $70 for line and developmental editing.
EminentEdit thesis editing services
At EminentEdit, we provide premium thesis and dissertation editing services at a reasonable price. We understand the importance of completing your thesis on time. Some of our editors have published their own theses and are fully familiar with the process.
We know exactly what it takes to get a thesis ready for submission. Our thesis editing services include developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading. We are there with you every step of the way.
More than that, we offer these services at an affordable price. Take a look at our pricing for the various types of thesis editing:
Type of Editing | Description | Price Per Word ($) |
Copyediting Lite | Line-by-line editing to improve sentence structure, syntax and idiomatic English usage. It also includes thorough proofreading and commentary. | $0.03 |
Copyediting Plus | Line-by-line editing to improve sentence structure, syntax and idiomatic English usage, and reference editing and formatting | $0.04 |
Proofreading | Proofreading to correct punctuation and grammar. | $0.02 |
Our copyediting services include line-by-line editing, extensive commentary, and thorough proofreading. It is divided into Lite and Plus categories, with the Plus category including reference and general formatting. Our proofreading services include correcting punctuation and grammar.
Get in touch for help in editing your thesis |
Our thesis editing services don't just include proofreading at the final stages. We provide guidance from the very start, such as editing and double-checking your thesis proposal. Our thesis editing services include:
Developmental editing to ensure your proposal is transformed into a thesis/dissertation that can pass your defense or committee review
Substantive editing to improve the quality of your writing on a sentence level
Extensive commentary and recommendations to improve literature review, structure, and arguments
Proofreading to make sure your writing is grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation
Formatting your paper to meet stylistic standards such as APA. MLA, CMoS, etc.
Assistance in transforming your thesis into a published scientific paper
So feel free to get in touch through our contact page here: CONTACT US AT EMINENT EDIT. Good luck with your research writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, February 05). Dissertation & Thesis Editing: A Useful Guide. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/dissertation-and-thesis-editing |
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