When you’ve finally finished your dissertation, there’s a good chance you feel an equal amount of triumph and exhaustion. You’ve been slaving over this piece of writing for months and months. Now it’s time to submit your dissertation to be defended. While most colleges and universities recommend that you obtain professional editing services for your dissertation, it’s not always a requirement. However, allowing an unbiased professional editor to examine your dissertation with a critical eye guarantees that you put your best academic work forward.
Editing Services for a Dissertation
When you enlist the help of a professional editing service, there are specific services you should request to ensure that they perfect your document. To begin with, always ask for technical editing. It ensures that citations, footnotes, references, and bibliographies meet the specifications of your style guide. To the same end, please make sure you clearly state the style guide that governs your paper when placing an order with a professional editing service. The more information your editor receives, the better prepared your dissertation will be.
Typical standard editing packages will check for grammar and punctuation, in addition to ensuring proper sentence and paragraph structure. But it will not measure your work against the appropriate style guide. In addition to asking the editor to check your dissertation against a style guide, if your school supplies formatting guidelines, you must submit them to your editor at the beginning of the process. Request that they use your school’s style guide and check your dissertation in conjunction with any other formatting requirements (such as APA, CMS, etc.).
Submitting Your Dissertation
When you submit your dissertation to the professional editing service or editor, be sure to state the language your entire paper should be written in and checked by. There are small variations between American English and British English, such as the way they handle punctuation with quotations. It can change the way your dissertation is edited. That is imperative.
A good editor will check for continuity throughout your dissertation. However, it’s a good thing to ask the professional editing service to make sure your points are clear and understandable. If you have statistical equations that were formatted in LaTex, please state that upfront.
Anything that is out of the ordinary with your dissertation (such as LaTex formatting) needs to be clearly explained. There is no such thing as providing an editing service with too much information! They, in turn, will communicate your needs to the editor. A professional editor can put a polish on your work that will make your dissertation shine. You worked very hard; make sure to see it all the way through!
Originally posted 9/9/2010 and happily updated 10/29/2017. Thanks for reading!
