Proofreading

Bachelor Thesis / Master Thesis / PhD Dissertation

SUPERIOR proofreading and correction of English academic texts by American English teacher/Political Scientist/writer based in Vienna, Austria. With utmost precision, passion, and persistence, your work will stand out to your professors as not only correctly written in English, but communicated with rigor, exactitude, and grace. A life-long passion for writing enables me to bring an extra element of scrupulousness and love to my work. My first writing award was won at the age of 12. Proven excellence in academic writing also renders my work special accuracy and attentiveness. Your thesis is thus in good hands!

With utmost precision, passion, and persistence, your work will stand out to your professors as not only correctly written in English, but communicated with rigor, exactitude, and grace.
Jennifer Marie Schneider Granić

Proofreading v.s. copyediting

There has always traditionally been a big difference between proofreading and copyediting, with proofreading being restricted to correcting glaring errors, such as mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation. Some proofreading styles also involve simple marking up of such places, short of actually necessarily actually correcting them, i.e. instead just pointing them out. Other proofreading styles involve actually changing those errors in the text.

In the journalistic cycle, proofreading is typically the very last step done—after the editing copyediting, etc.—as a final recourse before the content is sent to the printers, so to catch any final inconsistencies or errors. So proofreading is typically done only once the text is basically 97% ready to go, just as a final check to catch any potential bloopers or mishaps or typos. A good proofreader should nevertheless not only scan the document for mistakes, but actually read through each sentence to make sure everything is as it's supposed to be.

Meanwhile, copyediting typically involves more careful and painstaking review of the content at hand. Copyediting goes beyond the basic mechanics of correcting errors in grammar, punctuation, or spelling, and examines such matters as style, tone, clarity of argument or meaning, consistency in formatting, smoothness of transition, among other matters.

Copyediting also typically involves fact-checking, cross-checking references to the graphics ortables in the document, and cross-checking text references with the bibliography as well. Copyediting does not, however, venture into the domain of massive overhauls of the text or major changes in substantial parts of the text in terms of word choice or story flow. This is the domain of editing—which influences the content itself, the build-up of the story, order of events, and generally, speaking, the overall quality of the writing itself. Copyediting stops at minor improvements that do not change the meaning or content of the text itself.

WHAT WE DO

As far as the services we provide, a strategic combination of copyediting and proofreading is conducted to suit specifically German-speaker and other non-native English speakers' needs in drafting texts in English. Since the vast majority of the content we handle is written by non-native speakers of English, the quality of the content is almost never 97% ready as would be the case if only proofreading were necessary. The quality tends to be somewhere at a maximum of 80%. We go in there with our sleeves rolled up and change words that, for example, are clearly meant in a different way than the writer wrote based on the false friend vocabulary of the German-speaker mind. Non-native speakers frequently neglect to use sufficient transition words or use them incorrectly altogether. So for us, polishing up such phrases or adding them in when necessary is an important part of the work we do, squarely falling within the realm of copyediting. Correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling is certainly a huge part of the work done as well.Such issues as use of incorrect quotes -- « » instead of “”—is something that typically comes up, along with incorrect fractions, i.e. $3,40instead of the appropriate $3.40. Then there's the run-on sentence, or a sentence that is far too long or contains more subjects and verbs than is digestible for the reader whilst also being grammatically incorrect on account of the lack of transition words, commas, and/or semi-colons. These are typical problems we run across and have to polish.

Where our copyediting pursuits are narrower than the standard interpretation is when it comes to fact-checking or plagiarism-checking. These areas are squarely and entirely beyond our capacity as we see ourselves in terms of improving the overall level of English and readability in a given text. We also don't normally address the style of documentation or referencing. Since our clients typically come from very diverse contexts, the various citation methods are likewise quite diverse, making it hard to immediately follow any inconsistencies. Upon request, however, we are nevertheless very pleased to consider any requests to that extent on a case-by-case basis, and in case of use of the MLA or APA stylebooks as reference—the styles we're most familiar with--, we are happy to check citations accordingly.

All in all, we combine copyediting and proofreading services to do the job needed by non-native speakers, which is to significantly overhaul and improve their text in terms of grammatical correctness, readability, authentic language and overall quality. We take it from 73% acceptability and bring it up to 99%.