You’ve reached this page because you’re seeking clarity, consistency, and grammatical precision in your writing. You’ve come to the right place. Since our founding as the original all-academic editing service, we’ve provided final-draft proofreading, formatting, and editing services that most students (and professors) can afford for their most important work.
What Do We Offer?
We offer professional academic editing at the most affordable rates possible for anyone who needs it. We’ve prepared (i.e., edited, formatted, and proofread) over 30,000 pages of student dissertations for publication in a database alone using our proprietary 5-pass editing process.
Every document we edit gets reviewed at least three times before it’s formatted. The last two reviews are for formatting, but we quadruple-check your grammar and style in the process:
- editing for grammar,
- editing for style and voice,
- proofreading,
- citation formatting (optional), and
- your layout formatting pass (optional).
How Much Do We Cost?
Most editors charge hourly rates. However, that practice is dishonest for two reasons. First, the fact is that most writing takes about the same amount of time to edit. Very few writers need more edits than others, although their errors can seem so different that someone without a classical language and linguistics background may think one writer looks “worse” than the other.
In practice, most writers have a handful of recurring errors unique to their style along with the standard style errors most everyone leaves.
Second (or “secondly” for our friends outside the U.S.), a seasoned editor doesn’t get slowed down by these differences in writers’ idiosyncrasies because the rules of grammar apply no matter what kinds of errors an editor is correcting.
For example, your version of a subject-verb agreement mistake doesn’t need to be changed any differently from another writer’s: it just needs to be caught and corrected by someone who knows how to find it (without spending your extra money looking).
Instead of playing hourly-rate games like those, all of our services are designed to meet the needs and budgets of graduate and undergraduate students at per-page rates, with one page counted every 250 words.
We’ve done the math, and our per-page rates are comparable to the hourly rates offered elsewhere, but we don’t ask you to pay for the time we might spend stretching, daydreaming, getting a cup of coffee, or trying to figure out what kind of writer you are.
If you’d like more extensive editing (e.g., for sentence fragments, paragraph boundaries, and organization), you may wish to contact us about our line editing service, but the needs of most student writers are addressed with our thorough dissertation and essay editing services. Writers who only want to edit for basic grammar (without revisions for style and voice) might consider our dissertation and essay proofreading service.
How Do We Work?
Other companies use a pool of casual or part-time editors who produce work like the sample we recently requested from another service and re-edited here. We know from reviewing hundreds of applications over the years that most editors online provide a level of editing as poor as our competitor’s sample. In fact, they proofread, leave mistakes, and call it editing. We edit for grammar, then for style and voice, then for proofreading errors . . . every time.
What (Exactly) Does an Editor Do?
Most every industry has standards set by professional associations. For editors working in any style, the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) defines the difference between editing and proofreading. Editorial industry reporter and author Jane Friedman explained what editing should provide (per the CMS standards) in an article for Medium as follows:
an editor examines every word and every sentence and every paragraph and every section and every chapter and the entirety of your written manuscript. Typos, wrong words, misspellings, double words, punctuation, run-on sentences, long paragraphs, subheadings, chapter titles, table of contents, author bios — everything is scrutinized, corrected, tracked, and commented on.
Our featured and most popular service, Complete Prep editing, provides this level of editorial emphasis for a bundled rate with a 2-week deadline. (One-week deadlines can be ordered with standard dissertation editing.)
Complete Prep includes editing, proofreading, citation formatting (APA, CMA, MLA, etc.), and layout formatting following your university’s dissertation guidelines.
Can We Provide an Editing Sample?
We’d be happy to provide an editing sample for you. To make the sample useful, we ask that you give us a sample document that another editor has edited first. When you send us the sample you received from another editor (up to 2 pages), we’ll edit it again to show you everything they missed.
This is the best way to help you compare offerings, and we’re positive that we’ll find more errors and improvements than 99% of editors online. (When we hire editors using the boards and associations where freelancers gather, only 1 in 100 meet our standard by passing our test.)