Thesis Proofreading
Thesis proofreading, and editing of your dissertation are two of the most important stages of writing your thesis.
You could use a dissertation editing service or try to edit your thesis yourself.
I’ve written my own thesis, as well as editing and proofreading many more.
This is something that you can do yourself. This is something that most students manage themselves, with the appropriate help from their supervisors.
Your thesis is a very important document. Once you’ve the first draft it’ll need lots of editing and proofreading before it’s finished and good enough to show what you can do.
I’d recommend that you just write your first draft. You should try to get most of your thesis into a first draft before starting the editing and finalizing process on each chapter. Write the first draft of your thesis first and then work on individual chapters later.
Needs Direction
I suggest this way as you need to see where your thesis is going, and you can only do this by writing it. No matter how well you plan, you’ll always come across new ideas or a slightly different order in which you can present your data. Writing the first draft might entail you going back and changing some information or the order in previous chapters. So you need to get a least a complete first draft written to be able to see these changes or problems with your original plan.
Then when you’ve the complete first draft finished I'd suggest working on each chapter individually after that. Finish each chapter by editing it and proofreading it until you and your supervisor(s) are happy with it.
Do this for all your chapters and then at the end just before submitting do a final thesis proofreading on the complete document to check for any last errors.
Editing is Important
Dissertation editing is important as you'll have many different parts of your thesis that need to be joined together and kept constant throughout your whole thesis. You’ll need to make sure that you’ve presented everything in the correct order and in the correct place.
Also remember that thesis writing is all about producing a clear and concise document; so, as part of the thesis editing process remember to cut out any unnecessary text or information. Your thesis should remain focused on your topic.
Writing a thesis is a long and complicated process. Each chapter will go through many different drafts until you’re happy with the final version. All the rewriting and rewording can result in sections being moved around. This can lead to a disjointed feel in theses that haven’t been properly edited and proofread, to make sure that the sections flow together and are understandable, by someone that hasn’t written the thesis.
Most Important Point
This is probably the most important point to remember when doing thesis proofreading and dissertation editing; you know your subject extremely well, quite possibly there’s no one else in the world that knows as much about your small niche as you do, so remember what seems basic and common knowledge to you might not be to someone who’s reading your thesis, even another academic. Always stop and think, ‘do I need to explain that more?’
One of the benefits of writing a document as long as a thesis is that you’ve plenty of sections and chapters to work on, this means that you’ve plenty of other work to do while waiting to proofread each chapter. You can write a chapter, edit it and then wait, work on another chapter for a week before going back, proofreading and correcting the first chapter. This break will give you time to forget what you wanted to write, so that you’ll be able to read what you really wrote and correct it appropriately.
Proofread Your Own Thesis
You should be able to edit and proofread your own thesis, with the help of your supervisor. If you need help see my pages about the academic writing process or the section about proofreading which includes an article about proofreading techniques.There’s also this article that I wrote and was published at the EzineArticles site about thesis writing.
If for whatever reason your supervisor is unwilling to read your thesis (they should do, I do for my students), I can help you. I have experience of writing my own thesis and reading many other theses form students who went on to successfully complete their study. Also many of those theses were written by students who were not native English language speakers.
I know and understand the problems that students encounter when English is not their first language. See the page about my proofreading service for help with your thesis proofreading and dissertation editing, if you need it.
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