It can be difficult to tell whether you need your essay editing. As a general rule of thumb, everyone can benefit from editing: this is why publishers and magazines employ copy-editors and literary editors to help their writers produce the best work they can. Even the most talented writers can get better with help; even the most talented writers can make silly errors.
More to the point though, it can be difficult to tell whether you really need an essay editing service. What you’re really asking here is a complicated question that can only be judged subjectively: is your writing good? Is it good enough? This judgement can be tricky to make, particularly if you have to make it about your own work. There are, however, some general pointers that can help you to decide.
The first and most important thing is whether your work is clear and intelligible. If you have received comments from supervisors, teachers, friends or anyone else who has read your work that it is at times difficult to understand or unclear, then you should definitely consider essay editing, which is specifically designed to improve clarity and make sure that your ideas are well expressed so that they receive the marks they deserve.
So the second thing to attend to is your level of confidence in your English. If English is your first language, how well do you know your grammar? How good is your spelling? Are you dyslexic or do you have some other condition that might impact your work? If English is not your first language these questions become more significant. Generally we would advise all non-native speakers to choose essay editing, because even the most adept second language speakers can struggle with things like colloquial English expressions and the flexibility and lack of structure of English grammar.
The third thing to consider is tone. One of the aims of essay editing is to produce work that is tonally appropriate for its setting, whether academic or business. Tone, like quality, can be difficult to assess and to self-assess, but again there are rules of thumb: do you find that you use colloquial expressions in your writing? Do you use contractions? Do you frequently use superlatives, or offer value judgements? These are common tonal errors that our editors are used to correcting.
The last thing to think about when you are deciding whether you need your work to be edited is even more subjective and qualitative. It’s something like: how much do you care? How important to you is it that this piece is work is as good as it can be, that it is error-free and elegant and perfect? The answer, of course, will vary from person to person and from piece of work to piece of work, but again there are rules of thumb. If, for example, the piece of work you are thinking of having edited is your dissertation or your thesis, then it seems reasonable to say that it is important and that perfection matters.
So, how do you know whether you need essay editing? You can’t tell for certain, but, if you have concerns about your writing or your English, if you want your work to be clear and elegant and if you think it’s important that your work is as good as it can be, then it’s a safe bet that you can gain something from Oxbridge Proofreading®’s essay editing service.
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