Writing a thesis or dissertation is an arduous task that many look back upon in much the same way one might after completing a first marathon – an enormous sense of completion but also a visceral memory of blood, sweat, and sleepless nights – and then there are still the final tasks of proofreading and plagiarism checking still to do.
Any large-format academic piece can drive even the most diligent and hardworking among us to the very edge. However, your choice, while teetering on the brink of sleeplessness and sanity, will make all the difference.
Candidates sometimes ask if proofreading can be considered as plagiarism, but in reality, they couldn’t be more different – both legally and morally. One can give your thesis or dissertation the final polish it badly needs, while the other could easily lead to severe penalties or even expulsion.
Let’s begin with the easy one. Every university or form of higher education will take a tough stance on plagiarism – at least, that’s what they’ll say in their literature. Students are typically asked to sign formal declarations stating that they understand the consequences of plagiarism, which often include warnings followed by complete expulsion.
Plagiarism is seen as flagrant cheating, and officially, universities take a tough line on any work submitted that has not come from the penmanship of the name on the front page. Yet even here, plagiarism can appear in many forms.
There’s the unabashed – are you kidding – plagiarists who cut and paste sections from the internet before compiling them into their work. This kind of plagiarism can be not only borderline laughable to anybody reviewing it, but it’s also the easiest to check with tools such as Turnitin.
…is to hire somebody to write either part of, or the entire piece for you before you slap your name on it and hand it in with a slightly deluded sense of achievement. This can be done privately or by using one of several highly dubious companies still in the market today that are classified as essay mills. A government ban on essay mills, making them criminal organisations, was included in the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill that passed through Parliament in April 2022.
Partial or patchwork plagiarism can be more subtle and harder to spot and might include a mixture of real work sprinkled with the odd section lifted from another’s work. Sometimes students will even go to the trouble of altering certain words to try and avoid a Turnitin flag.
Other forms of plagiarism include adding incorrect or alternated sources, while self-plagiarism is also heavily frowned upon when you re-submitting something for a second time.
Plagiarism involves using any piece of somebody else’s work as your own without their consent, whether this is a single sentence where you forgot to add quotations or a complete Wikipedia “cut-and-paste job”. Using an essay mill/essay writing service and submitting a “sample essay” as your own is also defined as plagiarism and is considered to be gross academic misconduct.
Over the last few years, reporting on plagiarism, which accompanied the government’s efforts to curb the use of essay mills, set off a debate about proofreading. Some, shall we hardliners, declared it little better than cheating, while others see it as a legitimate and much-needed tool for thesis, PhD., and dissertation editing.
Let’s begin with the legal groundwork. While blatant plagiarism can see students expelled from universities, proofreading is accepted and actively encouraged. In fact, most universities will have proofreading guidelines similar to our own.
A high-quality proofreader can substantially affect a grade (which is why we specialise in assisting post-graduate researchers) if their recommendations and notes are carefully followed and the writer is willing to do the extra work afterwards. It’s important to stress that a real proofreader will not write the essay for you, nor will they rewrite a piece to improve it. Proofreading is about highlighting deficiencies within a text, such as spelling mistakes, repeated phrases, and unclear points, before handing said text back to the writer to make further improvements.
This brings us to the murky quagmire where proofreading and plagiarism sometimes overlap. You don’t need to delve too far into Google’s bottomless pit top to find companies willing to write entire texts for a fee, or to re-write/develop content under the guise of proofreading/editing. Often this is carefully phrased as offering an “example/model piece”, but both sides are perfectly clear on the illicitness of the transaction.
Numerous organisations are still actively pursuing this strategy, despite essay mills being outlawed last year. The question of tackling such rampant cheating has meant that little progress has been made to date – but it’s certainly coming.
If you have a dissertation or thesis on the horizon and you’ll no doubt be thinking carefully about how to approach this mammoth task best. We know that plagiarism can be tempting on a small scale or a full-blown cheating extravaganza, but the risks are also substantial. Penalties for cheating can range from a reduced markup to expulsion for the most serious and repeated cases.
Then there’s that beguiling human emotional trait that we call a conscience. While explaining the risk around plagiarism is relatively straightforward, the question of the morality behind it is often significantly more complex. Unfortunately, our natural social aversion to cheaters and cheating may be waning, with academic plagiarism rising across the UK. This is undoubtedly down to several different factors, which we don’t have nearly enough time to delve into here, but none of them are justified. No matter how well you push it out of your mind, for most of us, cheating at anything will always leave a slightly sickly feeling in the pit of our stomachs.
So what’s the alternative? Hours of painful, mind-numbing writing to produce something that you can call your own? Weeks of stress as you go to and fro over various ideas and theories? Sleepless nights? Yes, to all of the above. Writing a thesis, dissertation, or PhD will never be a seamless process that you look back upon with unfettered nostalgia. It’s a bruising, zapping, colossal task that will require your entire being, but once completed and submitted, an achievement that you’ll never forget.
If you need assistance with your thesis, dissertation, or PhD editing, our editors can act as your safety net. Oxbridge Proofreading have been working directly with many of the UK’s top universities for more than a decade – we won’t rewrite anything for you and you certainly won’t receive any “example essays”, but for help with grammatical structure, the flow of ideas, repetition, and so on, our Thesis/Dissertation Proofreading and Editing services are a superb tool that are not only accepted by universities and other institutions, it’s actively encouraged.
