Is proofreading my dissertation worth the cost? Do you ever get the feeling we’re constantly being sold something? Whether it’s blaring advertisements on billboards and sides of buses, painfully stupid TV advertising, or those emails that seem to continually find their way into your inbox, the message always seems to be: buy, buy, buy.
Yet, how do we know what we actually need and what’s being marketed towards us simply to make certain companies richer? Do we need that 56-inch screen plasma TV? What about that gym membership? We are constantly inundated with new ways of spending our hard-earned money. Some have genuine value that can improve our situation – either now or in the future – and maybe even our lives, while others are simply a waste.
Hiring a professional proofreader to check a dissertation doesn’t come cheap, but is it worth the money in the long run?
A proofreading service provides a trained individual’s comprehensive assessment of your work. They will check things like spelling, grammar, content, and flow of ideas before returning them to you with suggested amendments you need to do yourself. We would like to stress that while certain companies out there will offer to write you an “example” essay, this is strictly prohibited by universities and is also illegal under the Higher Education Cheating Services Prohibition Bill.
Our proofreading services are both ethical in terms of university policies and stays on the right side of the law while offering a detailed analysis of your writing style and how it could be improved.
If proofreading is new to you (and we really hope it’s not), there are some major benefits to doing it. The most significant is also the most obvious – it improves your writing – which can lead to a higher grade and an increased overall mark, which can be the difference between a 2:2 and a First.
While the differences between degrees might not be quite as pronounced as they once were when it comes to getting a job, there’s no denying that those with the highest scores become much more attractive potential employees. If you want to get into some of the world’s most prestigious organisations, many take great interest in your university scores.
Proofreading also allows you to improve your writing with the help of others. Once an essay has been returned to you with plenty of suggestions, you can use those stylistic and content remarks with other pieces of work. You may have a tendency to waffle on for too long before getting to the point, but you never thought that was the case yourself. When somebody points that out, it suddenly becomes obvious and certainly something to keep an eye on for future work.
Having someone proofread your work isn’t essential, and in a perfect world, we could do it all ourselves, but the level of detail between what a professional picks up vs. what we see in our own work is enormous. There’s something about the human brain that finds it incredibly difficult to pick up our own mistakes, and there’s a genuine scientific explanation.
Our brains don’t work like a computer, although they share many similarities. While scanning through a text, especially one that we’ve written and therefore know what’s coming, our brain takes in the sensory information it receives, but also combines it with what it expects. This is why we often miss typos that may seem glaring to others.
It would be best to proofread your work before sending it to a service, but having somebody do those final checks can make all the difference.
A professional proofread of an undergraduate degree dissertation, usually between 10,000 and 15,000 words, typically costs between £300 and £450. We’re not stupid; we know that’s not a small sum that students can throw around, but when you take it in its context, we begin to see that it’s well worth it.
The average cost for an undergraduate degree is now around £50,000, which will likely climb higher in the future. We can argue over whether that’s justifiable for higher education on a different day, but if you’re spending that figure on an undergraduate degree that can lead to an entry point into a particular field and a significant career progression, a few hundred pounds to have somebody check the most crucial piece of work you do at university starts to sound like a no-brainer.
This becomes even more important for those looking to achieve a grade at the higher end of an undergraduate degree. While it varies from institution to institution, a dissertation can be worth as much as 40% of your final year’s work – an enormous amount that can make or break your mark.
If we want to look at things from a purely financial perspective, the difference in median salary after five years between a graduate with a first degree and a 2:2 is enormous. On average, men earn 27% higher and women 23%.
So, is proofreading my dissertation worth the cost? When you’re spending high amounts to attend university and the long-term benefits of doing well are so clear, ensuring that your thesis or dissertation is in the best condition possible is in your best interest now and in the future.
