Importance of Professional Thesis Proofreaders
Completing a thesis takes years of your life. After finishing, no one knows more about your subject that you do, and no one is so emotionally invested in it. So the last thing you want is for errors to creep into your work at the last minute. This is where a good thesis proofreading service comes into its own – sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes to go over the thousands of words you’ve read thousands of times. Proofreading errors can be traumatic, as we are going to show.
There is a fascinating page on Wikipedia, one of many. It provides a list of prominent Bible errata – of errors in transcription or typesetting or proof-reading that transgressed the word of God.
Some examples are banal in cause but transcendent in effect: the ‘Owl Bible’ (1944) gives 1 Peter 3:5 as ‘For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their owl husbands.’ A damaged letter ‘n’ on a printing plate metamorphosed the prosaic ‘own husbands’ into the glorious, magical ‘owl husbands’. This category of examples shows the dangers of human error, providing concrete examples of the kinds of mistakes that, over millennia, can distort or confuse a text in strange ways.
The second category of errors is exhilarating. These errata fundamentally change the meaning of the Word. The most famous example comes from the ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631, where the significant negative particle ‘not’ is left out of the seventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. The omission of negative particles is commonplace, and it is a quirk of the language of the King James Bible, so dependent on accretive negative particles, that leaves it particularly vulnerable to this kind of error. ‘Go and sin on more.’ ‘[T]he fool hath said in his heart there is a God.’ ‘Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?’
Mistakes are often captivating, but these mistakes have a peculiar power: the random noise of one printer’s tiredness, one clerk’s hangover, corrupts the word of God. This is a big deal, especially for the early errors, those from the 16th and 17th centuries, before higher criticism, a movement that began to challenge the text of the Bible’s infinite integrity. These were not just errors, but blasphemies, punishable as such, with fines and book burnings. The printers responsible lost their licences, and were never allowed to print again. These were intrusions of fallen humanity onto the divine, wretched scars on God’s perfection.
Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, battered in the wakes of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation, was a culture that cared profoundly about words, about text. Those who were literate could be agonised by a misplaced comma or a forgotten negative, could spend months in debate over the particular, correct English translation of a Greek or Hebrew word. In a world where words were more scarce, more occult, they meant more.
Perhaps this is the reason Bible errata are so interesting: they recall a logocentric culture, a bookish culture, one where a printing error could ruin a life and continent-wide wars were fought over scriptural interpretation. The power and devotion this implies are intoxicating, heady, terrifying. A mistake in the Bible inspires nothing less than awe.
If there’s a text that inspires even more devotion than you have for your thesis, it’s the Bible. And yet people still made errors. As the Biblical errata demonstrate, mistakes are everywhere, and a good thesis proofreading service is necessary. Oxbridge Proofreading®’s professional thesis proofreading service will help you to find the errors and typos in your work, and ensure that you words don’t end up delivering exactly the wrong meaning.
All our thesis proofreaders have achieved their qualifications from the UK’s elite universities, with a minimum of a Master’s degree and the majority also holding a PhD. All are native English speakers and we have subject specialists in almost every discipline — this range of knowledge, combined with our exacting standards, makes us the perfect choice for your thesis proofreading needs.
If you would like to “try before you buy”, in order to see the added credibility our thesis proofreading service offers, simply send us a sample , a chapter or section of your thesis. We’ll randomly select an excerpt and edit it free of charge, and let you know the cost to edit your PhD manuscript and the turnaround time required.
Please allow one or two working days for delivery of your sample.
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