Five Tips to Edit Your Thesis
We understand that not every thesis is approved in the first go. As per the latest data collected from over 160 Universities across the world, over 94% of the theses submitted for review are sent back for major revisions. The remaining 6% involve the percentage where the changes are minor or are accepted. This fact provides a useful insight that in spite of research scholars having good research knowledge and completing the document on time, readability and compliance with University guidelines are usually ignored by candidates. This leads to rejections and major revision requirements in a thesis.
Our research team ran a survey with Master’s candidates in 18 countries including US, Canada, EU, Australia, and UK and found that 89% of all candidates were writing any academic document of more than 30 pages for the first time. Also, 64% of all the candidates reported that English was not their first language of study till bachelor’s level. With this data, we were able to derive that rejections of thesis were largely a result of a sub-standard use of English language in thesis.
With the above issues in mind, we have formulated five tips below for the benefit of Master’s scholars to help them edit their thesis and improve chances of acceptance.
- Online Software to Check Grammar: There are many online grammar checking tools available to check if you have used the right grammar and style of writing for your thesis. Some of the popular ones are:
- Grammarly: While the annual package for this website is priced at $ 149, we believe that it is worth for this amount. It provides basic spelling, structure and punctuation mistakes which you can rectify.
- Ginger Grammar Check: This is free software which can be used to check the grammar of any document. We recommend using this if you have a one-time requirement. If you have just enrolled for a course or have many assignments and thesis chapters to be written, we prefer you to opt for Grammarly.
- Reviewing University Guidelines:Over 60% of the thesis rejected had the issue of non-compliance with the University guidelines. After interacting with many candidates, they found this job tedious and a waste of their time. If that is the case with you as well, we recommend a highly effective and quick service of 24x7editing which offers formatting and compliance with University guidelines at prices starting from $ 1.5 per page. You need to send in the University guidelines, citation style sheet and your thesis document to them to complete the service. They are able to complete a 100 pages thesis in 48 hours. We investigated and found that 98% of their clients were satisfied and recommended this service to others.
- Doing a Friendly Review: A lot of errors can be hand-picked by your friends, wife, husband, peers who don’t even know about your subject. They can tell you about the silliest of your mistakes, and you can avoid blunders before submitting your thesis. After running this pilot project with 75 Master’s candidates from US and Canada, 64 reported that they received almost 40% fewer review comments from supervisor when compared to their peers. While your friend or wife may not take your request seriously, you can offer some incentive like a pizza or a dinner outside to motivate and make them understand that you are serious about this review from them.
- Hiring an Editing Service: When looking for editors or trustworthy editing services online, you will be bombarded with advertisements and a trillion websites. How do you make sense of all this and decide which is the right service to choose for your editing? We are listing a few trustworthy and reliable editing service providers below.
We have validated their service quality by reaching out to their customers, and minimum 90% of their clients reported positive feedback:
- Regent Editing : www.regentediting.co.uk
- EditnPublish : www.editnpublish.com
- RedMarkEditing : www.redmarkediting.com
- EditingProofreading : www.editingproofreading.in
Proofreading is basic service and price for the same starts at about $ 4 per page. For editing, price starts at $ 5 per page. We found the price to increase if the turnaround time is reduced.
Tip: Ask these services for discounts using any of the following:
- If your document is more than 50 pages, usually 5% discounts are offered
- If you offer a Facebook share of the service, usually these companies offer 10% off
- If your deadline is more than two weeks, you can do a good bargain
- If you are looking for cheaper alternatives, try searching these terms “Thesis Editing Services” or “Thesis Proofreading Services” in Google India or Malaysia.
- Working on Edited Thesis: Any editing service will usually return your document as tracked changes which will highlight the changes and comments made in the document. The comments will be the suggestions from the editor for the overall improvement of the thesis. You should work on every comment from the editor to improve the readability index of your thesis. Further, you can use the following to do a final check on your thesis:
- WriteCheck: If you are reading this blog, you understand the importance of original writing. Check for any accidental plagiarism in your thesis using this software. Plagiarism percentage of more than 15% is not good and needs revision.
- Zotero: This is a wonderful new software which can help you in checking if all your references are mentioned as per the allowed citation style. Also, if you are unsure of how to cite a book or report in your thesis using APA or Harvard, you can use this software.
- Auto TOC: This feature comes inbuilt in MS Word from version 2007 onwards and ensures that all your changes in the thesis are automatically reflected in the table of contents. If you have not used Auto-TOC feature of MS Office yet, please start doing so. This will save a lot of time.
To know how to use this feature, see this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gExEfR7wQMs
While we have tried to provide with all information which can help you in getting your thesis approved, if you have your own story or some other new tips to share, please do so using the comments in the blogs below.
To reach the author of this blog, please write into contact@24x7editing.com
