You’ve lost sleep, skipped meals and as for a social life-what’s that? But you have that paper well-researched and have just put the finishing touches on the last draft. Now you want someone else, a professional, to examine your baby and make sure it’s as perfect as possible. After all, a course grade-maybe a degree-is riding on that sucker.
But what sort of editing do you need, standard or technical? What level of editing will ensure that the fruits of your labor are presented as clearly and accurately as possible?
For term papers, research papers, theses, dissertations and even journal articles, your best bet is technical editing. Why?
Well, let’s look at standard editing first: an editor doing a standard edit will check for subject-verb agreement and other grammatical gaffes, make sure verb tenses are correct in context, alert you to continuity problems and often suggest fixes, and so forth.
“But that’s what I need, right?” you ask, scratching your head in confusion.
Well, yes, you need that and more-and that’s where technical editing comes in.
When an editor does a technical edit, s/he does all of the above plus-and this is a very important plus-checks your citations/footnotes, references, captions, headings and subheadings for accuracy and adherence to the style guide required by your instructor, committee or journal, in addition to providing feedback on how the paper reads and alerting you to areas that might confuse the reader or that look as if they’re missing citations.
“Oh, nobody ever really looks at the citations and references,” you laugh, shrugging.
Trust me: they do. Profs can be almost insanely persnickety about things like margins and proper in-text citations, and if your content is amazingly well-written but you used the wrong margins or the wrong style guide, what you’ve written won’t matter: the prof will fail you, anyway. After all that hard work, your paper could be rejected because of easily-fixable errors that a professional editor could have caught and corrected.
This is where technical editing can be a lifesaver…and maybe a degree-saver, too. Take the time to have your paper edited by a professional, and be sure to ask for a technical edit. Professional technical editing by a firm such as FirstEditing can make sure your glowing content isn’t obscured by glaring technical errors.
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Tags: citation, Professional Technical Editing, references, Standard Edit, Standard Editing, Technical Edit, Technical Editing
