General Proofreading

General Proofreading corrects grammar, punctuation, formatting, verb tenses, phrasing, sentence construction, and word choice. Sentences that appear awkward will be edited and parts of the text where the meaning is too vague to be edited or rewritten will be highlighted. House style and other formatting issues (excluding typesetting) will also be corrected, as we are familiar with all the major style guides, including APA, Chicago, McGill, AMA, OSCOLA, CSE, and MLA.

Manuscripts that benefit the most from General Proofreading are those that have already received sufficient content-based feedback from supervisors and/or peers. The purpose of General Proofreading is to ensure that the manuscript is, first and foremost, grammatically sound. We do not tend to provide content-based feedback under this stream except when absolutely necessary (e.g., about a claim we are certain is false). If a manuscript is in need of feedback on its argumentation, research, cogency and other issues pertaining to its content and organization, then we would recommend placing it in the Thorough Editing stream of work, whose extended description can be found here.

Every manuscript is proofread by one of our editors, who reads the whole text at least twice. You retain all rights in your text, which we use solely for the proofreading you have commissioned and never share, reuse or publish, as the non-disclosure clause of our contract requires.

Whichever editorial stream an author chooses, all of our work is covered by our Infinite Revisions Policy, which holds that once an author receives their edited manuscript from us and makes further changes as a result of our edits, suggestions, criticisms, etc., we review the author's tracked changes at no extra cost, up to a total of 10 per cent of the contracted word count. Additional material is charged at the contracted per-word rate. This might be particularly useful if, for instance, assessors or journal referees require changes to a manuscript after it has been edited or proofread.