For a good-quality document, editing is a must. Most editing services follow a 2-step editing process, where the first round will cross-check your writing for all aspects of grammar, language, and syntax, and the second round is done by a senior editor or a reviewer, who will go through the edited document to ensure that it is free from any mistakes. However, the editing service is all about checking the document for grammar, sentence structure, proofreading errors, and basic formatting. If you are looking for something beyond language editing, you need to look for online editing services that offer subject-specific editing.

Some well-established online editing service companies have already set a benchmark in the editing industry that may allow you to choose your editor. These companies have also developed an in-house editor-selection algorithm that can help people find the most suitable editor for their documents.

How Editing Services will Enhance the Chances of Publication?

Preparing a research document can be proven to be a hard task as the research funds aren’t as plentiful. The sponsors provide funds only to the interesting and perfect work that has a high chance of publication in prestigious journals.

Unedited Papers are Rarely Peer Reviewed:

Often, a poor-quality manuscript is outrightly rejected at the time of submission without the peer review process. The journal editor rejects the manuscript if it doesn’t adhere to the structure or writing guidelines of the journal. If the editor reviews the documents they are being asked to check more than the methodological accuracy of the paper.

Editing Can Save You from Professional Embarrassment:

Your research paper or any document must be error-free content. As English is the most preferred language of science, You must take extra care about grammatical errors. Critics and historians may argue that Latin, French, German, and Russian have equal claims on a scientific legacy, but for Science communication, English is the most preferred language.

Types of Editing:

Developmental editing

Developmental editing is otherwise known as content or substantive editing. It involves an editor providing detailed feedback on “big-picture” issues. They will improvise your paper and the ideas, shape your narrative, and also help to fix any major plot or character inconsistencies. Moreover, they will provide every element that your paper needs to improvise with and also suggest to you what works and what doesn’t.

This is just the first step in the whole editing process. If you don’t want to get your manuscript proofed or formatted developmental editing is needed. A developmental editor will make sure your story is up to snuff before moving forward, so you don’t end up copy-correcting work that’s just going to get thrown out anyway. During the developmental editing, there will be two pieces that will be provided by the editor, an editorial report, and an annotated manuscript. The editorial report is a general critique and your editor will comment on what’s functioning well and should stay in your work. On the other hand, the annotated manuscript is a marked-up version of the manuscript itself that indicates specific suggestions like how you can fix each issue.

Structural editing

As the name suggests, Structural editing sounds like an approach that will improve the structure of your story. It makes the content in a more representable way that works for your particular narrative and keeps the reader engaged. If there are a lot of twists and turns in your story, then there must be a flashback structure to increase suspense than a typical linear chronology.

Structural editing can also help you to determine whether you should split your story into more or fewer sections, and what content you might delete or expand. However, if you are worried about the structure, then you must go for Structural editing to prioritize it and also to address those issues before anything else.

Copy editing

After solving the big-picture issues and all the necessary rewritings of your file or document, you need to dive into copy editing. It is also known as mechanical or line editing, depending on its particular demand. A “copy editor’s responsibility is to bring the completed manuscript of the author to a more professional level. They help to create the most readable version of your document by improving clarity, coherency, consistency, and correctness. Moreover, they focus on diminishing the gaps between the author’s intention and the reader’s understanding level.

Generally, a copy editor takes care of the following elements in your work:

• Spelling
• Grammar
• Capitalization
• Word usage and repetition
• Dialogue tags
• Usage of numbers or numerals
• POV/tense (to fix any unintentional shifts)
• Descriptive inconsistencies (character descriptions, locations, blocking, etc.)
• Proofreading

Proofreading is the last and the most important phase of the editing process. Proofreaders have eyes that inspect and make sure that there will be no spelling or grammar errors in the final version of your work. Generally, they are extremely meticulous and their painstaking review of your manuscript ensures that your text is 100% polished before going to print.

So what exactly does a proofreader do?

With rapid modernization and digital typesetting, proofreaders often work from physical proofs, clearly marking errors and oddities as they go. They will be responsible for the following factors;

• Inconsistencies in spelling and style
• Inconsistencies in layout and typography
• Confusing or awkward page and word breaks
• Incorrect captioning on any illustrations and page numbers in the contents

As proofreading is the last stop on manuscript editing, most issues will have been resolved by this stage. The necessity of proofreading is to examine the text for anything that previous edits might have missed.

The style sheet

While proofreading your document, you should provide them with a style sheet that reflects the list of the unusual spellings or styles in your file. After completing the proofreading, the editor will return a marked-up document with the changes that you need to make to your file. After working accordingly, you should send your file to publication.

Fact-checking

Every file or document needs to highlight a fact. No matter how thoroughly you research your paper, it can still end up with informational inconsistencies. If you have a lot of niche information in your document, and especially if it is a topic that you have never studied before, you might consider getting a designated fact-checker to go through it. They will take a thorough tour of you and confirm them via external sources. After finding any inaccuracies, they will inform you right away. This type of editing is crucial if you’re writing nonfiction.

Proofreading or editing: which service do I need?

Most of the researchers believe that for a perfect error-free document, they only need proofreading to finalize before submission. However, along with proofreading, editing is also needed. An editor who understands your field can provide even more useful and attractive finishing to your paper. For example, the editors we work with our professional editors selected according to your research area, so they have the subject matter expertise and experience necessary to understand and critique your work on a deeper level which will lead to a long run.

Your paper must be error-free and have factual content along with good readability and an understandable area to get published. The paper with proofreading alone misses out on the kind of constructive criticism that could make the difference between your manuscript getting accepted or not. We know, there is always room for improvement. Authors must have their papers ready after editing and proofreading before submitting. That’s why we recommend both editing and proofreading for extraordinary content.