It is nearly impossible for any doctoral candidate or academic researcher to edit her own written work. When you are so involved with your research and the written material, you are less likely to see typos, spelling errors, or confusing parts in your dissertation chapters. An experienced editor who is looking at your paper with a “fresh” set of eyes will be able to notice errors and improve any areas that could use improvement. Proofreading and editing are critical in the process of writing any document, and are particularly important for academic writers who are facing increased competition.
Professional freelance editors are great for any graduate student or Ph.D. candidate looking to improve a thesis, dissertation, or journal manuscript. Using a professional editing service can help you get better feedback from your adviser as you move through the stages of writing your dissertation, and can also help you craft your full dissertation into publishable articles. Even in cases where the ideas within a dissertation are innovative, important additions to the literature, a poorly written document could diminish the value of the document.
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With increasing frequency, colleges and universities are making use of Web-based plagiarism checking services to scan papers for stolen material. And the consequences can be dire: at one end of the spectrum, a failing grade for the assignment; at the other end, dismissal from an academic program. If you are intentionally plagiarizing in your paper, thesis, or dissertation, this should give you pause. But if you are not intentionally plagiarizing, there could still be reason for concern. Plagiarism checking software catches an ever-growing amount of appropriated material–and sometimes the student has not even meant to do anything wrong! In what follows, I’d like to offer some simple tips for avoiding plagiarism of the unintentional variety.
1. Know what constitutes plagiarism. Simply put, plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of another person without giving credit to the person from whom they are borrowed. Right off the bat, this tells us something important: you can’t simply change a few words of a borrowed text (so that the passage is no longer a direct quotation) and think that you are out of danger. Unless the material is “common knowledge,” a citation is needed for any material you borrow–whether it is a direction quotation, a paraphrase, or even just an idea.
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