Thorough Editing

Thorough Editing involves two rounds of work: (1) a rigorous review of the work's logic, organization, and whether the research supports the argumentation; and (2) a more fine-grained reading to check for the mechanical elements of language covered under General Proofreading. The text's flow, style, and syntax may be improved, and we are also able to check references and draft indices for larger work.

We typically recommend Thorough Editing for authors who wish to supplement their supervision or standard institutional channels of review with additional feedback from the perspective of harsh but sympathetic readers. In practice, this stream of editorial work involves significant content-based feedback on the marginalia of the manuscript by at least two editors and, for most pieces, between 500 and 1,000 words of comments in a separate document.

Both rounds are carried out by our editors, who read the whole manuscript. You retain all rights in your manuscript, which we use solely for the editing you have commissioned and never share, reuse or publish, as the non-disclosure clause of our contract requires.

Thorough Editing is not suited to every manuscript. For those who only wish to correct basic errors of language, such as grammar, sentence construction, and the like, then the appropriate editorial stream would be General Proofreading, which involves little to no content-based feedback. You can learn more about General Proofreading here.

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.