Best Edit & Proof
6 min readNov 19, 2020

Six Myths About Academic Editing and ProofreadingThis blog discusses six myths about academic editing and proofreading. To give you an opportunity to practice proofreading, we have left a few spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors in the text. See if you can spot them! If you spot the errors correctly, you will be entitled to a 10% discount.

As we discussed earlier on our blog page, the difference between editing and proofreading can be a challenging issue to comprehend. We explained the main difference between these concepts in detail. The provided a wide-ranging overview of editing and proofreading and argued what each of the service include. Knowing their differences is especially of importance when you intend to avail services to polish your paper.

Let us briefly remember the difference between editing and proofreading Principally, the purpose of proofreading services is to correct all errors, including grammar, typography, punctuation, syntax, and spelling, in an academic paper, whereas the aim of editing services is to improve the overall quality of writing. On the one hand, proofreading services necessitate an extensive knowledge of the English language. In this sense, proofreading is basically the final process of preparing an academic manuscript. Hence, when you want to make sure that the final version of your paper is error free in terms of grammatical, typographical, syntactical, punctuation, and spelling issues, you should consider proofreading services. On the other hand, editing services require extra effort from an editor because it aims to improve the academic quality of your document. Thus, editing services typically comprise improvements of the content, overall structure, quality of findings and analysis, referencing, and format of your manuscript.

Academic editing makes some essential revisions to improve the academic quality and standard of the academic writing of your paper. Therefore, editors mostly re-write some parts of your academic writing while exercising care not to create text as this is not the responsibility of the editor but of the author. This re-writing process is of particular importance because the main objective of editing services is to ensure that the purpose of the manuscript is met. However, editing services also check whether the manuscript has any grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors to guarantee that the paper is error-free.

Hence, an editor who provides editing services also corrects all errors in grammar, typography, punctuation, syntax, and spelling in your manuscript. In this sense, editing services also comprise the proofreading services. However, strictly speaking, proofreading is the last stage before it is delivered to the client. Thus, even if the editor has corrected many of the errors that a proofreader would correct, the paper must still pass through this last stage. Whether your paper is a doctoral dissertation, a master’s thesis, a college essay document, or a business text, to make it shine, besteditproof.com editors insistently advise our customers to opt for the editing services instead of the mere proofreading services.

The first misconception is the belief that cheap editing or proofreading services are still good enough, which is rarely the case. They are indeed not. The issue here is that to edit and proofread a manuscript well, one must not only grasp the matter in question at a doctoral level but also know how to write well and properly.When an underqualified editor gets the job, the outcome is often so poor that one would never notice that someone examined your manuscript. You may say that, probably, the editor has not gotten his/her mitts on the paper.

The second misconception is that expensive editors or proofreaders are better than cheap ones. This is, of course, another myth because being an expensive editor does not necessarily mean that he/she will produce better jobs. All editors or editing companies, of course, allege to provide an excellent editing service, but what’s actually done could be no more than basic proofreading and even that belief may be inaccurate.

The truth is that one does not need to have perfect grammar skills to be a good writer. Undoubtedly, grammar is an inseparable part of students’ grades in English classes, but the process of writing is totally separate from the process of editing. For instance, typical books must go through at least four or five processes of editing and proofreading. Does it mean that the authors of books are not good writers? Does it mean that they do not have the capacity to detect all quotation marks and do not know where to put them? Of course, they are good writers. However, there is always a possibility that good writers made some errors in the document and that they may have missed out some fundamental issues because they were deeply involved in the process of writing the manuscript. Thus, it will be helpful to get a third eye to edit or proofread these manuscripts after the writing process.

This argument is simply not true! Even the best writers or scholars need good editing and proofreading services. Honestly, sometimes, it’s the truly gifted writers who may need editing services the most. The main reason for this is because writing an academic paper or a book means the author has to be deeply involved in the writing process. It is necessary to produce a very well-written paper , but it is also almost impossible for the author to assess the quality of his/her own writing. Good editors and proofreaders help authors who are stuck in their work and those who are mostly strained at gnats and swallow camels.

If you need our subject-area editors to format your manuscripts, giving you the fundamental rules for formatting your manuscripts as described in your guidelines, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian styles, then contact us. At Best Edit & Proof, our proofreaders and editors edit every type of academic paper . We have a user-friendly website, and a simplified the ordering process.

If you would like our subject-area editors and language experts to work on your project for the improvement of its academic tone and style, then please visit the It is easy! It takes only a few minutes to submit your paper and complete the process. Click to see how it works.

We have flat-rate pricing based on our type of service (editing or proofreading), word count, and turnaround time. Enter your word count or copy and paste your document into our pricing calculator to get an instant quote.

If you need support for editing and proofreading services, contact us. You can also e-mail us or use the 24/7 live chat module to get direct support. We have a 24/7 active live chat mode to offer you direct support along with qualified editors to refine and furbish your manuscript. Alternatively, you can text us through our WhatsApp business line.

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Originally published at https://besteditproof.com on November 19, 2020.

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