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Editing
The goal of editing English is to produce a document that is written clearly and precisely in an elegant style and that contains no errors. The English should be as simple as possible and easy to understand. In order to achieve this goal, given the diverse requirements of papers in business, finance, and accounting, we offer four editing services: standard editing, editing for special requirements, editing for accounting, and checking.
Standard editing
We provide this service for papers in business and finance when the authors have no special requirements. We undertake to do the following:
- Correct grammar
- Correct spelling
- Correct punctuation
- Ensure that the correct vocabulary is used
- Ensure that an appropriate level of formality is used
- Improve style
- Alert you to ambiguity in your text and tell you what the different possible ways of intepreting your text are, so that you can choose the formulation that conveys your intended meaning
- Point out unwanted implications of the text that you have written and suggest ways of rewriting
- Point out text the meaning of which is unclear due to a lack of clarity in thinking and, where possible, inform you of what you need to do to remove the unclarity
Every paper is edited twice, by two different people, to ensure the best possible result. We know from long experience that papers in business and finance are characteristically very difficult to edit because they contain a great deal of unclarity. That being so, it is very difficult for one person to identify everything that needs to be attended to. Using a second editor to do quality control following the first editing is the best way of ensuring that all problems are identified and attended to.
* Please note that in some cases, it is necessary to apply a surcharge for editing the English in a paper. When a surcharge is applied, it is almost always because of the extra timethat editing requires due to the paper being unclear and containing a great deal of ambiguity due to syntactic and/or semantic factors. The greater the unclarity and ambiguity (beyond a certain threshold) the greater the surcharge will be. Therefore, you should do everything possible to minimise the unclarity and ambiguity before you submit your paper to us for editing. We have tried to help you in this regard by preparing a list of cases in which writing can be unclear and ways to avoid them; see our webpage How to write more clearly.
We offer editing for both native and non-native speakers. We can use the spelling conventions of either International or North America, according to your requirements.
Editing for Special Requirements
There are no standard guidelines for preparing manuscripts in business and finance for publication. Sometimes, journal editors have specific requirements as to what particular grammatical constructins are acceptable and what are not. Oftentimes, the way in which empirical studies are reported runs counter to the well-tested, scientifically and philosophically sound way in which they are reported in more mature disciplines. We encourage you to emulate the way that studies are reported in other disciplines, but if it is necessary for you to write in a special way, we will cater to your requirements.
Editing for special requirements includes everything that is provided in standard editing, plus the following:
- Editing in accordance with the guidelines for authors of the Journal for Business Research, as far as that is possible.
- Using particular grammatical constructions that are specified by either the author or the guidelines for authors of the journal to which the paper is to be submitted, for example, using the active voice rather than the passive or avoiding the past tense as much as possible.
Editing for Accounting
Editing for accounting includes everything that is provided in standard editing, plus any special requirements that are specified by the author, such as avoiding the past tense as much as possible. Authors must specify, precisely and in full, any special requirements that they have at the time that they submit their paper for editing.
Checking
This service is provided after an author has revised a paper in response to the corrections, comments, and suggestions that we made during the provision of standard editing, editing for special requirements, or editing for accounting. Sometimes, checking is not required, whereas on other occasions it is strongly recommended. As a rule of thumb, checking is required when the paper contains unclarity that we cannot resolve without further input from the author. Checking will incur a fee that is in accordance with the amount of effort involved. If the checking takes only a few minutes, there will be no charge. Usually, the fee will increase in relation to the amount of unclarity that the original text contained.
What we do not provide
1. We do not edit any work that is to be submitted in full or partial fulfilment of the requirements for any degree. This is because in almost all cases, correcting the English in student work requires the elimination of unclarity and ambiguity, which is in contravention of university regulations, which state that theses should be clearly written and be the product of all the student's own work.
2. We do not reduce word counts, except when that occurs during the normal course of editing as we attempt to express your content correctly, stylishly, and succinctly. If the word count is still too high following our normal attempts to express your content correctly, stylishly, and succinctly, the problem must be that there is too much content. We are not responsible for the content of your paper. If your paper contains too many words, even after we have edited and done our best to express your content succinctly, you must reduce the content in order to reduce the word count. We cannot decide what content to omit, because we did not do the research.
N.B. Having your paper edited by us does not guarantee acceptance for publication. There are all sorts of reasons, completely unrelated to English, as to why your paper may not be accepted for publication.