The first time I had to deliver difficult feedback to a fiction author was on a fantasy manuscript, brimming with imagination but bogged down by clunky prose and plot holes. I spent hours deliberating over how to...
A future with machines Should we be concerned about a future alongside AI? Does the future hold productivity gains or mass employment? We are only just starting to see how this new technology will affect our particular...
Writing a thesis is a big deal. It’s the result of months (sometimes years) of research, thinking and hard work; and pulling all that work together into a polished, professional thesis can be tough. That’s where three...
The benefits of formatting to editors Formatting “makes it much easier for me to work with the document, it looks professional, and it is much easier for the examiners to navigate” (Richard Steele, in a...
A controversial concept I recently came across a social media post that unsettled me. The person who posted claimed that academic writers would benefit from training by popular fiction writers. The poster found the...
Taking on editing work for a student’s academic project – whether it’s an essay, dissertation or thesis – is a rewarding but complex task. As editors, our goal is to polish and refine the student’s writing while...
For around only SEK1 500 a year it is possible to subscribe to the artificial intelligence (AI) editing services that some reputable journal publishers offer nowadays. This seems like a brilliant way to save time and...
After studying and teaching science for 30 years, I thought I knew everything about Système International (SI) units. Turns out I didn’t. Editing has introduced me to a whole new, unsuspected realm of SI idiosyncrasies...
In this PEGblog, we explain what a compilation thesis is (often called a thesis by articles or a paper-based thesis/dissertation) and the limited nature and extent of the copy editor’s engagement with it. Compilation...
Plagiarism on the grand scale has been made more and more tempting and easy for lazy [writers] by people who provide whole essays on all manner of subjects on the web. – Manning Murphy (2019) To understand the nature...
I have been a supervisor and an examiner of academic texts but am now an editor of academic texts. I offer my services in academic editing because I want the student’s (and the university’s) efforts to be honoured with...
To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath (Pico Iyer). This post gives...
We are all familiar with fusty, complicated, roundabout academic writing – no doubt it filled many of the textbooks you struggled through at school and university; and if you have to read academic texts in your working...
There has been considerable debate in professional editing circles regarding the limits and boundaries of the editor’s role. According to Lozano (2014: 363), ‘correction or editing services [is] a practice that is...
This challenging and often prickly topic has elicited a great deal of controversy. There are many editorial purists who do not see editing as a process but who are prescriptive about what should and should not be done....
A good editor can add significant value to the quality of a thesis. In this edition of PEGblog, Jacqui Baumgardt tells us why and how. The worth of a thesis A thesis is the personal work of a student attempting to...