Give Me 10 Minutes, I'll Give You the Truth about Proofreading Services

From text-based presentations to articles, papers, research projects, proofreading and editing have become an integral part of documenting authored and derived texts. However, with the overload of so much information out there, it often becomes difficult to compile quality content when it comes to the strict formatting guidelines. Plus, one also has to ensure that there’s no plagiarism.

One of the ways to deal with that issue is to check plagiarism in the form of plagiarism testing sites and open sources to relevant content. However, that too is a cumbersome process, right? Plus, in the efforts to stick to the set norms and guidelines, sometimes, maybe more so than often we tend to commit a lot of grammatical and information based mistake. These can, however, be easily avoided by hiring professional proofreading services. One can opt for proofreading online as well as offline. However, there’s definitely more than what meets it eye when it comes to understanding how the market for professional proofreading services works.

Proofreading services are often expensively charged for as the person hired not only puts his/her authentic an effort to it, but also because of the general redundancy in the service and the quality of service the person is offering.  From huge price margins by professionals to not being able to find the right set of professional who shall offer you the best possible submission, there’s definitely more than what meets the eye. 

Proofreading sometimes doesn’t necessarily require a professional hand when it comes to working on the relatively smaller piece of content that one can himself/herself proofread. The simplest ways to proofread is to just enable spell check on the documenting software in your system you’re working on. In order to avoid deleting the vernacular or context-specific terms (that may sometimes don’t conform to the syntax guidelines), one could just put them into the exception list in their spell checking feature and they’re done.

Proofreading usually means identifying mistakes and not necessarily suggesting any extra solutions to the said mistakes; except, if you manage to negotiate the terms properly, you might just end up getting your project refined into a much pitch-perfectly edited document. Herein, not only would the terms include offering proofreading services but in fact, both proofreading and editing. 

While no one is questioning the professional investment and credibility attached to hiring a professional proofreader, this task is something that can also be taken up by somebody with a fairly good knowledge of grammar, the syntax structures and the literature element of language. And therefore, not only can you let go of the idea of hiring a professional for the same, but can also think to consider contacting an acquaintance who’d rather do it for the relationship you have with him/her for free. 

Stating other sources might just be the cheaper and inexpensive way out. Of course, you’d need due permission of the original authors, but then the internet is full of open-source pages that have no intellectual property rights applied to them. In this case, all you have to do is to check whether the content is copyright protected or not and just let the website owner know once that you’ll be taking excerpts from their page. You can also opt for proofreading online, sometimes for free, than to go for a paid one. However, there are some limitations to it. Usually, the online proofreading services have a word limit to how many words they’ll be proofreading for. Moreover, you can’t set a context for your content if you’re relying on freeware to proofread your content. Essentially, as much as this option helps you save money, no machine/software can outperform the quality that of an individual’s proofreading services. 

Contacting your neighbourhood community centres and libraries also help with finding the right set of people. Often, these institutions serve as the front desk for freelancers that are not only there for proofreading services like these, but also willing to offer those at a minimal cost. Be it papers or full-scale mini-models, functioning and/or non-functioning, the services offered here are usually the best at the prices they are offered.

Subjected to the domain/the subject of your assignment, the charges for the proofreading services differ. Usually, a humanities paper will be charged for at a much higher rate, while a science-based one would be case dependent, but still cheaper. This is because while humanities-based literature writes up involves lots of research and anecdotes from relevant sources, a science-based one involves intellectual investments too and hence, the relatively lower text-based content density is cheaply proofread. In cases like these, one has to seek the right person according to speciality. Once you identify the subject matter specific professional, it becomes much easier to decide terms, than otherwise.