Human beings are prone to making mistakes. When it comes to writing, it is common for even the exceptional students to overlook certain mistakes, especially when it’s about producing a full-fledged thesis document. Academic institutions often set forth a bunch of reviewing rules for theses, which need to be catered to in order to get your work accepted.
Whether your thesis is required to follow the American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), or Chicago/Turabian style, it is crucial to leave sufficient time for proofreading your thesis, before the submission due date. Experts from good thesis writing services suggest proofreading a thesis bit-by-bit, rather than rushing to get it done within one setting. Since nobody prepares a complete thesis overnight, it is not a good idea to review what you’ve prepared in a single day either.
So what should you be actually looking for in your document to make it qualify as fully proofread?
Review The Grammar And Formatting
Correct punctuation, flawless grammar and meaningful sentence structures are the foundation of a thesis worthy to excel in grades. Even if you put in a lot of valued information and back it up with research and theories, if your write-up is not presented in an eloquent manner, the examiner would view it as a third-grade piece of work. Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and inconsistent sentences or paragraphs often overshadow the usefulness of all your content due to the frustration of having to point out too many mistakes.
Formatting mistakes do not necessarily arise from lack of language fluency or grammatical expertise. They are more often a product of carelessness or the hassle of finishing the very first draft. Hence, these can be easily rectified by thoroughly going through each paragraph one by one from the start until the end. Make sure your font style, text size, line spacing and other document elements are not going haywire in any part that you might have, for instance, inserted separately into your thesis.
Ensure Consistency
The key to make your piece of work interesting to read is to ensure that the sentences flow smoothly. When examiners get the feel of being able to read in a tune, they find your content enjoyable and are happy to give a good grade.
Students and custom writing experts have to deal with too many research papers at a time, for collecting adequate data to prepare their content. During the process, they might get diverted from their own perspective, leading to muddled and confusing concluding remarks.
Having consistency means that your document as a whole must provide points that lead to the same conclusion. Any research or statistics that you include should not be putting forward conflicting information that confuses the readers on what you’re actually trying to say. Consistency in your perspective, sentence structures, and supporting information – all are important.
Check For Plagiarism
If your thesis contains copy-pasted content, it’s almost as if you didn’t do your work at all. But what if you didn’t really copy from anywhere; it just happened to collude with someone else’s work due to utter co-incidence and commonality of knowledge on the chosen topic? If that happens, your work would still be considered plagiarized and it’s against academic procedures to submit it as it is.
This is where the significance of plagiarism check comes into place. Instead of letting your examiner find out the parts of your thesis that contain plagiarized bits of content, it is better to eradicate or at the least, rephrase those paragraphs to avoid the problem from the start.
The matter of plagiarism is more serious than most students comprehend it to be. According to the US law, plagiarism is ‘stealing’ words or ideas that are protected by copyright laws, as long as they are recorded in any (written or audio) form. It is a must to give credit to the original source of work, if you are using somebody else’s past research to make your point. If any credit or reference is missed out in your draft, proofreading should bring it forth for you to make the correction.
Go Through The Reference List
Citing references in the right manner is a challenge in all kinds of academic work. Once you have understood the general principles to use for citing sources, you need to make sure that you have applied them effectively for each mentioned source.
The best way to reference successfully is to jot down the details of the author and publication (date and title etc.) at the time of writing the draft. If you’re using information from e-books, e-journals or webpages, you can note down the URL addresses and the date of accessing the source.
Besides helping you in avoiding plagiarism, this practice will also help you trace back the sources you have used throughout the course of your thesis, may those be weeks or months old, depending on the duration of your overall thesis work.
Tally The Table Of Contents
Table of contents is something that is prepared at the beginning to plan out your thesis. Once you have actually achieved researching, writing and reviewing what you’ve got, you would definitely need to tally your work with your originally created contents. This includes checking that pages numbers are inserted correctly, headings and subheadings are all in place, and no previously brainstormed topic or heading has been left out.
This is the simplest of all tasks you would have to take care of among all other proofreading elements. If you don’t identify any major errors, you can easily accomplish this task in just couple of hours in a single sitting.
Use Online Tools Or Computer Software
There are so many tools available for students to use nowadays that aid in looking for various problems in your work. Whether you want to check for grammatical errors, auto-correct spellings mistakes or detect plagiarism, a tool or software is at your hand, and many of them even come for free.
| Grammarly | An online proofreader that automatically detects grammar, spelling, word choice, punctuation and style mistakes in text. Includes free tools through its website or Google Chrome Extension. |
| Readable | Counts the words in your text and examines your readability level. Gives you a score that correlates to a particular reading level. |
| Slick Write | Checks your grammar, critiques your content by judging the flow of your writing. |
| Proofread Bot | Checks your writing for grammar, style, statistics, spelling and plagiarism issues. Gives recommendations for improvement. |
| Ginger | Corrects texts with accuracy. Consists of a spell-checker and a grammar checker. |
| Copyscape | A popular online plagiarism detection service. Comes with a free as well as premium version. |
Concluding Remarks
An exhaustive proofreading activity for your dissertation will enable you to enhance the perception of the examiner towards your writing and researching expertise. If it feels like a boring or draining job, keep in mind that your hard work is meant to pay off in the form of a good grade, positive remarks and a shining brand-new degree!
