Supervisors Recommend Lex Academic for PhD Proofreading
In our professional editorial experience, PhDs require a very particular form of proofreading. At Lex Academic, we recognise the priorities of doctoral candidates as they navigate the rite of passage from PhD submission through to examination and, thereafter, the academic job market. With many students moving onto postdoctoral positions upon receipt of their PhD, we understand that you do not want the examination process to be drawn out by a lengthy (and demoralising) round of revisions. With this in mind, we have devised a proofreading service dedicated to removing the chances of receiving minor corrections from your exam, while also preserving the academic integrity of your scholarship. Through our careful interventions, we can elevate the scholarly register of your thesis, helping to engage your examiner as effectively as possible with your ideas, whether you are working in the high humanities or the hard sciences.
In offering this service, we check and correct for typographical mistakes, grammatical and punctuation errors, structural infelicities, and sentences that do not read well (for whatever reason). We will also retrieve and format absent or inadequate references. We thus aim to reduce the risk of receiving minor corrections based not only on the sort of mistakes that a regular proofreading service (or your supervisor!) might catch, but also missing or incomplete citations and/or formatting issues. As part of this service, we strictly heed any university regulations so that the thesis meets the relevant form (as opposed to content). To this end, we are conversant with the dominant citation styles for business, the social sciences, humanities, and law (including APA, Chicago, Harvard, ICMJE, MHRA, MLA, and OSCOLA).
If you have received major corrections from your doctoral examination, we can also assist. Please contact our Managing Editor to enquire.
We have uniquely strong expertise proofreading within Art History, Anthropology, Classics, and Philosophy. We can also edit Arabic, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, and Spanish.
AI ‘Humanizing’, AI Editing, and AI Refining
We are being approached more and more by authors who employ AI tools and programs to draft (whether partially or fully) their manuscripts. We are extremely skilled at editing all kinds of academic manuscripts and, owing to a proliferation in demand for so-called ‘AI humanizing’, we have done (and continue to do) considerable research on the syntactic and linguistic patterns frequently identified in AI-drafted work. The discovery of such patterns can lead to your works’ disqualification from publication and can also cause significant reputational damage, particularly if the peer-review process is unblinded at any stage.
Sometimes, verdicts declaring a text ‘AI generated’ are erroneous and unfair, indicating a ‘false positive’ result. Such thwarts to publishing make it all the more worthwhile to have your work carefully checked and copy-edited (whether lightly or substantively) by an experienced team of researchers and writers, such as those at Lex Academic. There are tools online and for purchase that use AI to subsequently ‘refine’ AI-generated text, but these typically exacerbate and further embed the problem, as they are based on the same LLMs. Owing to this, AI text refiners do not enable you to capably outmanoeuvre the spectre of being accused of using AI to write your work.
Lex Academic will never employ AI tools in the editing process. We have professional indemnity and professional liability insurance to the value of £10M to reflect the seriousness with which we take our editorial and research work. We have spent decades honing the skills of academic research, writing, and editing. It is our justifiable pride in these skills that make us an invaluable partner to thousands of the world’s top academics and public figures. To us, a five-star service is not merely met when our clients are happy: we likewise need to be delighted in, and proud of, the work we deliver. 100% satisfaction needs to apply on both sides of the equation.
A growing number of institutions accept that students use AI tools in their research and drafting process. Some universities encourage the use of these programs. For instance, the University of Oxford became the world’s first university to offer all its students and faculty a free subscription to ChatGPT. Still, we find our clients to be uniquely discerning; they want to be certain that what they submit and publish is factually accurate, grammatically flawless, and captures their characteristic writing style and voice. These are currently limitations of generative AI tools and can land students and tenured academics in hot water when it comes to submitting original research.
Please get in touch with us if the above describes your situation. We would be honoured to help you on the road to success while defusing and removing the stress that the world of AI has caused academics of all stripes.
Can we help with anything else?
Ensure your entire manuscript is submission-ready with our bespoke Indexing and Bibliography Compiling services. We also purvey extraordinary academic Proofreading, Copy-Editing, and Substantive Editing. Our impeccable author services include correcting all typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors. Where desired, we can make stylistic and substantive changes to your work that promise a powerful first impression with major publishers. Our authors have published with all of the top-tier publishing houses, including Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Peter Lang, Princeton University Press, and Routledge.
Authors or publishers interested in our services should get in touch with our Managing Editor detailing their editorial requirements and publication ambitions.
