Please tell me how to begin proofreading a friend's dissertation

December 8, 2015 7:34 AM

What are best practices for editing a dissertation? Dissertation writers and editors, lend me your ears.

I agreed to help edit a friend's dissertation for a small fee. I'm glad to do this, but it's entirely new to me. The writer is a non-native English speaker and he told me he needs help proofreading, but is also "looking for deeper edits when necessary." How does this process typically work? He sent me the document as a pdf, which raises my first question. How do I edit a pdf? I envisioned editing the doc in Word with Microsoft Track Changes. Is that standard? I have a Mac and I would prefer not to use Word, but I can make it work if that's the best option. I also have access to a pc, if necessary.
I appreciate advice on how to best approach the situation, including best practices for communication, how payment typically works, common problems that my arise, etc. I'd also love to hear from PhD students who can describe how the proofreading process worked successfully for them. Thank you!

posted by areaperson to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

Best answer: I'm an editor. I would recommend asking him to send a Word file-- it's almost impossible to edit PDFs (when I have done it it has involved placing notes. It's very messy and would require him to go back and manually input all of your suggested changes).

Microsoft Word and the Track Changes function are the way to go.
posted by naturalnumbers at 7:51 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Hi, it might be a little late for some of this, but here is my two cents worth:

I have both written a dissertation and also edit those of others. I have different fee levels based on what the client wants. For example, if I am editing just for grammar, that is one fee. If I am editing just for whatever style manual the discipline follows (e.g., APA), that is a different fee. If I am doing both those, there is another fee for both. If the client wants me to do "deep edits," meaning content, that is a substantial fee since then I am more of a consultant, and to be frank, the dissertation sponsor and readers really should be working with the student on any deep edits that affect content. But I will do it for a reasonable fee if they ask.

I only work with Word so that I can track the changes and allow the client to accept/decline any changes. Fees and deadlines are negotiated/settled in writing before any work is transferred. Once the contract is set, the client emails me the document and I get to work.

I will keep in contact with the client through email and ask questions along the way if they come up, but grammar and style are pretty straightforward. If I see huge red flags but I was not asked to edit for content, I will mention to the client that I noticed things they might want to either check with their sponsor or I would be willing to re-negotiate the fee for a more comprehensive read/edit for content clarity and synthesis.

By the deadline, I will email the first page of the edited document to the client, so they can see that I have made edits, with the instructions to make payment through PayPal. Once payment is received I email the entire edited document to the client. Do not take checks, ever.
posted by archimago at 7:53 AM on December 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: When I did this for my own dissertation draft, I printed it through Lulu and had them bind it with spiral binding for about $20. Then I made comments and edited by hand. This was a lot easier than trying to read the entire thing on a screen.

I had some fellow researchers work as data auditors/peer debriefers and they used Word Track Changes for this job, which is similar to (but not the same as) editing. This worked very well.
posted by k8lin at 7:56 AM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: This is helpful! Thank you! archimago, I have not negotiated payment yet, so that advice is still timely and appreciated.
posted by areaperson at 7:59 AM on December 8, 2015

Best answer: I've made edits by hand when I am the person who will be reading the edits and making them. If my edits are going to have to go to someone else (like the author), then Word with track changes, especially if there may be sentences or paragraphs that you re-write. Don't do that by hand!
posted by rtha at 9:01 AM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I think others' advice to use Word and track changes is spot on. You might also want to make some choices early on about how you will handle ambiguous or stylistic rules. For instance, one space or two after periods? Oxford commas are go or no?

I have done part-time editing, and although I "know" the rules on grammar and such, I find that reading someone else's work can sometimes acclimate me to incorrectness -- I liked to have the style guides from my company available for reference when I would question whether a certain usage was correct or not (and also to check on what the house style is for things that can be correct in multiple ways). There are also tricks, like searching for commonly mis-used words. I see that my company's guide is actually an in-house document so you can't access it, but you might check out AJE's page here.

Bioscience Writer's page talks about various levels of editing, which I thought might be helpful for you in negotiating a price.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 9:21 AM on December 8, 2015

Best answer: Yeah, I would never, ever agree to do a dissertation in PDF. Much too painful. Do it in Word and track changes. (You may wish to do an on-paper edit first; personally, I do find that's a better way for me to work, but YMMV.)

Find out whether your friend is looking for literally just proofreading for language stuff, or also is looking for you to help whip his dissertation into a particular format/style. If the latter, allow extra time for it and ask him to provide you with a copy of his university's style requirements.
posted by Stacey at 9:22 AM on December 8, 2015

Best answer: Depending on the field, I would guess you may have gotten a PDF because the person wrote their dissertation in LaTeX rather than Word (common in more science/math disciplines and even in some social science disciplines these days as it allows you to input mathmatical notation much more easily). If this is the case, unfortunately LaTeX does not have good collaboration/editing tools. I would recommend printing and making comments/edits on a hard copy, only because the commenting/editing tools for PDFs are a big pain. Either way your friend would have to input manually, so may as well make it easier on yourself!

Also, I'm not sure if you're a subject matter expert or not? If not, I don't think you should necessarily attempt to edit content. I feel like this will end up with frustration on all sides because you won't fully understand the content of the dissertation that you're editing, and your friend may have issues with the comments you do provide. Instead, I would recommend to your friend that he have an advisor or peer look the document over for content edits after you've assisted with some proofreading.
posted by rainbowbrite at 10:41 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've done something like this once or twice on a very small scale---one friend or another who's not a native English speaker will ask me to go through a paper or a proposal or something. He or she will come by and hand me a printed copy, and I'll go through and mark straight up grammatical errors, as well as mistakes in idioms and constructions that, while technically correct, aren't the natural way to say something in English. These people have been doing work close enough to mine that I can understand at least in outline what's going on and occasionally ask "is X what you really mean, or are you actually trying to say Y?", or, "wait, are you making some assumption here that you forgot to articulate?" You may or may not be able to do this. I'll then walk the marked-up copy to the person's office, or grab them at a talk or a class or something and hand it to them there.

Payment's never come up for me. Going through a few pages will take me something like an hour, so it's a nice break from beating my head against my own problems---and besides, I get to learn some physics. All part of the ecosystem of grad students helping each other out.

A whole dissertation is a Much Bigger Deal, though: like, probably two orders of magnitude more work. Payment seems entirely appropriate, though I have no notions about scale.

I'd like to emphasize rainbowbrite's point about LaTeX: in physics, Word is a total no-go, culturally and technologically; everything that's not hand-written notes is LaTeX source that gets compiled to PDF. It wouldn't even occur to me to use Word for anything (including papers in my undergrad history classes); I don't think I have Word or anything remotely like it on any computer I have access to. (One exception is that I've seen experimentalists who are more comfortable with Word for short, quick things like problem sets---I myself might be a standard deviation or so out to the right of the median as far as preference for LaTeX goes.)

It's essentially impossible to export LaTeX to Word in a meaningful way, as the underlying philosophies are profoundly different. (That difference in philosophy is precisely why I like LaTeX.)

Your friend might be using a distributed version-control system like git---this is increasingly common among the people I talk to. It makes writing with collaborators on the other side of the country or the world much easier (or so I hear---I'm not there yet), and even if you're just down the hall it provides a very good way to keep track of who's changed what, how. Learning LaTeX and git just for this one thing is ... a disproportionate amount of effort, though.
posted by golwengaud at 11:09 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

With copy editing, track changes tends to be a lowest common denominator tool. What I find works is to print the whole thing out first, double spaced, and make my brief edits there (using the typographer marks makes it pretty quick), and then I make the changes in the Word document. After that, I print it out again and go through to make sure that every change worked and made it in. For longer publications, especially in terms of content editing, I try to keep an edit log as well, so that I can go back and ensure that things that got changed a couple times in the back-and-forth get fixed. I find that this ends up being faster than typing, even though I'm a pretty quick typist.

The other thing that I've found helpful is to write simple macros or grep expressions to run on bibliographies to ensure that they're properly formatted, rather than having to e.g. manually italicize 200 different entries.
posted by klangklangston at 1:22 PM on December 8, 2015

This is a little off track because I've never been paid, but I've done quite a lot of proofreading for friends and the thing I've learnt is to be very clear about what you will be doing upfront, and maybe send a couple of pages as a sample before you get really stuck in. I say this because I am a pedant and will usually send things back with lots of edits and questions. So before I even see it, I will tell them I am really pedantic, and ask if they are happy with that. Then I'll proof a couple of pages and send them as a sample and ask again if what I'm doing is helpful.

The reason I now do this is because it's a huge amount of work to proof a dissertation, especially when you are not familiar with the subject, and some people really just want you to maybe change a couple of commas and tell them that what they've written is amazing. So you can waste a lot of time and really piss people off if you're not aligned on what those 'deeper edits' look like.
posted by Dwardles at 2:37 PM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm so late, but if the person is using LaTeX, then latexdiff (or latexdiff-vc if they're using git, mercurial, subversion or CVS) is your friend: you can make all your edits (either to a copy of the .tex file, or directly to the original if using a version control system) and it will give you a Word-esque "red for deletions, blue for additions" PDF versus the original, so that you can see what changed in your revision. I have used this heavily on papers where I'm collaborating with other authors, and, when paired with git, find it a much nicer (and safer!) workflow than the Word "Track Changes" workflow.
posted by snap, crackle and pop at 4:53 PM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also a little late, but I write everything in LaTeX and when I have to collaborate I use Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com/benefits), which is a free online tool that allows multiple authors to access the same document. If you're not familiar with writing in LaTeX this will allow you to pretty much treat it as a WYSIWYG editing process as it has realtime updating from the source to the compiled output. I can't stress enough how this has filled a gap in collaborative writing in the LaTeX environment - you can leave notes for the author in the text, or you can make changes directly that he can review. This will make things easier for you, as you can access the text directly, and you don't have to learn very much LaTeX at all to be able to edit.
posted by tractorfeed at 9:32 AM on December 14, 2015