Spell-check of your thesis. Review to catch mistakes!
At Persoonlijk Proefschrift, we will take care of the design of your thesis. This means we assume all texts will be delivered to us correctly, and that they will not be changed later on. Therefore, it is a good thing to carefully review the texts out of your thesis to catch mistakes before we start designing the layout.
This article will answer the following questions:
- What is the best way for me to perform a spelling check of my thesis?
- Are there any existing services which can help me to correct even more spelling errors?
- Using Word’s spelling checker does not give the desired result, are there other options?
50.000 words flawless?!
Putting all your articles together, a dissertation could consist of 50.000 and sometimes even 100.000 words. That is a whole lot to review and it can be hard to catch all textual mistakes. The best advice that we can give you is to print your thesis. By printing it you are more likely to catch mistakes, because you can focus better on the text. We often see textual mistakes getting noticed after the print proof of the thesis is printed.
Software / Grammarly
Unfortunately, Word’s spelling checker cannot always be trusted. Word looks for spelling mistakes in individual words, but not for grammar mistakes in sentences. Luckily, there is a company that focuses entirely on this problem: Grammarly. Grammarly is a free online service that aims to analyse and improve complex English sentences. In general, this can be used very easily. There even is a plugin for your browser that will check your e-mails for grammar mistakes as well.
No time to review your thesis for mistakes?
When you do not have time to perform a spelling and grammar check yourself, or when you are not the best at it, you could also rely on paid services. These often work with help of experienced (English) text writers and they can save you a lot of trouble. We ourselves often collaborate with Scribbr. Scribbr is specialised in checking manuscripts. Its editors are academic linguists. All editors have gone through a strict selection process and are prepared for editing academic texts in Scribbr Academy. Only native English speakers will work on English dissertations. Moreover, all editors work with the Scribbr-Improvement-Model, especially developed for academic texts.