The sub-title of this post should be: “How to make the most cost-effective use of a professional author’s editor”.

I occasionally get queries from graduate students looking for editing assistance with their dissertations. My response is often as follows:

The cost of an editorial review is dependent on several factors: the level of editing necessary, the length of the manuscript, and the turnaround time required. I should also mention that I require written confirmation from your supervisor that they are aware of and agree with your use of editorial support for your thesis before I can even begin.

Generally, I will only proofread and copyedit theses. If your supervisor agrees, additional feedback can be provided, such as structural and logic commentary, but I do not offer rewriting services to thesis clients.

Regarding costs, most professional editors estimate based on word count not page count. Therefore, x# of pages (of 250 words/page) would cost around $$ to $$$ plus GST, depending on the hourly rate of the editor. Don’t be dissuaded by a specific hourly rate – often a more expensive editor will be faster and catch more errors than a less expensive (and often less experienced) editor. An alternative billing option is to set a fixed budget and we would work together to get the biggest improvement for your investment. I can give you a better estimate of costs if you provide me with some sample pages to determine the intensity of editing required.

A good proportion of the queries are spooked by either the cost and/or the fact that I require that their supervisor be informed about the process. Why do I require their supervisor’s consent? As a member of the Editors’ Association of Canada, I follow the standards of ethical conduct established for editing academic theses. Following these standards ensures that the student’s work remains largely their own.

According to surveys of editors across Canada, editorial services can range from $30 to $90 per hour. The range can be geographically dependent, but is often directly linked to the skill and knowledge of the service provider. Technical editing rates in specialized scientific fields can be even higher. Some editors offer discounts for academic clients, but the most effective things that students can do to control costs include:

1. Use your word processor’s spell checker and grammar checker – apply what makes sense and ignore what doesn’t. Microsoft’s grammar checker is notorious for missing grammatical mistakes or offering error-riddled suggestions.

2. Use your word processor’s find and replace functions to:

• remove all double spaces after periods;
• make sure that specialized terms are spelled correctly throughout the document and make a list of approved spellings of special terms (your own dictionary, which will make your life easier in the future); and
• get rid of contractions in formal documents (search for the apostrophes).

3. Read your document carefully. Use a few different techniques to slow yourself down and increase your rate of catching errors:

• Read out loud – to yourself or to someone else. If it sounds funny – it probably has some type of error.
• Read it backwards – go through the document line by line from the bottom to the top. This helps you pay attention to each sentence individually.

4. Cross check all your figures and tables with references in the document, including your table of contents and the figures themselves. After many iterations, errors tend to creep into drafts and what you may refer to in the body of the document as figure 4, has now become figure 6. Checking the legends of figures and tables is essential to make sure that the conclusions in the legend are complementary (not contradictory!!) to the narrative.

Taking these steps should smooth out the draft and make it easier for a professional author’s editor to catch the remaining problems still in the document.

In February, I attended a seminar called “Blogs, podcasts and online syndication” delivered by Dean Owen of BRASS Media through the Alberta Business Link. The Business Link is a not-for-profit business support service provided by the government. They have lots of resources available to entrepreneurs and have a fabulous service called the “Guest Advisor Program”.

I quite like the seminars the Business Link broadcasts through their videoconferencing system. I have attended quite a few of these sessions and find that most of the material is pretty basic, but can be a nice introduction to a wide variety of topics. In fact, their portfolio of offerings has gotten better over the past year. An added incentive is that most of the seminars are free – and you just can’t beat that value!

Sometimes it is difficult to take the time to learn new things when there are a million other things clamouring for your attention. Of course, it is hard to justify going to a course when you aren’t sure if you will actually learn anything – shaking off cynicism can be tough. Keeping in mind Parkinson’s Law, (I’ll paraphrase: ‘work will expand to fill all the time available’) I am trying hard to schedule learning, marketing and exercise commitments into my schedule to ensure that I make time for these important things in my life. A few years ago I decided that I would apply a rule of thumb: if I learnt one new thing per hour from a course or training session then it wasn’t a waste of my time. If I learned two new things in total, the course was a great investment of my time.

But, back to the blogging seminar. . . I learned much more than two things! So – success! In fact, I learned some new words: splogging and flogging. I suppose that I won’t run across these regularly in my writing, but since they explain phenomena in the blogoverse, I thought that I would share them with you:

Splogging: is a term describing blog plagiarists. Sometimes this activity is also called blog scraping. The worst offenders take someone else’s content and re-post it and then earn advertising revenue based on visits to the stolen content. Of course there are degrees of scraping, but basically I have learned that it is naughty blogger behaviour. There are some companies/sites that have automated tools to do this – which expands the problem very quickly.

Flogging: an internet term that describes a fake blog, where a ghostwriter or marketing firm is hired to create content as a marketing tool and misrepresents the voice by pretending to be someone else. See The Consumerist’s article ‘Sony’s PSP blog flog revealed’.

In addition to learning a little bit more about blogging and podcasting from the seminar, I have started to become very interested in the implications of web 2.0 on science teaching, research and commercialization. I think this might become a recurring topic – once I find the time.