Editing for Academia

Who needs linguistic services for academia?

The short answer: everyone! But seriously, most academics are not native English speakers. Even those who are, didn’t necessarily specialise in writing or linguistics. Being an expert in your field is difficult enough as it is — without having to combine that with attaining native-speaker level in your second language. However, an academic editing service will help you achieve the level of quality that you need to get your papers published.

If you work in academia and want to get published in English, you’ll probably need an academic editing service. At QuickSilver, we believe academic editing should be done by experts. All our editors are degree-holding native speakers of English, or Spanish, with wide experience in both academia and business editing. Our premium editing service involves two different editors reviewing your manuscript.

What does academic editing include?

Our academic editing offering (available in English and Spanish) includes:

Academic Editing – Get Published!

First of all, as the author you need to be an active participant in this process, since you remain the expert in the subject matter. We are merely helping you package it, in the culturally, and academically correct way.

QuickSilver’s suite of linguistic services for academia keeps growing. Having worked for universities, business schools and academic institutions for over 15 years now (see references at the bottom of this page), we have expanded our service offering. These are some of the things we offer:

Services for academia

Types of documents

How does the process work?

Firstly, if you have already agreed a publication date with a Journal – please let us know when, and where you intend to publish.

Step 1:

We briefly skim the text to familiarize ourselves with the contents, and to determine whether the text is “eligible” for this service. In other words, in some texts the English or content is too difficult to understand, so they need a re-translation or a total reworking of the content before they can be edited.

Outcome: The outcome of this “initial intake” is a brief report in which we:

• Give general recommendations on what the paper needs and estimate the amount of time for this service, or
• Recommend a re-translation, a complete re-write, or whatever else it might need if it is not close enough to being publishable.

That’s delicate, so we can talk about it…

Step 2:

We read the text more carefully and correct any “cosmetic” changes needed (spelling, punctuation, etc.). At this stage we will make ourselves more familiar with the content so we can start working on specific points that need improvement in terms of clarity, organisation, etc.

Outcome: The outcome of this step would be an edited text, and a series of talking points with the customer. At this point, we:

• Send you the text with questions, and then
• Videoconference with you to clarify and find solutions.

Speaking directly to the customer is almost always essential, unless just a few brief corrections are needed. Sometimes the language or organisation is unclear and we might need you to explain why you wrote certain things, in that specific way, etc.

Step 3:

We videoconference with you to discuss points. At this stage, we can discuss details and determine where certain content should be moved. It’s common to have to shift content around to make the sections logical, yet concise.

Outcome: The outcome of this step would depend on the process. At times, the customer has to make changes and return the text to us. Other times, we make the changes and have the customer confirm them.

Our references

We have prepared manuscripts for the following journals:

More information: Academic Editing and Translation