![]() If the proofreader is a trained professional who is an expert in the English language and a specialist in your subject area, he or she will have the skills to correct and polish your grammar, spelling and punctuation, determine if your references are accurate, thorough and consistent, and ensure that your writing meets the high standards expected in your discipline and field. This means that a proofreader will be able to focus on exactly what your text does say and catch ambiguities and errors that you, as the author well aware of what you want to say, may read right over without noticing. He or she will almost certainly not be as familiar with your research as you are and in most cases will have no predetermined idea about what you are trying to communicate. Why are scientific editing and academic proofreading important for academic and scientific authors? First and foremost, a proofreader brings a fresh and ideally objective perspective to your writing. No author creates a perfect text without reviewing, reflecting on and revising what he or she has written, and academic proofreading and scientific editing are extremely important of this process. ![]() When done carefully, correctly and thoroughly, academic proofreading can make the difference between writing that communicates successfully with its intended readers and writing that does not. If university or department guidelines indicate that a specific format must be used for any one or more of these elements – superscript Arabic numerals for numerical references, for instance – your system of distinction will have to accommodate those requirements.Įffective academic proofreading is absolutely vital to the production of high-quality scholarly and professional documents. In addition, if you happen to be using a numerical system of references, you will need to distinguish reference numbers from the footnotes and/or endnotes you use for supplementary material, so numerical references could, for example, be placed in square brackets. The note numbers usually take the form of superscript Arabic numerals, but the numbers are sometimes placed in square brackets or parentheses (1) instead, and if you need to use both footnotes and endnotes, you will need to use more than one kind of numerical indicator: superscript Arabic numerals for footnotes, for instance, and Arabic numerals in parentheses for endnotes. Notes of each kind (footnotes or endnotes) are numbered separately and appear in numerical order in the main text of a thesis either in one consecutive series or beginning with a new series for each chapter. It may help to remember that footnotes will often receive more attention or more immediate attention from readers than endnotes do simply because they appear on the same page as the information to which they refer in the main text. It may be, however, that you will need to use both kinds of notes in your thesis – one kind for supplementary critical material and the other for textual variants, for instance – and if that is the case, you will need to decide which kind will work best for each purpose. Your university, department and/or thesis committee may indicate a preference for footnotes or endnotes, so do check before making a decision on this, but, as a general rule, if your notes are going to be long, they are usually better as endnotes because long footnotes can result in more notes than main text on individual pages of your thesis chapters, which makes for an unattractive layout. ![]() Footnotes appear at the bottom of pages throughout a thesis, whereas endnotes appear either at the end of each chapter or at the end of the entire thesis in its final matter. ![]() If you decide that you do need to use notes, you will also need to decide whether footnotes, endnotes or a combination of the two will be most appropriate for your thesis. In the first case, footnotes or endnotes can be included solely for the purpose of providing references, but they can and often do contain supplementary material as well in the second, notes cannot be used for references alone, but the supplementary material provided in them can certainly contain references of the same kind as those used in the main text of the thesis. In some documentation styles (Chicago-style references provided via notes and a bibliography, for instance) citations are provided in either footnotes or endnotes, whereas in others (author–date or numerical references, for example) footnotes and/or endnotes are used predominantly for supplementary material. Whether and how you use them depends on the requirements and preferences of your university, discipline, department and thesis committee, as well as on the nature and needs of your particular thesis. Footnotes and endnotes can be used for a variety of purposes in a thesis, though in all cases they should only be used when necessary.
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