3 reasons why humans are still better than computers at academic editing

Editor’s note: This article was reviewed and updated in July 2026 to meet Expert Editor’s latest editorial standards.

Editing is one field where a human touch is still more valuable than an electronic one. In our digital age, it seems logical that editing and proofreading services would become an exclusively digital enterprise. The internet is currently littered with countless free grammar and spell checking tools that promise to offer a thorough review of your writing and put your mind at ease. Before you snap that laptop closed and catch a few hours of sleep before your next dissertation meeting, though, take note: computers don’t really speak English all that well.

Check out three major writing errors that electronic editing and proofreading websites completely missed below:

1. Missing Words

If you decide to leave your academic editing to your computer, you could end up submitting a thesis that includes nonsensical (and unintentionally suspenseful) sentences like this one:

The Enigma Project has been for the people of Sydney.

The most important word in the sentence, the adjective describing what The Enigma Project has been like for the people of Sydney, has been left out. Was the project “great”? Was it “horrible”? The reader has no idea. Try plugging the sentence into any online electronic academic editing website, though, and you’ll find that that it is completely approved and contains “no grammatical errors”. All the software can see is that the sentence has a subject and a verb and adequate punctuation. That’s why academic editing services with a human touch are still more valuable than the electronic kind.

Missing words are particularly common in academic writing because authors frequently revise their sentences mid-thought. A writer might start with “The Enigma Project has been transformative for the people of Sydney,” then decide to reword the sentence, accidentally deleting the key descriptor in the process. The grammar checker sees a structurally plausible sentence and waves it through. A human editor, by contrast, reads for meaning—and immediately notices when a sentence promises information it never delivers.

2. Extra Words

By the time your thesis or dissertation is complete, you will likely have revised and reworked your writing dozens of times. It’s easy to leave fragments of old sentences behind in your writing, and electronic editing and proofreading websites don’t catch the problem.

The following sentence makes perfect sense and has no grammatical errors:

There have been many changes to the Enigma Project since it began.

Now, consider another version in which half of a leftover prepositional phrase “of the” sits in the middle of the sentence. The electronic grammar checking websites didn’t catch it:

There have been of the many changes to the Enigma Project since it began.

Any real person reading the sentence would immediately see that something isn’t computing. If your dissertation is ultimately intended for the discerning eyes of real people, the academic proofreading should be done by a real person with a discerning eye as well.

Extra-word errors become even trickier when the leftover fragment happens to be a real word that fits grammatically in its new position—even if it changes the meaning entirely. Consider a sentence like “The results do not suggest a not significant correlation.” A grammar checker may flag nothing, because every individual word is valid and the syntax is technically acceptable. But a human editor will recognise that a stray “not” has crept in, most likely from an earlier draft that read “do not suggest a significant correlation,” and will flag it immediately. In high-stakes academic work, a single leftover word like this can reverse a conclusion.

3. Repeated Sentences

The nature of academic writing means a lot of cutting and pasting of your ideas until they’re in just the right order. It can be very easy to hit “Copy” instead of “Cut” when moving around your sentences. This can lead to repeated content—especially for lengthy writing projects. Without even knowing it, you could end up repeating yourself in your own paper, and most grammar checking websites and programs won’t catch it—grammar checkers evaluate each sentence for syntax and spelling, not for whether you have already said the same thing elsewhere in the document.

Here is a straightforward example of how this looks in practice:

The study found that sleep deprivation significantly affected cognitive performance. Participants who slept fewer than six hours scored markedly lower on memory recall tests. The study found that sleep deprivation significantly affected cognitive performance.

A grammar checker processes each sentence in isolation and sees three perfectly formed sentences—no red flags. A human editor reads the paragraph as a whole and immediately spots that the first and third sentences are identical, interrupting the flow and adding no new information. In a 10,000-word dissertation, where the same argument might be developed across multiple chapters, duplicate sentences can easily slip dozens of pages apart, making them even harder for the writer to notice on their own—but no harder for an experienced human editor to catch.

Self-plagiarism of this kind can also raise flags during institutional plagiarism checks if the same paper is submitted more than once in different courses, making it a genuine academic integrity concern, not just a stylistic one.

Note: Academic integrity policies vary by institution — check your university’s guidelines to understand how self-plagiarism is defined and what the consequences may be at your institution.

Why software falls short: the root problem

(Section added in 2026 for context.)

All three of the errors above share a common cause: grammar-checking software is designed to evaluate sentences at the level of syntax and spelling, not comprehension. It checks whether words and punctuation conform to a set of learnable rules. It does not ask, “Does this sentence actually make sense? Does it say what the writer intended? Does it contradict something written three pages earlier?” Those are questions that require understanding. While modern AI-powered writing tools have meaningfully extended beyond basic syntax checking, significant contextual and semantic limitations remain—and for now, a trained human reader is still the most reliable check on whether your writing says what you mean.

This is worth keeping in mind the next time a grammar tool displays a reassuring green tick beside your work. A clean bill of grammatical health is not the same as a clean bill of communicative health. For academic writing, where clarity, precision, and logical consistency can determine whether years of research are properly understood and credited, the difference matters enormously.

It looks like editing and proofreading companies won’t go extinct quite yet, no matter how smart computers are. Academic editing services by real living breathing professionals remain one of the most reliable ways to ensure your ideas and insights don’t end up lost in the circuitry.