3 Reasons Why Humans Are Still Better Than Computers At Academic Editing

Editing is one field in which 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:

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 so much more valuable than the electronic kind.

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.

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 plagiarising yourself right in your own paper and no grammar checking website or program will catch it.

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 the best way to ensure your brilliant ideas and insights don’t end up lost in the circuitry.