Seven Editing Tips For Your Masters’ Dissertation

You might be an extremely talented student, who knows his academics and concepts at the back of his hand, but when it comes to dissertations, even the best make mistakes at some places. When the piece of work in consideration is a Masters’ dissertation, then errors are bound to happen. A Master’s dissertation can exceed over fifteen thousand words and some places can be overlooked within the paper even after countless repetitions. Here are a few tips for editing your Master’s dissertation so that your paper remains flawless:

• Do Not Go Overboard With The Editing. Many students may go overboard with the process while editing. Instead of focusing simply on correcting the errors within the grammar, paraphrasing, paragraphing, idioms, spelling and punctuation, they start changing the entire format of their dissertation paper.
• Pay Close Attention To The Writing Style. Almost all of the dissertations have an unspoken rule of adhering to a specific writing standard from the beginning to the end. Your writing style in the dissertation should be same as your writing style in the proposal that you submitted initially. If you followed a Harvard style, you should proofread your dissertation to ensure that your writing style remains consistent.
• Keep Your Tracking Changes On. The best idea when editing your Master’s dissertation is to keep your tracking changes on. In this case, you can always go back to all the edits that you made instead of vigorously searching your entire dissertation looking for one edit you had made fifteen minutes ago. Tracking changes and adding comments throughout your dissertation documents can help the process of editing and proofreading easier.
• Eliminate Unnecessary Jargon And Inappropriate Words. Most of the standards set by educational institutions require the student to keep the writing flow simple, comprehendible and relatable. For this purpose, most institutions require the students to eliminate unnecessary jargons and inappropriate words out of the dissertation when editing and going through their work revising for the last time.
• Follow A Proper Format Of Citations And References. A dissertation that does not follow a proper format of citation and references can be an instant turn-down for students and the academic supervisors alike. You are bound to make mistakes when you have to cite around dozens references but your mistakes can instantly crumble the reliability of the research in front of the judging committee. Review your citations and references for this reason to ensure they are following a proper format throughout.
• Check For Logical And Technical Errors. Logical and technical errors are a more common sight to behold than one can even imagine. Students make various mistakes when it comes to formulas and numerical digits. It takes a second to turn a 500 figure into a 5000 and vice versa and you might also be one of such students making a similar mistake. Before turning your paper in, make sure to edit all the logical and technical errors.
• Ensure Your Dissertation Obeys The Rule Of Ethics. One of the mistakes that can require extensive editing is ethics. This case is quite common in medical or engineering related dissertations where the subject of observation is a living organism, for example: a rat. If you believe you carried out a similar observation, you will need to run your dissertation with your supervisor to make sure that your dissertation is not breaking any code of ethics in any way.

Apart from these, make sure that the figures and tables are correctly formatted. Also add page numbering, headings and correct pagination and remove all the extraneous spaces. A Masters dissertation is an important paper and you need to take all the measures to make sure that it is correct.

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