Your academic writing is important to you. These few years that you spent in academia will help to shape the rest of your life as you continue your studies into the world of work. So, then, why do you need a service that charges for proofreading your papers and reports?
Mark Twain, the penname of a famous writer Samuel Clemens, was known for his abrupt and candid attitude when it came to ‘telling people like it is’. You can read more about him here.
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers.” – Mark Twain, 1893.
This makes you think. He means that you’d be an idiot if you didn’t employ someone to check through your written English. Twain understood that we, as humans, have many faults. We’re not super beings of the planet so we need to have our work checked by others because when we write, we write for the sake of communicating something and not for checking its accuracy.
Twain is also said to have commented:
And then there is that other thing: when you think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don’t know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes — but not often enough — the printer’s proof-reader saves you — & offends you — with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right — it doesn’t say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn’t light the jets.
– Letter to Sir Walter Bessant, 22 February 1898
What did he mean? When you’ve written something of your own, as opposed to reading a newspaper article or a chapter in a book, your mind will fill in words that are missing or fail to notice irrelevant sentences. When you employ a proofreader they will review your work, check for misspellings, grammar issues, word choice and punctuation errors. If there are sentences in your paper that are difficult to understand then the proofreader will make a note of this for you; you should clear these up before printing, because if your proofreader didn’t understand what you were attempting to portray then you can be sure the marker (your professor) wouldn’t be able to either.
Uniproof has highly qualified and experience proofreaders who will check through your written texts for consistency and tone of your arguments. If you want to ensure the time you spend on your degree course is productive and help you to achieve all that you can in your future career, then get in touch with us or click on the blue order button in the top corner on the right.
You can view some of the original letters that Twain wrote on this page. Or, if you want to see what he thought about grammar, wordiness and composition then take a look at this page. The latter includes some interesting thoughts on verboseness that Strunk and White believe: reduce the clunkiness of your written words by writing in short, easy to digest sentences to avoid boring or confusing the reader.