You've done the experiments, you've written the paper, and you've submitted to your top choice journal.
"Great work," the reviewers write. "But the English needs improvement before it can be published."
So you spend hundreds of dollars to have a large editing firm polish your English.
Except here's the dirty little secret: Of those hundreds of dollars, do you know how much the firm actually pays the graduate student editor?
About $35.
Isn't that insane? It's no wonder then that these graduate students don't spend more than 5 or 6 hours editing it. They'd be crazy to work at sub-minimum wage levels for very long.
And that's the second problem with these big editing firms. Their editors aren't actually trained copy-editors, and they don't last in these jobs for very long because they're so undervalued. You'll never be able to develop a long-term working relationship with the editor. Every time you need another paper edited, you'll get a completely new editor, who may be better or worse, but certainly won't be very familiar with your work.
You'll never get to develop a long-term relationship with an editor who could get to know your research and help you communicate its full impact to your peers.
It makes you wonder where most of that editing fee is going and how much you can expect to get back.
In my experience, editing an average 6000 word paper that was written by non-native English speakers takes around 10-15 hours to do it properly, sometimes more. That means catching obvious grammar errors, rewriting sentences to make them easier to understand, adjusting the manuscript's organization to improve its flow, and writing detailed commentary to help the authors understand where their data and arguments could be improved.
Editing is a process and it's something I enjoy doing. Try Advanced English Editing and see the difference.
"Great work," the reviewers write. "But the English needs improvement before it can be published."
So you spend hundreds of dollars to have a large editing firm polish your English.
Except here's the dirty little secret: Of those hundreds of dollars, do you know how much the firm actually pays the graduate student editor?
About $35.
Isn't that insane? It's no wonder then that these graduate students don't spend more than 5 or 6 hours editing it. They'd be crazy to work at sub-minimum wage levels for very long.
And that's the second problem with these big editing firms. Their editors aren't actually trained copy-editors, and they don't last in these jobs for very long because they're so undervalued. You'll never be able to develop a long-term working relationship with the editor. Every time you need another paper edited, you'll get a completely new editor, who may be better or worse, but certainly won't be very familiar with your work.
You'll never get to develop a long-term relationship with an editor who could get to know your research and help you communicate its full impact to your peers.
It makes you wonder where most of that editing fee is going and how much you can expect to get back.
In my experience, editing an average 6000 word paper that was written by non-native English speakers takes around 10-15 hours to do it properly, sometimes more. That means catching obvious grammar errors, rewriting sentences to make them easier to understand, adjusting the manuscript's organization to improve its flow, and writing detailed commentary to help the authors understand where their data and arguments could be improved.
Editing is a process and it's something I enjoy doing. Try Advanced English Editing and see the difference.
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