As a professor, researcher, or PhD, your job involves carrying out research, as well as transmitting your knowledge to your students and supporting them in their education, learning, exploring new ideas, pushing the limits of your knowledge, and sharing your results with the academic community and the world outside it.
This is a lot of work, and you are highly qualified for it.
What is not part of your job description and should not consume too much of your time is writing in perfect English and polishing your research articles so that they meet the standards for publication.
If your native language is not English, this could be a very time-consuming task for you and, no matter how much time you invest in it, the result could still be not good enough for publication.
What I am about to say applies to all sorts of services, not specifically to editing. Whatever service you need, when you are debating whether to hire a professional or try to do it yourself, you should always consider a few factors to determine what the best solution is.
Let’s take an everyday example.
If your sink was leaking, you could either call a plumber or try to fix the leak by yourself. If you are the kind of person who is good at and enjoys fixing things and if you also own the right tools, trying to fix it by yourself might be a good idea. However, if you are like me and don’t even own a tool box, you will probably not think twice about calling a plumber, because trying to fix it by yourself would mean:
- buying at least a few tools,
2. spending a considerable amount of time watching YouTube tutorials about it,
3. then probably ending up with a sink that is not properly fixed and needing to call a plumber anyway.
So you will waste both money and time.
And this is the key issue here – when it comes to work, we should all learn to delegate and optimize our time.
Proofreading services are a very wise use of your research funds. Think about how much time you would spend trying to write your articles in perfect English, and reading them over and over again only to have a mediocre result that still needs proofreading anyway.
And then think of how much more productively you could spend this time by doing what you are qualified for: researching, teaching, studying etc.
Doing what you are qualified for is the most effective use of your time. This is why we should all delegate to other experts when some task is beyond us – unless you have a lot of extra time on your hands, which is hardly ever the case if you are an academic.
A professional proofreader can correct your papers a hundred times more efficiently and can guarantee that your research papers will convey their content clearly and effortlessly.
Academics who work hard on their research should not let language get in the way. If your content is valuable and you believe it is important to make it available for a wide audience, then it deserves the best possible presentation.
Make your research available across international borders so other researchers can read it, understand it, and learn from it across the globe.
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