I know some people who have a PhD and their English skills are very weak, both oral and written.
I wonder how these people wrote a dissertation. Is it considered OK to have someone else “edit/clean up” a dissertation if your English is weak? I assume that’s not allowed.
I once had a secretary who worked part time. In her own time, but on the office typewriter (I turned a blind eye to the source of the paper) she typed up theses and dissertations.
When I read some, I was astounded at the poor grammar, spelling and construction. She told me that although she was supposed to type them as they were written, she did correct some of the worst errors. How those students ever got a degree I never could fathom.
They were at a local college - not Oxbridge.
Dissertation editing services are fine and appreciated.
nb: I am an author whose work has been published in scientific journals after it was edited for grammar, sentence structure, and word usage.
Credit must, of course, be given to the editors of the dissertation. This is very important.
When I was a TA in college, one of my duties was to correct freshman-level exams. There was one in which the answer to the essay question was so badly written, I showed it to a colleague; he called it “Caveman English.”
Two years later, the author of the essay and I were in a class where everyone had to read everyone else’s term paper. His was the best of the lot!
Sure, I believe in personal growth. But to go from Caveman English to Churchillian prose in two years is a bit … suspicious. :dubious:
I earned Independent Study credit in Psychology for editing a friend’s PhD dissertation. I needed one more credit hour and did not want to take a whole 3 or 4-hour class. He needed an editor, so he got his advisor to sign off and took me on as a “student.” I met him in a psychopharmacology class that we took together, so he knew I was qualified to at least quasi-understand the content, but my mission was to check spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. It was a study to determine if amphetamine use caused permanent changes in the brain in rats and cats. Short answer was: sort of, but not really.
Nice to know that 6th grade English is not required for a PhD. What a great country America has become!
Wait–what? Sixth grade English? Typically, dissertations and theses are required to conform to MLA style, which requires meticulously documented source references and are usually indexed and so forth. The writing style required is far more complex and difficult than sixth grade English.
The writer doesn’t need to know 6th grade English. Only the editor.
I see nothing wrong with using a copy editor. Some people have the knowledge to get the PhD and some people have the skills to construct a coherent and eloquent sentence. It is not necessarily a prerequisite that these skills exist in the same individual. If it did, they would all be English PhDs.
And when American students study overseas, they are generally offered similar options. Indeed, it’s not unusual for PhD programs in non-Anglophone countries to be taught in English.
But when these people graduate and get a job, there is no longer an editor around to “fix” their English.
Of course most big universities don’t seem to care if their professors can speak decent English. I worked with a guy who might as well have stayed with Chinese since everyone who worked with him only understood about 10% of what he said . But since he had a PhD he was considered an expert in his subject. Super nice guy though. He took a job elsewhere after a few years.