For most of us, the dissertation is a daunting experience in one way or another. You spend months, if not years, plugging away at what seems like an interminable project in the marathon that is your doctoral program. But oh, the feeling of absolute accomplishment once you complete it and stand before your committee to defend it! Finally, you have crossed the finish line and move on to postdoctoral life. NOT! Now, you have to put your dissertation through format review and hope for dear life that you dotted every “i” and crossed every single “t” in your 200-page masterpiece!
Why Is APA Dissertation Formatting So Difficult?
Most of the time, the dissertation is written in phases across a long period of time—time that is usually split among your other competing interests. You may still have remaining course requirements, be completing a clinical internship, or have a job or a family. In addition to having impossibly busy lives, most doctoral candidates cannot write their dissertation in one sweep, even if they wanted to! Indeed, one often puts the writing to rest when collecting and analyzing data, when waiting on committee feedback, or during those inevitable periods when one’s general motivation for the dissertation itself wanes. Due to the many breaks doctoral students take from writing coupled with the sheer length of the document itself, the final product is often left rife with formatting inconsistencies. APA rules you were fastidiously following at the beginning have now been forgotten, the spelling of authors’ names has somehow shifted between Chapters 1 and 5, you didn’t notice that on p. 57 you left two spaces between words instead of one (Don’t worry, your university format reviewer will!), and oh, one more thing—on top of all these nefarious APA rules, your university has asked you to follow their own dissertation formatting guide too! At this point all you want is to graduate, not spend weeks or months toiling with all these technicalities. Don’t worry—at TTE, we are experts in APA dissertation editing and are here to help!
Why Hire an APA Dissertation Editor?
Despite how maniacal APA rules can get, most doctoral programs do little to train students how to adhere to them. Thus, students are left to figure out the rules themselves and often, the dissertation is their first experience using APA Style. Additionally, many students never hear a mention of university-specific formatting guides from their programs until they are practically on the brink of defense! Fortunately, an APA editor can assist with all of the APA Style and dissertation technicalities and let you focus on your scholarship. This way, you will not have to worry about widows and orphans in your paragraphing, outline levels and pagination, or citing those pesky technical reports or gray literature.
Additionally, at TTE, our APA editors can work quickly without sacrificing attention to detail and are sensitive to the tight deadlines surrounding the dissertation process. What might take a matter of weeks or months of pleading with your committee or formatting-savvy friends for APA editing help can be completed in a matter of days. This may make the difference between graduating the same semester that you defend and having to wait another semester, if you do not pass university format review.
Proofreading your own work is difficult! When we know our own work too well, we often fail to notice that we are skipping over words that are not really on the page, as our minds have filled in the blanks. Additionally, when it is our own work, we can read the same sentence over and over again and fail to notice glaring typos and misspellings, again due to being unable to see our own work with fresh eyes. Fortunately, a professional APA editor will be reading your work for the very first time and is trained to read closely to catch all of these little errors.
APA dissertation editing can also save you money. In the long run, the costs spent hiring an APA editor are typically less than the costs associated with not passing format review (universities often charge if you have to go through format review more than once) and the costs associated with maintaining your matriculation for yet another semester. So, if you’d like to sit back, relax, and put your formatting fears to rest, consider TTE for your APA dissertation editing needs.