Academic honesty

Is it cheating to get help with your dissertation?

No — with one critical caveat.

The caveat? Is the thinking yours? Do you understand what is on the page? Restructuring, being told an argument does not hold and what would fix it, having a passage rewritten as a worked example, building an outline detailed enough that filling it in is mechanical — all of that is legitimate, and heavy intervention is not the problem.

What is not legitimate is anyone writing work you submit for academic credit, or concealing help you were required to declare. Institutional policies vary and change often, and knowing your program's rules is your responsibility.

The distinction that settles almost every case is what you are claiming. In business and commercial writing you claim the output — that the text says what you meant, and is true as you understand truth. On a dissertation you claim the origin — that the thinking is yours.

Editing can make text say what you meant. It cannot make you have thought of it.

What universities say themselves about editors and third-party help

We use one university's guidebook here as typical of many. Capella University's Doctoral Publications Guidebook — version 7.2, effective April 2021 — has a section on working with an outside editor, and we quote it throughout this section as a fair representative of what many universities tell their doctoral candidates. It is unusually explicit. It is not unusual in substance.

A doctorate is a fairly standardized product, and so is the guidance that goes with it. The categories this guidebook uses are ordinary publishing practice, and the advice it gives is, in our experience, what the guidance of many universities comes down to. Your own may say less, or say it somewhere harder to find, and it will often not say anything very different. Check what yours says — and if it says nothing at all, treat what follows as a reasonable picture of what is standard.

What it does not do is treat hiring an editor as a problem to be discouraged. It assumes you may, and sets about telling you how to choose well.

It separates three kinds of help, and the distinction is worth having before you spend anything.

• Word processing specialist. Production. Spacing, page numbering, margins, and the formatting of tables, figures, and headings. Largely superseded by use of a good AI. We recommend which to use and provide the right prompts, both for free. Needs a little human review of output — which we provide, and not for free.

• Proofreader or copy editor. Sentence level. Misspellings, misplaced modifiers, sources cited in the text but missing from the reference list, citations put into proper style. Again, largely superseded by AI, and again we provide recommendations for which AI models to use and prompts, both for free. Needs a little human review of output, which we provide...not for free.

• Content or substantive editor. Grammar, but also the manuscript's overall organization and development. We provide a super-set of this — see Advanced Editing directly below.

Those are three different jobs, and the third is not a more thorough version of the first two. Engaging the wrong kind of help is among the more expensive mistakes a candidate makes, because it is normally discovered after the money is gone.

What we actually offer, beyond our free services:

• Advanced editing. What the above list calls content and substantive editing. The scope is much the same; the difference is one of order. We read everything relevant, discern what the text currently argues, and then work until we grok the whole — the dissertation's intent — before we touch a sentence. An editor who starts at the first page and works down can only correct what is in front of them at the time, and structural faults are not visible at sentence level — they become visible only once you can see what a chapter set out to do and where it stopped doing it. In most cases that implies a second pass. That is not how we work, and that difference is what the word advanced is carrying. The approach is very different, and results usually come faster and more on point. It is also one of the reasons we do not bill by the word.

• Coaching. Not on the list at all — and it is our main business. Every one of the three categories above describes work done to a document. Coaching is work related to addressing issues with the actual content, interacting both with a person and with their thinking. Not infrequently, part of it is being a sounding board: somebody who has read your material, understands what you are trying to argue, and will think it through with you out loud. That matters more than it sounds, because your Chair is assessing you. Every admission of confusion is information handed to the person who decides whether you pass — which is not a criticism of Chairs, it is structural. A sounding board is somebody you can be confused in front of at no cost, and who can take the time and effort to be of real, on-point and material help.

A candidate who needs coaching and arranges editing instead has paid for the wrong kind of work, usually at length and at some expense — and the guidebook's list will not warn them, because the category is not in it. What the difference actually amounts to is worth ten minutes of effort to identify what you really need before you hire anybody.

Then the guidebook — rightly — tells candidates how to verify the bona fides of whomever they are about to pay. It states plainly that the university does not recommend or endorse outside editors, so the research is yours to do. Ask for client referrals. Confirm the person has worked on complex academic material before. Make sure they know APA and your institution's own requirements. And then this:

That is right, and it applies to us — to the listings. You can find morethananeditor.com on directories and listings here and there, and none of them are proof of anything at all.

What is on this site is a different matter. Over sixty pages of our actual thinking are here, free — no paywall, no freewall, no signup of any sort. That is not a listing. It is the evidence, and you can test it before you contact anybody. Read a page on something you already understand well and see whether we get it right. Read one on something you are stuck on and see whether it helps. Ask us a question of your own and see what comes back.

Publishing your thinking is expensive in a good many ways. Writing more than 180,000 words (and growing…)? More than twelve hundred hyperlinks? All of it built so the pieces actually connect? Very expensive. It also heavily exposes us. Anyone can read it, check it, and find us wrong — and it stays up either way. Mills do not do it, because they have nothing to publish. And as far as we can tell, very few legitimate services do it either — what you generally find instead is a description of services, which tells you nothing whatever about whether the people behind it can think.

Prose is the only thing you can evaluate before paying us, so we have put a great deal of it where you can reach it.

And it is ours. We built the servers this site runs on, we built the site itself, and we wrote every word on it. No agency, no content service, no freelancers. If you know technology? We list our whole stack — go and look at what this site is built on, and judge that too. That matters more than it may appear to, because it is a demonstration of our own competence in multiple fields, and especially in tech. As for the text on the site? Copy written by a marketing agency tells you about the agency and nothing else. What you are reading was written by the people who would be working on your dissertation. So you really can judge us on it — and you should.

That is also why we publish references rather than testimonials, and why we would rather you checked.

The test that still works is harder to fake than a style question. Ask what they will do about your problem — not your commas. Ask how they would find out what is actually wrong with a stalled chapter, and who would do that work. The first question — a lookup question — has one right answer. The second? Addressing a live issue? Does not.

Academic honesty is important. Very seriously important. Without it there is no academic integrity. It is foundational to the whole idea of performing research and also providing credentials that represent the truth about your level of skills and knowledge. How can you trust a degree someone presents if they do not earn it themselves? How can you trust research that was faked? How can you trust professors who ignore facts in favor of untruths that are to their benefit or just based on their personal opinions? Academic dishonesty cheapens all academic work to some extent and your home institution's more – and that affects your own interests as well. And in terms of your own interests: if you are caught being academically dishonest it can cost you a term, a whole thesis — or, later in life, bring a career crashing down.

Where AI is concerned, honesty is rarely about whether you used a tool. It is about whether your work is defensible:

What does this mean for you?

It means we will help to ensure that all of your work is your own. We will work hard to ensure there is no inadvertent plagiarism in your work — no accidental cut-and-pastes, no borrowing of others' work without attribution.

If somebody 'helped' you and inserted plagiarized work, we will work with you discreetly and in confidence to eliminate that problem. We will also ensure that any work of others you use is properly quoted, or help you paraphrase it properly — and in either case, properly cited.

We will not write your thesis or article for you. But we will work hard with you to ensure your work is of the best possible quality, and fit for whatever purpose you are creating it for.

Our relationship with you is completely confidential in all circumstances. Whatever may or may not be in your work currently, the only person we will inform of anything that is not right is you.

If you think you may have a plagiarism problem, the time to deal with it is now — before anyone at your school flags it. It is not hard to fix, and working with us you can clean up any issues quickly.

If you are uncertain about the skills involved in handling other people's intellectual property, see our Do I need an editor? page. If you need more help, call us.