For this project, I worked with a student getting their doctorate in education on the 23-page lit review portion of their dissertation. As you can see, this student needed help streamlining the wording and smoothing out the flow of the paper. They also needed help integrating the sources in the in-text citations with the reference list and formatting the citations to be compliant with APA style.

The highlighting here is the writer’s.

Here, I’ve been fairly hands-on in terms of helping the writer with word choice. Reporting the results of previous research requires a varied choice of verbs so as not to repeat the phrasing, “X and Y (2005) state…”

After working so hard to write up their research, students often have difficulty knowing what needs to be cut so that their paper maintains a consistent flow. An outside set of eyes can really help the structure of a lengthy academic paper.

APA style can be quirkly, particularly when it comes to reference list citations. This student needed help with the finer details of capitalization and punctuation within each citation. The highlighted bits here are sources included in the reference list but not referred to in the text — a discrepancy between the two is very common when a writer is dealing with 30 or more sources.