How do we edit at EduWrite?

Jayashree Rammohan / September 2021

There are three components to any paper/document:

1. The language and grammar
2. The structure
3. The content

Our job is to correct any language and grammar issues without tampering with the author’s voice. It is also our job to indicate or comment on sentences or paragraphs that are not clear or are difficult to understand. We call this ‘red-flagging’… somewhat like an alert.

To eliminate bias and opinion, we may ask the author to provide suitable evidentiary support for any claims they might make.

Next, we look at the structure of the paper.

Sometimes, authors will indicate which journals they would like to submit their paper to. In such cases, it is a good idea for the editor to visit the journal website and take a look at some of the sample papers. This gives us a better format to work with and our comments to authors will also be more specific.

In other cases, we may indicate a suitable framework for the author to follow, based on other research papers.

Finally, the content.

This is one part which is the responsibility of the author. The author has to develop a strong research question, which adds to existing literature and is relevant. All copyright issues, extent of similarity and permissions required, need to be addressed by the author.

Given that editors may not always be domain experts, they would not be able to judge the accuracy of the methods used and the quality of the analysis done by the researchers.

I hope this helps clarify the role that editors play.