Check the whole
You have finally arrived at the end game. You will need to have been through your final chapters several times without your supervisor. Your supervisor might read your final draft once - so please make sure you choose the time to submit this carefully. They will need several weeks to do this. Whatever last changes they recommend, please implement them - leave yourself time in your plan to implement them.
For your part, you need to proof read your final draft several times before submission. If your language of submission is not your first language, you might, if you can afford it, pay a professional proof reader, if your University regulations allow. This is not necessary and it is a form of privilege to be able to afford such a service. Ask friends and family. They are looking for typos, they don’t need to understand it. Give a chapter here and there to other networks you can trust for reading. Parcel it up.
If you do want to hire a professional proof reader, Academic Coach offers this service. Please see here for our competitive rates.
This stage is hard as you just want it over with but we are in the final stretch and we are making this as professional as we can. First impressions count enormously. If there are lots of typos, misplaced paragraphs, mis-spellings and the text is sloppy, you create the impression your work is sloppy. And we don’t want that.
When you come to your final read through before submission, it is a tricky point emotionally. You are out of energy, and you just want it over with yet simultaneously you are afraid to let go and submit. This is completely normal. Recognise these feelings as the inevitable end to a 3 year research project. You want to avoid judgment (which is the examination) and yet you want it over with because you don’t want to spend another single minute on this text.
At this point in the read through we are not interrogating intellectual ideas, linkages or sentence structure and so on. All that is done. We are trying to read it as though we are coming fresh to it.
Give yourself a few days away from your thesis before you do the last run through to get a little distance. Pay particular attention to data points, charts, tables and titles when you are proof reading it, because you have probably skimmed this text in particular a thousand times without really reading it.
Run the spell check. This can take up to two hours in a long document, so be prepared that this final stage will involve long hours at the computer, and may take a fortnight to complete.
Make sure the text is as professional looking as it can be. This is no time to turn in sloppy work after all the hard intellectual grind.
When I have reached this stage I will:
RUN THE SPELL CHECK;
Proof read the entire thesis making sure that there are no errors, typos, or other infelicities in the text, titles, references and data points;
Make checkmarks against the errors, typos and so on;
Amend errors on the computer;
Give it to someone else to check typos for you. It is very hard to get them all by yourself!
RUN THE SPELL CHECK AGAIN;
Submit according to the departmental regulations.