What do I do once I receive my edited document?

After your document has been edited, you will receive an email with a link to download the edited document.

The editor has made changes to your document using ‘Track Changes’ in Word. This means that you only have to accept or ignore the changes that are made in the text one by one.

It is also possible to accept all changes at once. However, we strongly advise you not to do so for the following reasons:

• You can learn much by looking at what mistakes you have made.

• The editors do not only change the text, they also place comments when sentences or sometimes even entire paragraphs are unclear. We therefore advise you to read through these comments and take into account your editor’s tips and suggestions.

• Because of the many changes, sometimes there may be double spaces, double periods, or other minor mistakes in a sentence. Checking the changes one by one, you can easily detect these minor errors.

We have written a manual in which we explain step by step how ‘Track Changes’ works. You can also find an example of how an edited document looks here.

Does Scribbr provide a clean copy of the edited document?

No, we do not provide you with a clean copy. You will always receive a file edited with tracked changes.

We do this for two main reasons:

1. In most papers, there are sentences that the editor cannot edit without additional information from the author. In these cases, your editor will provide guidance but leave you to implement the feedback. If we were to simply accept the changes for you, then these issues would be left unaddressed.

2. We believe students should be accountable for their work. Our editors can correct language errors and coach you to be a better writer. However, the end product belongs to you and should reflect your ideas and decisions.

​What if my document contains redundant changes?

You might come across redundant changes, where a word or punctuation mark is replaced by the same word or punctuation mark.

Changes like these occur during the routine editing process, so there’s no cause for concern. There are two common reasons you might see such changes:

1. Our editors work in the “simple markup” view, so they can ensure they don’t introduce errors during the editing process. However, this means that editors sometimes delete a word and then retype it, and Word’s track changes will count this as an edit.

2. This can also happen when editors use spell check or other advanced editing tools, which allow the editor to review multiple instances of a word at once. Tools like this enable us to deliver a consistent edit, but they sometimes result in “unnecessary” changes.

If you see redundant changes in your text, you can simply accept or reject them.

What if I don’t agree with edits made by my editor?

Of course you may also find changes in your text that you do not agree with. Our editors are language experts and do their best to help you, however, sometimes you may have a different idea of what you would like your text to look like.

Should you encounter changes that you do not agree with, you can simply reject them using the “Track Changes” function.

Why does my document indicate that my editor worked overnight?

Your editor may be located in a different time zone than you. The timestamps in your edited document do not show this. This is why it might seem like the editor only worked on your order during the night, when it was actually daytime in the editor’s location.

Furthermore, some of our editors simply prefer to work in the evening or at night because they are more productive then or because they are working on other projects during the day.

In general, the time stamps in the document are not an indicator of editing quality.