Essay editing is one aspect of creating an excellent piece of writing. Even after you carefully do your planning, research the topic and struggle through writing your essay, you will still have to put the finishing touches on it; or as they say, “dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s.” This is essentially what you’ll be doing when proofreading and editing your essay. The importance of editing cannot be underemphasized because having a well-presented and error-free paper is very much part of what makes it excellent and helps one earn a high grade.
This is especially important at the college level when the standards of assessment are much stricter. In fact, you should know that the assessment rubric for college-level writing includes more than simply the content of your essay. Substantial emphasis is placed on the adherence to the expected writing and citation styles and document formatting.
But what if you find yourself in a situation where you have finished your writing but have little to no time to undertake the editing? What should you do if you have a large essay or research paper containing tens of thousands of words? You can save a lot of time by paying a professional and affordable essay editing service to do the tedious task for you.
Whether you are a student looking to pay someone to edit your essay or do the editing for someone else, the following question may naturally come to mind: How much does essay editing cost? How should essay editing be priced? This is what we’ll attempt to answer in this article.
The first thing you should know regarding the question is that there is no single way of pricing an essay editing job. There are options that, on the one hand, allow for greater flexibility and convenience to the person paying for the editing, and on the other, ensure fair remuneration to the person or company doing the editing.
Before we explore the pricing options, let’s examine the factors that can affect the editing price. They are as follows:
- Volume/size of writing: From a general standpoint, here is how this works: the larger the size (word count) of the writing, the higher the editing cost is.
- Type of document: All documents are not equal or should be edited with the same degree of ease or difficulty. The general rule here is that the more complex the document, the higher the editing price. Hence, you can expect that research papers and dissertations will carry a higher price tag than essays and book reviews. Similarly, the price is also affected by the academic level. The cost of editing high school essays can be lower than that of the college-level essays.
- Expected time of completion: Other factors being equal, the time within which the editing should be completed has a significant impact on the price. The shorter the delivery time, the higher the editing cost will be. This is logical since editing may be done by more than one contractor in order not to compromise the quality. By contrast, for longer delivery times, one person can do the editing without rushing it and jeopardizing the quality of the final document.
With these three factors in mind, let’s take a look at the available pricing options:
- Fixed price: As the name suggests, this option comes with a specific set price. The price can be offered by a buyer looking for editing help. In other words, it simply indicates the budget the person has for the task. This pricing option is typically observed on freelance platforms. The beauty of it is that the suitable editors will get to decide whether its worth their time and effort. Ideally, the buyer should set a reasonable price to attract skilled editors.
- Pricing per 1000 words: This is a more popular pricing option. Many paper editing services prefer to price their editing for multi-page research papers and dissertations using this option. For example, the price for editing a PhD dissertation may be as high as 80 USD per 1000 words. By contrast, for a high school essay, it could be as little as 20 USD per 1000 words. A typical price range for college paper editing services is 10-30 USD. Again, the actual price can be higher depending on how the earlier mentioned factors apply to a given situation. If you need editing to be completed with a few days, the price could increase to 40 USD per 1000 words.
- Pricing per word: Another approach to pricing is to state the price per word. This is useful for situations in which the word count for the text is lower than 1000. However, as you may have figured, even this rate can be used to arrive at the per 1000 words pricing rate. In essence, both reveal the same thing.
- Pricing per page: As straightforward as it may appear, this pricing approach for editing documents has many disadvantages, especially for the service buyer. One of its downsides is that as a buyer you can never be certain of how many hours will be required to edit your text. Even if the editor gives an estimate, it may take actually longer, thereby surprising you with a higher-than-expected cost. Unless there is a clear understanding of the pricing terms, problems can always arise. For example, font sizes can be changed to spread the content across more pages thereby increasing the price. Another disadvantage of this approach is that the editor is incentivized to take more time to complete the editing task to be paid more.
The most important thing to know is that there are factors that influence the price. You simply have to look at how similar editing jobs are priced in the market where you participate as a buyer or essay editing service provider. With the pricing information you obtain, you can make an informed decision as to what rate you are OK with for a specific editing task.
