Three jobs, three prices
The words get used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. Knowing which one you're buying is the difference between paying too much and getting too little.
- Proofreading: the final sweep. Typos, punctuation, inconsistent capitals, a reference list that doesn't match the citations. Nothing structural moves.
- Copy editing: sentences tightened, repetition cut, transitions repaired, formatting brought into line with the manual. Your argument and your structure stay put.
- Rewriting: starting from your material and producing different prose. Necessary sometimes, and much more expensive, and rarely what people actually need.
- A rubric read: separate from all three, and the one most likely to move your grade. Somebody checks the draft against the criteria and tells you what's missing.
Why a proofread often isn't the problem
Students ask for a proofread when a paper feels wrong, and a paper usually feels wrong for reasons a proofread cannot touch. A clean, typo-free draft that never explicitly addresses a rubric criterion loses exactly the same marks as a messy one.
So the rubric gets read alongside your draft as a matter of course, even on the cheapest order, and if the real issue is a missing criterion rather than commas you'll be told that instead of quietly sold the polish. It's not generosity, it's that a beautifully proofread paper that scores badly is a bad advertisement.
Two things happen to your reference list
One is mechanical and one is not. Bringing entries into line with a style manual is ordinary tidying that anybody careful can do. Establishing that the things listed exist is a separate job, and it is where student papers have started coming apart.
A plausible journal, a plausible author and an article nobody ever wrote will pass any formatting check ever devised, and gets discovered when an instructor goes hunting. So every entry is looked up and read, and where a source turns out not to support the sentence pointing at it, you hear about that too. For a full read against the marking criteria, that's the deeper service.
Your voice stays where it is
Editing that makes a student paper sound like a published article is a disservice, and instructors notice. Your register, your sentence rhythm and your ordinary vocabulary all stay put. What changes is what's genuinely broken: the sentence nobody could parse, the paragraph that argues two things at once, the transitions that aren't there.
Comments explain the fix rather than performing it silently, so the same mistake stops appearing in the next assignment. Where you want the writing genuinely taken off your hands rather than tidied, that's a different order and priced as one.
Send the draft
The paper, the rubric and the deadline. You'll be told which of the three jobs it needs, free.
Agree the level
Buy the proofread, the edit or the rubric read. Cheapest useful option gets recommended, not the priciest.
Back in 48 hours
Marked up with comments that explain the fix, references verified, and your own voice intact.
Questions people actually ask
How do I know which level I need?
Send it and you'll be told before paying. As a rough guide: if you're confident in the argument and just want it clean, that's proofreading. If sentences feel clumsy or the flow is off, that's copy editing. If you're not sure the paper answers the assignment at all, what you actually need is a rubric read.
Will you tell me if the paper is fine?
Yes, and it happens regularly. A draft that already meets the rubric and reads cleanly gets sent back with a short note saying so rather than an invoice for work it didn't need. A polished paper that still scores badly helps nobody, so there's no incentive here to sell you the deeper service.
Is using a proofreader allowed?
In nearly every institution, yes, and most of them fund a writing centre that does this job for free. The condition is always that the thinking stays yours, which is exactly why the markup here names problems instead of quietly solving them. Where your own program sets a rule about outside editors, tell us what it says and we'll stay inside it.
How fast is it?
Forty-eight hours covers an ordinary course paper comfortably, and short pieces frequently come back the same day. Anything long runs slower, purely because looking up every source takes real time rather than a click. Name your deadline in the first message and the answer you get will be realistic rather than encouraging.
Can you make it pass a similarity check?
That's not what this is, and it isn't something we do. What a similarity report flags is usually a citation problem: quoted material without quotation marks, or paraphrasing that stayed too close to the source. Those get fixed properly, by attributing correctly, which solves the underlying issue rather than disguising it.
