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Syracuse University, College of Arts and Sciences

Graduate Editing Center

Support for Graduate Students

In addition to the services offered by the Writing Center, graduate students may also make use of the Graduate Editing Center (GEC), which provides free editing and proofreading services. Our editors work with a range of texts, from dissertations and master's theses to articles, conference presentations, and grant proposals. The GEC is staffed by writing instructors and advanced students in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, the Writing Program's doctoral program. GEC procedures and policies can be found by clicking the other tabs on this page.

WC or GEC?

What kind of help do you need? Because the difference between services offered at the Writing Center and GEC are not always intuitive, the following matrix is intended to help you decide which service is most appropriate for your projects.

WC GEC

For help:

  • Developing ideas
  • Organizing paragraphs or sections and developing transitions between them
  • Making decisions about how structuring arguments 
  • Mapping a project
  • Finding and using appropriate sources
  • Learning documentation standards

For help with editing and proof-reading of:

  • Papers complete or nearly complete in the final stages of drafting before submission or publication
  • Papers that have already been seen and responded to by advisors, instructors and/or peers

For international students to:

  • Improve their written and spoken English
  • Develop basic knowledge of the language
  • Locate patterns of error
  • Adjust to conventions of Standard American academic English

For work specifically on:

  • Grammatical correctness
  • Standard American academic English
  • Mechanics of punctuation and word arrangement
For shorter papers (10 pages or less) For longer papers (more than 10 pages) that are already well-developed, organized and focused written by those who have faculty approval to work with an editor.*

*If your project is for a degree requirement, you must contact your professor for approval. Many professors and advisors appreciate reading work that has been edited, but some require that your work be yours alone. Without faculty approval, GEC editors will not edit your work.