Proofreading

I’ve been asked to proofread a thesis document and here are my thoughts. I must remind the reader that I’m not in school any more so this is solely based on how I understood the current flow of their documentation. 

Their proposal is good because the topic is something they are intimately familiar. That helps a lot as it lessens the stuff that you’d have to study and understand plus you already know what to look for when you do your web search. 

That said, here are the problems that I noticed:

There was a problem with the arrangement of their ideas in the Background of the Study in logical order. I did make it my prerogative to rearrange some ideas a bit but not much because I might deviate from what they had originally intended to say. 

I can’t comment much for the Related Literature and Studies because I haven’t seen the original articles, so I didn’t do much but change some tenses here and there. It wasn’t how I would write the whole chapter in APA format as I don’t have the following: original text, author, and date of publication. Now the dilemma there is that if I had those things, I will play the proponent role. Hmmm.

The Chapter 3 is quite different than what I was used to; it talks about the technical background of their study, which to me was all about features and functions, hardware specifications, software they will use in development, and how their system should work. 

So guys if you will talk about your minimum hardware specifications, you should describe the minimum hardware requirements needed by your system. A good hint would be to look at the most basic hardware requirements of software you want to install, for instance a new game. 

If your proposed system requires a browser, you have to specify which browser it’s viewed the best. Browser compatibility is important as there might be slight changes in the layout with the use of different browsers. Hint: Non-techies use Internet Explorer. So during the development process, test your system using different browsers.

I noticed they described they mentioned the software they will use. I maintain the view that in this aspect you will describe why you will use particular software in the development phase. A hint here would be, the software is free. Why a particular DBMS and why this particular PL? So what if MySQL has the following features, how will those features benefit your system. You don’t need to list down all features of a particular software, only those features that you need.

Of course you will use images and other types of graphic, be sure the images you will use have no licensing issues. 

Recommendations:

Your chosen grammarian can only do so much. It is better that you sit with your grammarian so that when he/she has questions, you can elaborate. If you can’t be there physically there are other modes of communication. 

Though the document format may change a billion times, your ideas have flow in logical order to make sense to your reader. For example, it has always been the practice that the Background of the Study follows a macro to micro or global to local arrangement of ideas.

Disclaimer: I did not proofread this. For all I know, this blithering idiot is frothing at the mouth. {◕ ◡ --}