As a professional proofreading provider, I often deal with PhD theses, dissertations and essays for students and academics who know the long-term value of having their work checked.

Now, you may be asking yourself, 'Why do I need this type of service? I'm intelligent, have a good grasp of the English language and therefore don't need to pay some pedant to tell me what I know already.'

That's pretty much how I felt when I was studying in the long and distant past. However, would it surprise you to know that when I set up my website I had somebody else proofread it for me? It has nothing to do with my abilities or confidence as a proofreader but it has everything to do with the fact that I knew that I needed to detach myself from the work.

The perceived wisdom within the industry is that one should NEVER proofread one's own work and it's not until you look at it that it makes absolute sense.

Think of it this way. You've spent hour upon hour, sometimes weeks or months, writing your text and then you begin to develop the narrative, check for consistency and refine the answers to the questions that have been posed. You have given your heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears (and any other cliches that you can think of). In short, your work has become your baby.

Herein lies the problem. You have, rightly so, become obsessed with the content but your brain remains in this mode when you begin to proofread the finished article. However hard you try, you cannot detach yourself from critiquing your own work as you read through. 'Should I have expanded this argument? Have I actually answered the question in such a way that I will be marked highly? Does my bum look big in these jeans?'

It is this inability to stand back and check the text, spelling, punctuation and grammatical structure that can lead to lost marks - a situation that could be easily avoided by using the services of someone who has not gone through the emotional rollercoaster of getting these thoughts onto the page.

Spell checkers are useful tools, but can be fatal if you use the wrong version of the English language (US instead of UK) or if you accept a wrongly spelled word into your dictionary. Their [sic] are also the occasions when words are spelled correctly but there [sic] meanings have totally different connotations. So they're!

To summarise, please consider the following analogy. It is generally considered that Heather Mills-McCartney would have got a significantly larger sum than the paltry £24m she recently received from Sir Paul. The reason why she can now only eat caviar burgers once a week instead of every day is that she represented herself.

In other words, she did not use the services of a professional.