The editor handles a wide range of documents well, but academic writing is varied enough that edge cases come up. Most of them fall into a handful of recurring patterns. This article walks through the common ones with the actual fix for each, organised by the stage of the edit where they show up.
Before you upload
The file is not a DOCX
RightMyWork accepts Microsoft Word documents with a .docx extension. If your draft is in another format, convert it first. In Google Docs, use File › Download › Microsoft Word (.docx). In Pages, use File › Export To › Word. In LibreOffice, save as .docx through the format dropdown in the save dialog. Older .doc files need to be opened in Word once and saved back out as .docx before they are accepted.
The file is larger than 45 MB
The 45 MB disk cap is generous for documents that are mostly text. When it is exceeded, embedded images are almost always the cause: high-resolution figures pasted directly into Word, scanned diagrams, or chart objects stored at full resolution. The fix is to compress images in place from the Word ribbon (Picture Format › Compress Pictures, then pick Email or Web quality) and resave. A 60 MB thesis usually drops to under 15 MB after this step.
The document is over 150,000 words
The per-upload word cap is 150,000 words across body, footnotes, headers, and text boxes combined. If your document is larger, split it into logical sections by chapter or part and upload them separately. The style guide and English variant you pick will apply consistently across sections, so the final manuscript reads as a single edited piece.
The word count is higher than you expected
The word counter is deliberately inclusive: body text, footnotes, endnotes, headers, footers, captions, and text boxes are all counted because the editor will touch all of them. A thesis with 80,000 words of body text and 25,000 words of footnotes is a 105,000-word editing job. If the number on the upload screen is significantly higher than the count you saw in Word, footnote depth and text-box content are the usual reasons.
During the edit
The progress page seems stuck
Each stage of the edit reports a label as it progresses. Some stages, particularly the reference-parsing stage on long documents with hundreds of citations, can sit on the same label for a minute or two while they work. If a stage has not moved for more than 10 minutes on a document under 50,000 words, reload the page once. The job ID is in the URL, and progress is saved on the server, so reloading does not restart the edit. It just refreshes the view.
If reloading shows no change after another few minutes, the edit may have hit an error that did not surface as a visible failure. Contact support@rightmywork.com with the job ID from the URL and we can pull the trace.
The edit took longer than expected
The 3 to 5 minute estimate covers documents under roughly 50 pages. Longer documents take longer in proportion to their length, and complex documents with hundreds of citations or many text boxes take longer than the same word count of plain prose. A 150,000-word manuscript with heavy footnotes can take up to 15 minutes. The job runs to completion whether you stay on the page or not, so the safest plan on a long edit is to start it and check back later.
An error appeared partway through
If an error surfaces during the edit, the engine does its best to roll back so that no partial output is delivered. If credits were deducted before the error, they are refunded automatically. The job page will show the error message and a retry option. Most errors are transient and the retry succeeds. If the same document fails twice in a row with the same error, it usually points to something specific in the source file (a corrupt section, an unusual element from an older Word version), and the support team can help diagnose it from the job ID.
After the edit
The download link is not where I expected
The download link is on the job page, which is the same page where the progress bar lived. If you closed that tab, your dashboard lists every edit you have run with a download link next to each one. The link is active for the duration of your download window: 24 hours for free users, 7 days for paid users. After the window closes, the file is deleted from storage and the link no longer works. Save the DOCX to your computer inside the window.
Tracked changes are not visible in Word
Word ships with several display modes for tracked changes, and the default is sometimes set to Simple Markup or No Markup, both of which hide the changes even when they are present in the file. The fix is straightforward: open the Review tab in Word, find the Display for Review dropdown, and switch it to All Markup. Every edit, inserted text, deleted text, and formatting change appears inline. The Reviewing Pane on the same ribbon gives you a sortable list of every change in the document, which is useful on long manuscripts.
Editorial comments are missing
Comments only appear if you turned on the Editorial Comments toggle before uploading. The toggle is on by default for new users. If you turned it off and want comments on your next edit, switch it back on. There is no way to add comments to an already-finished edit; the comment generation happens during the edit pass and is not a separate step.
A citation looks wrong after the edit
Two cases are worth checking before you assume the edit was wrong.
First, if your draft uses a reference manager such as Zotero or Mendeley, your in-text citations are stored as field codes rather than as plain text. The editor preserved those fields and your manager will update them the next time you refresh in Word. If the citation looks raw in the edited DOCX, open it in Word and either click in the citation field and press F9 (Windows) or run the manager’s refresh action, and the citation will rebuild.
Second, the editor does not invent corrections to author names, titles, or years that look wrong. If a citation was already wrong in the original document (a missing year, a misspelled surname, a transposed page number), the editor flags it in a comment rather than guessing at the right answer. Reject the suggested change in those cases and consult your source.
Bibliography entries shifted
If you have the Manuscript+ autofill enabled, the editor looks up missing reference details and inserts the verified information back into your bibliography. That can change the visible content of an entry: a missing DOI appears, a publisher is filled in, a page range is completed. Each insertion is delivered as a tracked change, so you can accept the ones you want and reject the ones you do not. Nothing in your reference list is overwritten silently.
When in doubt
If something is happening that this article does not cover, two pieces of information make support requests fast. First, the job ID from the URL on the page where the edit ran. Second, a description of what you expected to happen and what actually happened, in that order. Both together turn a vague “it broke” into a specific trace the engineer can pull up immediately.
The support team can be reached at support@rightmywork.com. Replies typically come within one business day.