I have a co-worker who is pursuing a master’s and asks me to edit her papers. I only revise punctuation, grammar, spelling and sentence structure, and never the content of the paper. Is this acceptable at this level or should she be getting evaluated on these things too? English is her second language and she does fine; some of the issues are consistent so I assume they come from the syntax of her native language.
Am I doing anything wrong in doing this?
I’ve never heard of grammar and spelling help at that level being unethical, as the main focus is on producing coherent, logical, insightful, and hopefully original works of research, but I usually consider it better to just point out errors and let the student actually correct them. By helping the student correct their own errors, one helps them learn.
I’ve never heard of a degree program (let alone a graduate one) where the main focus is on having awesome spelling and grammar in English. Is there one - not a degree in Linguistics or Literature per se, but a degree that you get by showing that you have a 25th grade reading level, can win championship spelling bees drunk, and rarely if ever misuse the subjunctive?
I send my students to the writing center at my university for help with their grammar and syntax (they generally speak English as a their second/third language). I don’t see what you’re doing as any different.
When my wife was in grad school back in the days of typewriters, she picked up spare cash by typing papers. She says she would flag mistakes in the paper but not change anything without direction from the other student.
Right. In cases where an instructor needs to specifically check students for mastery of grammar, syntax, or vocabulary, they will typically do so via an exam, not a paper.
One of my study groups in grad school was me and three Latin American students. They were fluent in English, but it was not their first language. They relied on me when we were writing group papers to check their sections for grammar and syntax and word choice.
I think you’re fine, but you may want to point out the errors she seems to keep making.
I don’t think what the OP is doing is unethical, but it’s different from what most university writing centers do; they generally have a policy of not proofreading or editing papers for students. They might point out one example of a repeated error and show the student how to correct it, but it would be the student’s responsibility to fix the rest.
We were always told to have someone else proofread your work. Even professional writers get editors.
I work in this industry, and most journals and publishing houses require that papers, theses, and scientific articles be professionally edited and proofread. No content is changed, just the language. A lot of scientists cannot write, and even English majors can benefit from having someone else look at their work. I hope you are charging for your services.
My wife worked in a think tank in Japan and I regularly edited her papers and presentations including sentence structure and often vocabulary. (She’s Taiwanese and would write in Japanese which would get professionally translated into English, so I was really editing the translator.)
For people writing in a second language, they should have someone editing it and the university will understand and expect it.
This is an incredibly over-simplistic way to look at the issue.
It is true that a graduate program will not have spelling and grammar as its “main focus.” But the reason for this is the assumption, in most graduate school programs, that your writing ability is good enough not to need basic corrections to spelling and grammar. If you can’t produce competently-written work by the time you’re in graduate school—at least in fields where ideas and knowledge are demonstrated through narrative writing—then you probably shouldn’t be there at all.
If i had, in my first year of graduate school, produced papers that were filled with errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax, my adviser would not have spent time correcting or editing them. She would have sat me down and told me that i needed to improve, and if i didn’t improve, i probably would have been asked to leave the program.
I disagree, for the reason noted by Fretful Porpentine.
Pointing out errors and helping a person avoid those errors in the future is not the same as the sort of line-by-line editing implied by the OP. If gigi is just fixing stuff for her colleague, without helping the colleague to actually avoid the errors in the first place, it might not be strictly unethical, but it’s a bit borderline, in my view.
I understand that all scholars ask colleagues to read their work, and make suggestions regarding both argument and writing style. I also understand that editors who work for publishing houses make changes and correct typos and other basic errors. But line-editing for someone who is a student, and whose work is (or should be) getting judged and graded for its clarity and coherence, is a bit different. Part of assessing the student’s work, in my field at least, is assessing their ability to convey their ideas using correct and clear and coherent writing.
No, of course not: Once you get to studying language and actual grammar, you aren’t learning “correctness” but reality. You’re learning how language is used, and how that usage changes over time and place, and the real, empirically-derived rules linguists have found through patient research and analysis of corpora.
Everything prior is, really, a non-academic exercise in memorizing the style of a semi-artificial prestige dialect with rules which intentionally run directly counter to real life, so we can use it to exclude the poor and the recent immigrants. Pure social peacocking: Deliberately useless, so people can show off how many resources they can afford to waste on nonsense.
Of course it’s not unethical.
Yeah, she actually said she went to the writing center and “the woman was afraid to work on it” and kept just giving it back. To me, that meant the writing center didn’t want to do the proofreading for her, which is partly what prompted my question.
I always thought that asking for someone to proofread your work is not only ethical but expected.
Isn’t this something you should be asking the course provider?
So long as she sees your corrections and learns from them!
The intention of school is for the students to learn. So that will help her to learn to write better. Then when she grows up [gets a job], she will be able to do these things on her own!
The only unethical thing you might be doing is using time at work to edit the papers. Whether your coworker is doing anything unethical is between her and her professor.
But, as has been pointed out more than once in this thread, there’s a considerable difference between proofreading for arguments and typos and minor mistakes, on the one hand, and doing a line-by-line edit of work that lacks the basic mechanics of formal writing.
My wife and i are academics, and we often proofread each other’s work. But when i make make edits on her documents, it is done with the understanding that, apart from things that are clearly typos, they are suggestions, and she is free to accept or reject them, as she sees fit. Same when she makes edits in my documents. Proofreading and editing is a process by which an author is helped to improve his or her work, not a process by which the work is done for him or her. In the case described by the OP, this does not seem to be part of a learning process, but rather a case of, “I’ve done the best i can, and now i need you to fix my mistakes to ensure that my writing is up to par.”
I do agree with muldoonthief: the OP is doing nothing unethical in helping her friend and colleague. If there is anything unethical going on here—and i’m still a bit on the fence about that—it’s between the student and the professor.
This is definitely the spirit in which I was going into it – this is what I would do, and it’s up to you if you want to use it. I assume she would use it because in most cases it is actually correcting mistakes, but ultimately I do it and let it go.
She’s actually one of the most driven and hard-working people around here. That’s why I feel better doing it, knowing she is not just being lazy.