Editing an adult student's paper -- ethical?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think it differs as to type of document and as to field.

My area, Computer Science, having someone edit an assignment for grammar and such is quite reasonable. An English prof, not so much maybe.

OTOH, the time and expense to do this for ordinary assignments means that it’s not at all common and therefore not expected.

Note that these things are intended to generally be seen by only one person and are considered ephemeral.

For papers for publication in a permanent form, e.g., a thesis or a journal paper, editing is a fact of life. Lots of eyes means each error is magnified.

22

I do this occasionally and see nothing wrong with it. In fact it is more beneficial because you may be able to explain it one on one with them whereas a prof. may just circle it in red and move on.

23

But is this happening?

The OP’s description suggests that she fixes the errors, and the students takes the paper back and incorporates the corrections. Is the OP actually explaining anything? Is the OP helping the student to improve her writing, or is she making sure that the student has no incentive to improve her writing because someone will be there to fix the mistakes?

When i correct my students’ writing, it is done with a view to encouraging them to improve. For example, if i find that the student has a problem with writing sentence fragments, or with subject/verb agreement, or with dangling modifiers, i mark the error, and link to an explanation, usually on the Purdue University Online Writing Lab website, which is an excellent resource.

This is made easier by the fact that my students submit their papers electronically, and i return them the same way. Thus it is a simple matter for me to insert a URL link for the student to follow.

So, in the cases described above, the student will see part of their sentence highlighted, with a comment that says something like:

Sentence fragment
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/620/1/

Subject/verb agreement
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/599/01/

Dangling modifier
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/597/1/

This lets them know the name of the problem, and gives them a resource that will help them identify and fix the problem.

At the end of their papers, students with writing problems will also see, as part of my overall comments, a paragraph that looks something like this:

Your essay contains some problems related to grammar and sentence construction. I have identified some examples in your paper, and have provided links to resources that will help you identify and correct the problems. If you would like further assistance with your writing, you should consider contacting the Writing Center on campus. I would also be happy to help you with your writing, and to explain these concepts in more detail, if you visit me during my office hours.

This sort of thing needs to involve some effort on their part. I’m not simply going to correct the mistakes, and i also make clear to the students that i take their writing into account when evaluating their papers and assigning a grade. If the first paper a student submits has some problems, i will point them out, provide resources, and offer help. If, as the semester progresses, that same student continues to make exactly the same mistakes, and seems to have made little or no effort to improve his or her writing, then the grades the student receives for written work will suffer a bit.

24

Is it fun or fattening? If the answer is no, you are fine.

25

Why does mhendo consistently not capitalize the pronoun “I” when it’s not at the beginning of a sentence?

ETA: Purdue OWL® - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University

26

For a couple of reasons.

  1. Habit, because most of my work is done in word processors that automatically capitalize a standalone “i”.

  2. Writing on this message board does not constitute, for me, a formal writing exercise.

An important aspect of writing is that different types of grammar and usage and writing conventions are appropriate for different occasions.

Writing in universities and academic settings is generally expected to be formal writing, where certain appropriate conventions and standards should be observed, and where part of the exercise is not just getting stuff down on the page, but taking the time to proofread your work for errors and problems. In forums outside of formal writing settings—this board, and some email exchanges come to mind as examples—the conventions and standards are not as important.

The fact that i correct the grammatical and syntactical problems in my students’ essays does not mean that i make the same corrections in the emails that they send to me. And the reason that i don’t correct their emails is the same reason that i don’t generally go around correcting people’s writing errors on this message board: the setting matters.

27

I’m not your teacher, and you’re not my student. But there is a bit of dissonance between your writing style (which is great) and this grammatical error. Gives off a “smart with a side of lazy” vibe. If you don’t care about that, then neither do I.

28

What is she taking in school? :confused::confused::confused::confused:

If it is accounting, computer hardware, computer software ,programming, system design, engineering so on no than I see no problem at all!!:eek::eek::smiley: Well if she taking some thing like say a teacher, lawyer, judge, news reporter, journalist so on you have to be some what good at English on the job.

29

I was recently asked to line edit someone’s big paper for her writing class. She was being graded on every aspect of her writing, so basically, she was asking me to take her final exam. I read the paper and told her I couldn’t edit it, but I did give her a general list of issues she needed to look for throughout the paper.

30

Oh, gosh I sure hope so! Virtually all of my nursing school writing assignments went directly to my DIL for comments and editing suggestions. I know I have a tendency to fall in love with my own prose, so it was helpful to have her input. Sometimes, my papers went to a couple of other people (including an English professor friend of mine) for final vetting. None of this seemed like taking unfair advantage to me.

31

Well who cares if she was going in as nursing or a doctor and her English was bad, :eek::eek::(:frowning: it not like she going in as a lawyer, judge, news reporter, journalist or teacher.

32

I’ve found that one of the biggest usage issues that non-native speakers face is deciding when to use and when to not use the progressive tense as opposed to the simple present. Sometimes non-native speakers will overuse it and say things like “The airplane is having two engines” (instead of “The airplane has two engines”) or will underuse it and say something like “I learn chemistry” instead of “I am learning chemistry”. In some cases, it is not just a usage issue and can lead to semantic misunderstanding, such as the difference between “I go to work” and “I am going to work”, with the first one describing a habitual action and the second one describing something that is happening right now.

33

Back when I was in undergrad, I had a fellow doper who is a newspaper editor go over all my important papers (Thanks P!). He would go through the word document, and make the changes while noting the changes he made, and why. This would help me decide if the change was appropriate for me (he didn’t know anything about the subjects in question), and also show me what simple mistakes I was making so that I didn’t keep making them. Since I never did this in an english class, I never felt there was anything unethical about it. All he did was clear up my papers, and make it so the teacher graded me on what I wrote, not how I wrote it.

34

I don’t see what the problem is at all if she taking nursing, doctor, accounting, computer hardware, computer software ,computer design, programming, system design, engineering, music, art and so on!! What does it matter!!

It not like she is taking say a teacher, lawyer, judge, news reporter or journalist. With those jobs you want to be some what good at English.

35

yeah, um, even THOSE people use editors and proofreaders. Well, possibly not the lawyers.

36

Sorry, I am not getting it. Could you say it a fourth time?

37

When my wife was working on her Masters, I edited all her papers. I used to tell her I was worth 6 points on her final score :wink:

I also did all the cooking. We ate anything you can prepare using a frying pan.

38

Yea collage or university is supposed to help you for your job. So if you write on your job than the schools should make it policy that you have to pass basic English at school.

If you are going in like say a plumber, electrician, mechanic, computer hardware, computer software ,computer design, programming, system design, engineering, music, art so on,:eek::eek::eek: well than I think it is silly that a collage or university would be concern about your English. It not like you are going to be writing with those types of jobs.

Where jobs like say a lawyer, judge, news reporter, journalist or teacher it should be school policy that you have to have really good English for those jobs.

39

A couple decades ago, I was working at a publishing company. Somehow one of my former colleagues from an English language school in Japan (a native Japanese teacher who taught the lower level English students) got my e-mail address and let me know she was in The States and had gotten accepted to grad school to study Gerontology. She wanted to know if I could help her with her course papers. I told her that her English ability was obviously good enough if she had gotten accepted, but I would be happy to take a look at the first few pieces she wrote if that would make her feel more comfortable.

I ended up working with her through everything but her final dissertation, using the Review functions in MS WORD to suggest alternative terms that were probably just outside her English vocabulary* and tweaking a sentence* or two while adding an explanatory comment or a question to help us both figure out what she was trying to convey. I also tried to use each of her pieces as a foundation on which to teach some grammatical point or another, depending on whatever problems or quirks I was seeing in her material. Once I pointed out that her use of statistics was a bit weak, and I also drew from my old sociology background to suggest she include some cultural issues in her survey methods.

The company I worked for actually published a major reference work on the then-current state-of-the-art in Gerontology so I ordered a set [a perk of the job: free copies of anything we published] and sent them to her.

I learned a lot about gerontology by interpreting her meaning through my sociology background and contextual cues in her paragraphs. At one point, though, something seemed a little off and I didn’t have enough background within her field to know what it was. So I asked her if she would mind me sending her paper (some stage between a literature study and a masters thesis; I don’t remember what those are called) to the editor-in-chief of the books I had sent her. With her permission, I sent an e-mail to the EIC and explained how I was helping and asked if he would review the content of my former colleague’s latest effort. To my surprise, the EIC praised me for helping with the mechanics of my former colleague’s papers, and agreed to take a look. He even cc’d me when he thanked her for quoting him but noted that she had misinterpreted the work she was citing, and suggested she come by his office (at a rival college) for a deeper discussion. She ended up finishing her masters thesis (with corrections) and then transferring to the rival college to work on her doctorate under the EIC’s tutelage. :cool:
As for Sweat209’s repeated suggestion: Yes, in the USA there are proficiency levels required in the fields which heavily emphasize communication in English. There are general exams (SAT, ACT, etc.) to simply qualify for college and they have sections on vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension. Students who wish to study in the United States whose first language is not English must take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) with different USA+ Universities setting their own minimum qualifying score. I also had to take an even tougher exam to get into the Journalism major at my university. The basic exam for qualifying to get into a graduate school (GRE) includes tougher versions of the SAT English proficiency# sections as well. If you want to be a judge, you gotta be a lawyer first and the GRE-for-law-schools (LSAT) also has tough sections on English proficiency. I don’t know about Med school or Teaching programs, though.

–G!
*I don’t know about other foreign language students, but in studying languages my habit has always been to think as much as possible within the language I’m learning and fall back on thinking in English (my first language) and translating to the foreign language. This seemed to help my grammar and sentence structure, but at the cost of slowing vocabulary memorization. [I should open a separate thread for discussion of foreign language study approaches.] The sentences I would tweak for my former colleague were usually those that seemed to have been conceptualized in Japanese, then translated imperfectly to English.

+I even had a student in Japan who needed to improve her English proficciency so she could get a high enough TOEFL score to get into a German university’s Music program. :confused:

#On the other hand, one of the first bits of humor that was shared amongst the employees when I started at the publishing company was a review of an article that had been submitted for peer review in an academic journal. The managing editor in charge of the journal came out of his office and read aloud: *Dr. Yang should not be allowed near a typewriter until she has retaken and passed her lower division English courses. How she earned her degrees at Yale and Harvard is a complete mystery considering the heavy emphasis and rigor of their English composition departments…
*

40

The program itself may have been an “international program”, which means “taught in English”. Programs involving students from or even in many different countries aren’t called “international”, it’s a marketing term rather than a description.