What Do Proofreaders of Student Writing Do to a Master’s Essay? Differing Interventions, Worrying Findings

Abstract

There has been much interest recently in researching the changes editors, supervisors, and other language brokers make to the writing of L2 researchers who are attempting to publish in English. However, studies focused on the pre-submission proofreading of students' university essays are rarer. In this study of student proofreading, 14 UK university proofreaders all proofread the same authentic, low quality master's essay written by an L2 speaker of English to enable a comparison of interventions.Proofreaders explained their interventions by means of a talk aloud while proofreading and at a post-proofreading interview. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data reveals evidence of widely differing practices and beliefs, with the number of interventions ranging from 113 to 472. Some proofreaders intervened at the level of content, making lengthy suggestions to improve the writer's essay structure and argumentation, while others were reluctant to do more than focus on the language. Disturbingly, some proofreaders introduced errors into the text while leaving the writer's errors uncorrected. I conclude that the results are cause for deep concern for universities striving to formulate ethical proofreading policies. Keywords:Academic writing; language support; editing; error correction; feedback; tutoring; English for academic purposes 2 Introduction: Why researching proofreading of student writing mattersBefore submitting writing for assessment, university students in the UK may approach a 'proofreader' to improve their work. Indeed, proofreading adverts can be found around many campuses, but it is not always clear what types of interventions will be provided. The current study begins to fill this knowledge gap, investigating the quantity and type of interventions by 14 proofreaders who proofread the same master's essay by an L2 speaker of English.Articles and opinion pieces about proofreading of student writing appear frequently in publications such as Times Higher Education and are often shot through with a discourse of moral panic traditionally reserved for plagiarism and cheating (e.g., Scurr (2006), titled "It is not enough to read an essay and mark it; one must also guess if a student has purchased professional help"; and Baty (2006), titled "Fluency can be yours…for a small fee"). The concern is that students, especially L2 students with inadequate English, are buying their way to success by paying a proofreader to write their essays for them-or at least to rewrite their work to a standard they would never achieve working alone. Hence Scurr (2006) argues that proofreading services enable students to pass themselves off as having acquired academic literacy when doing so legitimately would require much time and effort.Another alarming story is Shaw's (2014) post in The Guardian higher education blog, which claims "Proofreading agencies boast of being able to improve grades". The Cambridge Proofreading LCC website (proofreading.org) promises clients: "If you do not get a significantly improved gra...

‘I Have to Hold Myself Back from Getting into All That’: Investigating Ethical Issues Associated with the Proofreading of Student Writing

“…The current research incorporated these methodological suggestions. As in Harwood et al's work, ethics again emerged as a major theme in the present dataset, and, having elsewhere provided a detailed quantitative analysis of the frequency of corrections and comments they made (Harwood 2018), I focus in this article on the theme of ethics, and on the following research questions in particular:…”

“…Four methods were used to collect data: (i) a proofreader profile questionnaire; (ii) text analysis of the interventions informants made while proofreading an authentic master's-level essay written by a Chinese learner studying applied linguistics, which had been awarded a bare pass mark of 50; (iii) a talk aloud task, proofreaders explaining aloud what they were doing and why as they proofread; and (iv) a post-proofreading interview. In the method section of Harwood (2018), I provide a detailed description of each instrument, and in what follows, I focus particularly on how ethical issues were explored and uncovered.…”

“…Proofreaders' interventions (i.e., their corrections, comments, and mark-ups/annotations when proofreading the essay) were systematically counted and classified using a modified version of Willey and Tanimoto's (2012) taxonomy, originally designed to analyse proofreading of L2 texts for publication. The taxonomy and quantitative results are in Harwood (2018). The taxonomy comprised eight categories, identifying the proofreader's Additions (adding words to the writer's text), Deletions (removing words), Substitutions (replacing shorter stretches of the writer's text), Reordering (repositioning the writer's words/sentences), Rewriting (replacing longer parts of the writer's text), Recombining (combining of one or more sentences, or division of longer sentences into shorter ones), Mechanical Alterations (changes to punctuation, spelling, and formatting), and Consultation/Teaching Points (where proofreaders address questions, comments, or suggestions to the writer).…”

“…3 Yet despite the increasing regulation, ethical issues remain: Harwood et al (2009) claimed that much proofreading is done by institutional outsiders, i.e., writers' family, friends, or freelance proofreaders with no connection to the university in question, and these outsiders may have little knowledge of proofreading policies and the degree to which the institution permits them to intervene. In addition, there is increasing evidence that proofreaders have differing understandings of their role and of the extent to which they should intervene (Harwood 2018;Harwood et al 2010;Kruger and Bevan-Dye 2010;Rebuck 2014). For instance, Harwood (2018) showed how 14 proofreaders made between 113 and 472 interventions when proofreading the same text, with some choosing to focus primarily on the language and others making much more substantial interventions concerned with the writer's argumentation, structure, and ideas.…”

Changes Beyond Limits: Proofreading in an American University

“…Unfortunately, not all students are able to write at the level that their professors expect. Moreover, many studies have found that the errors in the students' assignments may affect their grades, whether positively or negatively (Harwood, 2018). Therefore, students are encouraged by their professors to carefully proofread their papers before submission.…”