A guest spot today from an academic acquaintance…
I get a lot of students – not just international, but mainly – coming to me asking for academic proofreading services. Universities don’t provide proofreading for their students. There are two reasons for this: 1) the students are supposed to be learning good English usage themselves, and 2) university budgets don’t include the specialist staff required to proofread literally thousands of essays per term.
Should you get your essays proofread? Well, really, that’s a moot point. OK, so you’re supposed to be learning how to write correctly for yourself, but then everyone makes silly mistakes and it’s very hard to spot your own. I suggest students swap essays and proofread each other’s; but where do you stand if you want to go down the professional proofreading route?
Is professional proofreading on academic essays cheating?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is also no, but you need to be VERY careful.
If you think you need something proofread (and it is essential for PhD theses to be professionally proofread, and highly recommended for MA/MSc and BA/BSc dissertations) you need to be very careful who you hire to do the job. First of all, you need to make sure they’re not going to introduce any errors into your work, but more importantly, you need to ma
ke sure that your academic integrity (ie, your not-plagiarising) will be intact. Never pay someone to write your essay for you. Never ever ever pay Blokey from essayessayessay.com £5/1000 words to ‘improve’ your essay. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Essays bought or edited online are frequently plagiarised and when they go through Turnitin (or any comparable plagiarism detection software), they light up bright red. If you are caught plagiarising, you will get 0, and will often be disqualified from your course.
A good proofreader will not touch the content of your work. That’s not their job. They correct the errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar and (if you ask them nicely) your referencing. I would also recommend hiring a proofreader who has been recommended by a friend as trustworthy. If you can’t get a recommendation, make sure you hire a proofreader with a proper proofreading certificate. Someone with an English degree is not necessarily qualified to be a professional proofreader. There is a lot of training that goes into proper proofreading, and it’s worth hiring a professional. Standard rates vary, and some proofreaders charge by the word or by the hour, but if someone is asking for much less than £10/1000 words or £15/hour then I would be cautious about their qualification for the job.
So, you’ve hired yourself a reputable proofreader – what now?
Well, there are still some rules. You must always consult the course handbook for your university department to check whether professional proofreading needs to be declared. Not every university and not every department requires it, but you MUST check.
Academics rely on proofreaders all of the time for journals, articles and monographs, and there is nothing wrong with undergraduates and MA students using them to make sure that their essays are grammatically sound. Just be careful who you choose; it’s your words that matter, after all.