Proofreading and editing ‒ Where do we draw the line?

Written by: Alice Lehtinen
Published: 21 February 2025

On 31 January 2025, Dr Fiona Richards from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, gave an interesting online UniSIG talk titled ‘Proofreading student writing: A research-based stakeholder tool focused on ethical practice’. Fiona began the session by introducing us to the stakeholder tool for examining ethical practices in proofreading that she developed together with Nigel Harwood (Sheffield University) as part of her doctoral studies. Her main research question was ‘How do students, proofreaders, and lecturers perceive a range of proofreader interventions in terms of ethical appropriacy?’

In their co-authored paper³, Fiona and Nigel described the taxonomy they used to develop the stakeholder tool, which was based on Nigel’s taxonomy (2018)¹ and Kruger and Bevan Dye’s (2010)² frameworks. They also used the SENSE Guidelines for Proofreading Student Texts (2016) to confirm proofreading service for a student thesis. The taxonomy enabled them to analyse how many and what kinds of proofreading interventions (e.g. changing words or correcting punctuation) were made to students’ writing. They also interviewed the study participants for their views on ‘lighter and heavier’ interventions.

The need for this tool arose in response to Harwood’s claim that ‘Many British universities do not have proofreading policies, with those that do providing little information as to ethically (in)appropriate forms of intervention.’ It seems that UK academics are hardly aware of what proofreading entails, let alone the ethics and guidelines surrounding this service. More universities are now drawing up proofreading policies, but these are still brief and vague.

The purpose of the stakeholder tool is to help academics (supervisors, lecturers and university teachers) decide whether the changes made by proofreaders, i.e. third-party interventions, are appropriate, that is, ethical or unethical. It can also serve as an educative tool and remind writers of their responsibilities.

The tool consists of a questionnaire that suggests various third-party interventions, and the respondent can decide whether or not these interventions are ethical. Fiona showed us an example of two interventions that reordered the words, phrases or sentences in a paragraph written by a student. The first asked the student to think about the placing of a sentence and to decide where it should be placed. The second was a ‘heavier’ intervention, as it directly suggested (in a comment) moving the sentence to the end of the paragraph. The first intervention was considered more ethically acceptable by the supervisor as the student had to do the thinking, whereas the second intervention did the thinking on behalf of the student. The study found that students were more permissive of ethical appropriateness than academics were, and that their stances sometimes differed greatly. It also showed that some supervisors acted as grammar checkers, but that others were content to let proofreaders make suggestions.

The stakeholder tool can be used in workshops to train proofreaders and policymakers. It aims to draw attention to the ethical appropriateness of proofreading and to make stakeholders communicate more with each other. It can also be used to encourage and inform proofreading policies.

After Fiona’s presentation, a lively discussion ensued. The first question concerned the definition of ethical appropriacy. Where do we draw the line? We all agreed that this was a difficult issue. Is a ‘lighter or heavier proofreading touch’ more appropriate? The editors in our group raised the age-old issue of ‘fixing versus flagging’ with the following questions:

• How far do we go when language editing?
• Isn’t part of our work to teach writers, and to help them improve their writing?
• Shouldn’t we show them how it’s done?

Fiona’s opinion was that students should be permitted to receive some guidance on their writing – a supervisor can’t just leave their students’ papers full of grammar mistakes, for example, and should be allowed to correct their writing.

Fiona’s doctoral study focused on an English L2 Spanish student, whose command of English was close to native level, and who was writing a thesis for her doctorate of education in English. She was helped by an English L1 proofreader and her English L1 supervisor. In the study, the student had strong opinions about the proofreading changes. She voiced these opinions and made sure she had the last word, even if her language-related opinions were not always in line with those of her supervisor. However, the pilot study had an English L2 Chinese student, who had a lower level of English and allowed much more language intervention and even wanted suggestions from the proofreader to improve their writing.

Many of us attending Fiona’s online session were self-employed academic English editors, who work with researchers, some of whom are PhD students and write articles for publication in international journals. One editor expressed the following ‘sinking feeling’, which I personally identified with: ‘So, is what we do so unethical?’ And doesn’t this also make journal reviewers’ comments unethical?

However, our discussion concluded that this type of intervention is very different to proofreading young graduate students’ writing, and that it is based on a different set of standards. Some of us even saw ourselves as part of the writer’s ‘team’. As our clients pay us to improve their writing, they want us to make changes, to make it worth paying us. And so our boundaries may stretch further than those around students’ writing. Fiona’s tool can’t really be applied to scholarly writing, as it is intended for assessing student writing, and so a distinction was drawn between these types of interventions.

This then led to a brief discussion on the difference between proofreading and editing, a topic under ongoing debate. Copy-editing was also mentioned, and how its definition has changed over time. We talked about the difference between the ethicality of, on the one hand, changing word order, spelling and punctuation, and fixing mechanical language issues and, on the other hand, suggesting that the writer change the order of their research questions in a paper. Here, the line between language editing and substantive editing is crossed. This raised the following questions:

• If a proofreader/editor actually almost rewrites the text… is it even the original author’s work anymore?
• What exactly is the editor’s role?

We all agreed that these questions were difficult to answer.

We concluded that interventions in scholarly writing for publication are not the same as interventions in graduate students’ writing, but that in both areas, guidelines need to be more transparent. Clearer policies are required to help solve these ethical dilemmas.

References

1. Harwood, N. (2018) ‘What do proofreaders of student writing do to a master’s essay? Differing interventions, worrying findings’. Written Communication, 35(4), 474‒ 530. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318786236

2. Kruger, H., and A. Bevan-Dye. (2010) ‘Guidelines for the editing of dissertations and theses: A survey of editors’ perceptions’. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 28(2), 153‒169. https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2010.519110

3. Richards, F., & Harwood, N. (2024). ‘Proofreading student writing: A research-based stakeholder tool focused on ethical practice’. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 20(20), 1‒16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-024-00165-4

SENSE (2016). Guidelines for Proofreading Student Texts.