Harwood, N. orcid.org/0000-0002-9474-4865 (2019) 'I have to hold myself back from getting into all that': investigating ethical issues associated with the proofreading of student writing. Journal of Academic Ethics, 17 (1). pp. 17-49. ISSN 1570-1727
Abstract
L2 student writers in UK universities often seek the services of a ‘proofreader’ before submitting work for assessment, and the proliferation of freelance proofreaders and online proofreading agencies has led to debates about the ethics of the proofreading of student writing in publications such as Times Higher Education. This study investigates the kinds of ethical issues that confront proofreaders and how they deal with them. Nine UK university proofreaders proofread the same poor-quality L2 applied linguistics master’s essay, explaining their interventions by talking aloud while proofreading and at a subsequent interview. Proofreaders addressed ethical difficulties by means of two macrostrategies: (i) selective proofreading; and (ii) declining to proofread in part or in whole. Two additional findings relating to ethics emerged from the study: firstly, some informants experienced dilemmas and uncertainties despite their attempts to proofread ethically; secondly, a number of informants went far beyond traditional, narrow conceptualizations of proofreading, making interventions affecting the writer’s structure, argumentation, and content which could be seen as unethical. The findings highlight the need for the regulation of proofreading to ensure it is standardized and consistently administered from writer to writer, and I close by recommending that universities strive to implement more formative types of proofreading to enhance writers’ academic literacy, not just their texts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Academic writing; Language support; Editing; Ethics; Error correction; Feedback |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 06 Mar 2019 14:32 |
Last Modified: | 07 Mar 2019 05:28 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-018-9322-5 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10805-018-9322-5 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:141347 |