Edit a friends' paper

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My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
 
HNA444 said:
My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
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Sure you could edit the grammar and the ‘whatever is wrong’ part. But giving general feedbacks are just as useful. I don’t think you have to re-write most of the parts, but see which parts she is having issues with and help her by opening her eyes in becoming more creative in tackling that certain issue. …At least that’s what I do.
 
My children had tutoring programs as part of their on-line English classes. They didn’t do the changing themselves, but they pointed out errors and explained the principle and maybe offered examples.

So they might point out that the introductory paragraph was incomplete because usually the IP mentions all the main points. Or that the second paragraph should be checked for tense differences.

They didn’t usually do any actual editing, like Change this sentence to go like that, but they would suggest a transition here, or suggest a point might go elsewhere.

Then my children would work on the paper and the tutor would check it again, offering more critiques as needed.

So I think the goal was that the tutor help and teach, but not actually re-write.

Also, they kept in mind that the grade was the responsibility of the student: if they helped improve the grade, that was good.

PS: does your friend’s school have tutoring? That would be worth her checking into. The writing tutors seem pretty rigorously trained in order to avoid problems as well as to pick up errrors the average, or even above-average person would not notice, like differences in person and the like.
 
HNA444 said:
My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
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Print out the page, and mark up with a pencil where you think changes are needed, then let her do the actual changes.
 
HNA444 said:
My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
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Most papers these days must be typed on the computer. What you can do is suggest that she use the grammar and spelling tools to check her work. She needs to learn to do this.

You can use the “comments” option to add some feedback comments, or as another poster suggested, print it out and make comments in the margin.

You cross the line when you take the paper, make changes or “re-write” it, and give it back.
 
HNA444 said:
My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
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I agree with others about not actually re-writing the paper. Make general comments on how she can improve her paper. Checking her grammar and spelling is fine, but also help her in finding the mistakes on her own. The grammar and spellcheck tools are good up to a point. Those tools are not always correct and so she needs to read through her work again after running those checks on the computer. I’m not sure where she is writing her letter, if she is in college, but some places will purposely deactivate the spell and grammar check tools on the computers. When I was in college, my department did that in order to force us to use our heads and not depend on what they considered a “crutch” for our articles and papers. They also showed us how often the tool checks would either skip grammar mistakes or correct words that actually were right, etc.

One thing I would be aware of is that if you are going to make comments on the paper, don’t go too hog wild over it. I did that once for a friend to help her out, but she felt a little defeated in her writing skills when she saw that her entire 10-page report was covered with comments in red ink. (She asked me to put it in red so that she could see the comments better.) If your friend’s writing skills aren’t that great, make some comments on the paper and then make the rest of the comments to her in person, showing her how she can rethink how she wants to say something in the paper. It’s less daunting than seeing everything covered in red.
 
HNA444 said:
My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
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There are different levels of editing. I would mark up the paper in Word or whatever software you share with her, using “Track changes.” If she isn’t a great writer, explaining your edits is helpful, so use that bubble feature to give her helpful tips. These would be just basic grammar edits, and correcting spelling mistakes.

You could edit sentences for clarity, but not to change the meaning. And if you do too much of this type of editing, the work can start to look as though someone else wrote it, which her professor (if this is a university course) will pick up on. I would try to keep deep editing to a minimum. Let her professor see what she’s really got, not what you have, you’re not in the class.

I have been asked to edit papers that were abysmal in quality. I just do the basics, grammar correction and typos, because going any deeper would mean scrapping the whole thing and starting again from the outline. And I’m not getting paid to teach the person how to write (which really involves how to THINK and PLAN).
 
HNA444 said:
My friend asked me to check her personal statement letter that she needs help with. I told her I would, and I don’t mind. But, how far is too far when it comes to helping someone with a report or paper? Should I just edit whatever is wrong, or could I add in some stuff on my own, or would that be cheating? I don’t think her writing is the best, so I kind of want to re-write some of the parts, and of course edit grammar and anything else I see wrong. Is this OK to do?
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Grammar and spelling- perfectly fine to just mark as incorrect or change (she’d learn more if you just marked it as wrong and explained why while going over your corrections)

Adding stuff, as in actually writing- Crosses the line in my book

Adding stuff, as in short “bullets” or comments for her to incorporate into the paper on her own- that’s usually what I do and what I expect when someone reviews my papers. “Add X”, “Discuss Y,” “Show impact of Z on A,” “Meaning unclear here”, etc.
 
Ha, I’ve been there. In college, I somehow ended up being the go-to guy for proofreading papers. :o

I understand the impulse to want to just change things. When proofreading a paper for someone without any natural gift for writing, there would often be so many little mistakes I wouldn’t even know where to begin! If I just told them that this sentence or paragraph needed work, they’d often change it to something with an equal or greater amount of errors. It certainly would have been easier to just do it myself.

But please don’t! 😉 I always preferred going through with a red pen, but you can use the “track changes” function as well (realizing that you may have to explain to the person how that function works and how to turn it off again. :o). If a sentence didn’t make sense, I’d write “needs to be reworded” or “confusing” and highlight the part that was confusing. If a transition was needed, I’d write “add a transition”.

You really don’t do them any favors by just changing it for them. You can point them to where the paper needs some work, but they need to be the ones to do the work. Otherwise, they’ll never learn and grow and get better at writing.
 
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