Will You Proofread My Paper?
As a writing specialist in The Writing and Research Center, this is one of the questions I hear most often. Unfortunately, the question can be hard to answer because students typically have different meanings for their questions. Four common meanings come to mind.
However, before I can attempt to answer the question, I have to ask some questions of my own. Typically, if you come to me for assistance, I will ask you for the name of the course and the name of the instructor. Then, I will ask you if you have an actual printed copy of the assignment, so I know exactly what the teacher wants. If you don’t have a printed copy of the assignment, I will ask you to explain the assignment to me. Finally, I will also ask for the length of the assignment and the due date. Once I have the answers to all those questions, I can try to answer the proofreading question. As I mentioned above, proofreading means different things to different people.
First, the proofreading question sometimes means, “Will you read my essay and let me know if that’s what my teacher wants?” This question usually occurs when a teacher asks for an essay that you, the student, have never written before. For example, the teacher might ask you for an analysis of a poem or a short story. Many students assume the teacher wants to know simply what the poem or story is about, so they write the essay just as if they…
