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In my school and university days it was expected that every word written in an essay or assignment was my own – that nobody helped me with it at all. The only exception was that I could show a draft to my tutor, who would check my thinking and guide me to the research tools available in the libraries. School essays would be shown to Mum and Dad, but only if my work had been awarded A or had ‘Excellent’ written on them by the teacher – otherwise they’d be hidden away out of sight!

My university assignments and theses grew out of a deep interest in a particular field of study. My practice was to choose topics that would stretch my knowledge or even break through the existing boundaries of knowledge. They were personal things, nurtured through draft after draft and nourished with the results of extensive reading and thinking. They were tested in the muddy waters of fieldwork, written with words chosen carefully to give meaning and impact to the arguments propounded, then checked and double-checked for spelling, grammar, typos, layout. Finally, they were bound lovingly in sober academic garb of neat plastic binders or handed over, with trepidation, to book binders who treated them with infinite respect and clothed them in rich cloth with gold letters sparkling from the spine.

Never did anything written by me at school or university ever get into the hands of an editor. Just as well I had fussy parents and brilliant teachers. It’s different now. Many students have come through a school system that has neglected to teach them how to think critically or how to write. They have ideas, but their ideas are tumbling over themselves for expression. They have no idea of order or of reason or of logical presentation of material in writing. They don’t know how to plan an essay. They don’t know what terms like discuss, analyse, compare or critically examine mean. An argument is a row with a mate at work. Reading the literature means finding a book, any book, and looking for any reference to the topic under review. They don’t know how to spell or put a complete sentence together – and they often don’t care about these details. It is so bad that university lecturers in leading MBA courses have been heard to say: ‘We have given up – we have to award marks for content and ignore the way it’s presented, or nobody would pass’. Perhaps that’s what’s needed – for nobody to pass.

Instead, editors have come to the rescue. Is this right? My feeling is that the student’s work should be identifiably the student’s work, including the 39 writing. I have no hesitation in helping a student to structure an assignment – from outline through several drafts – that’s tutoring, not editing.

When the assignment is ‘finished’, however, I baulk at restructuring or rewriting whole slabs of text because the fundamentals of planning, emphasis, appropriate citation and coverage of the question still haven’t been addressed. For students who are familiar with English, it should not be necessary to do more than proofread and suggest improvements at such a late stage in the production of an assignment. Students whose English is a second or third language, and students visiting from other cultures, need special assistance. It isn’t fair to compare the two.

Should we edit at all? Should we edit selectively? Should we combine editing with tutoring/mentoring in the necessary thinking and writing skills? How should such assistance be acknowledged?

Yes, I think we should edit students’ work, but we should be careful to tell the student how much we are prepared to do while ensuring that the student retains ownership of the writing. Yes, if we’re competent to do so, we should guide the student in the skills that will help them to do better next time – but we’re not all teachers, so if this isn’t one of your competencies, don’t attempt it.

Acknowledgement is important. When I was running a Study Skills Unit in Canberra, I devised a statement that all students were obliged to include on the cover sheets of their submissions if they received editorial help. It read something like ‘I acknowledge that I received editorial assistance from XX (name and phone or other contact for the editor)’. The lecturer was then able, if necessary, to contact the editor to ask just how much assistance was given to the student. (This was in the days before the societies of editors and the universities had agreed on guidelines for the editing of academic work, including theses.)

While it is perfectly possible to advise a student on how to overcome thinking and writing problems, it would not be proper to change the substance significantly if what’s written is what the student finally means to say. It’s a fine line and sometimes difficult to draw.

As discussed earlier in Chat 8 ‘Courtesy, cribs and copyright’, plagiarism is another difficult problem to deal with. Should an editor check a student’s work for plagiarism? Plagiarism can be difficult to detect, and if the editor is not familiar with the literature surrounding a particular thesis topic, for example, they are unlikely to recognise a passage as plagiarism. Be suspicious of passages of text that are exceptionally well written – that is, of a much higher standard of writing and content than the rest of the document. My inclination would be to ask the student to tell me the origin of such a passage, 40 and point out to them the penalties for plagiarism. That should be sufficient to make the student think carefully before quoting from a source and failing to acknowledge it. Having said that, is it really the editor’s job to check for plagiarism (for example, by scanning it with software programs that are now available)? We could debate whether this properly comes under the heading of ‘content’ and therefore more appropriately in the province of the student’s supervisory panel.

In the end, the student has to be responsible for the content of the work. It will not profit them if a paper is written in a slapdash manner, with woolly thinking, or if bits have been ‘borrowed’ from other sources and passed off as the student’s own work. There is only so much the editor can do – largely restricted to copyediting to make the text as readable as possible. The guidelines for editing academic theses, agreed between the universities around Australia and the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), have been revised to allow for on-screen editing, with material being returned to the student in PDF form, for preference. (For more on this aspect of editing, see Chat 11 ‘The ethics of editing’.) It is possible that agreement could be reached between professional editors and universities about the use of programs that scan for plagiarism. However, the ultimate responsibility for content should always remain with the student, the student’s supervisory panel and the university concerned.

All of that having been said, there is nothing more rewarding to me than working with students who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge in their chosen fields. Academic editing is a challenge, but a great experience, and very much to be recommended as a branch of professional editing.