Proofreading for college-aged kid?

Millancad
Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:51:20 +0000

My mother proofread my papers in HS occasionally. With us, proofreading was always quite literally just that - insert a comma here, there’s a typo there, etc. I proofread her grant proposals in exchange.

In college, if I wanted proofreading on something sort like a resume or a statement of purpose, I would ask my friends or sometimes my sister, and I reciprocated by reading and commenting on theirs. The only problem was when I had long papers, because no matter how much my friends would like to help me, they weren’t going to read 20+ pages single spaced. That led me to ask my mother once in my senior fall and my sister once in my senior spring. I wanted to ask my sister both times actually, since she and I have often read statements of purpose for each other, but she was super busy in the fall. These long papers are always fairly technical, which really means that no uninitiated individual can over-edit it. If my sister is proofreading my paper on contact linguistics or I’m proofreading her paper on the legality of gender discrimination in Francophone Europe, we can’t really go beyond “comma here”.