<p>You would need a Prof to sign off before going in some colleges…even ones without honor code. </p>
<p>Granted, the main reason for the latter was more due to the fact the given college’s writing center was overwhelmed due to the college’s lack of resources/unwillingness to expand the center to account for the burgeoning demand from its undergraduate students. Such colleges also tend to “ration” use of such. At one college I know of, undergrads may only use the writing center 3 times in a given semester. </p>
<p>Most writing centers will only allow 2 appointments per assignment. And the tutors generally have training that keeps them from really doing the work for the writer. My kid had to take a full semester class before she could be a tutor in her school’s writing center – students were invited after 1st semester freshman year to sign up for the class the next semester, then started working first semester of sophomore year. I think they will point out issues with flow, if the paper does not support the thesis, if the thesis is missing, etc. But I don’t think they reword for the writer, at least are not supposed to. They also might point out things like inconsistencies in capitalization through the paper. But they don’t go through and proofread every line – although they might strongly recommend that the student do so! I think of they help they give as something like what the professor themselves might give if the student took a draft into office hours, although the professor may give more feedback on content. A writing center tutor can only do so much of that unless the paper is on a topic in their major. My D who worked in the writing center said she thought it was really interesting to read all these papers from different majors and she learned a lot doing it.</p>
<p>I think your D should now find someone at work to give her writing a once-over. What you did previously was fine, IMHO. Your D obviously needed your tutoring in HS. In college, I think it starts to become iffier. At some point, you have to cut the cord.</p>
<p>My kid is very independent, and never wanted to show me anything he wrote in school. I haven’t proofread of edited anything for him except resumes and applications, where another pair of eyes is always helpful. I would continue to do that.</p>
<p>One issue to also think about in work situations is whether client/institutional confidentiality issues are present. </p>
<p>With some companies I’ve worked for, even discussing a work matter in some detail is forbidden outside of the office/specified work area…sometimes even with colleagues on the same team. </p>
<p>Due to those experiences, it would never occur to me to ask family members…or even folks outside my workteam to proofread anything I wrote for work. </p>
<p>Occasionally, my adult children ask me to look over something really important to them, like a resume or an important email. I’m happy to give my opinion…but it only happens perhaps once a year or so. Their work is all so foreign to my experience that any help I might want to offer would only make things worse in that area!</p>
<p>Part of it depends on what kind of job is she looking to do after college. Is she going to be in the sort of job that she is going to be writing memo’s to others on a regular basis? If yes then she really needs to do it by herself. If however she really isn’t going to be doing much writing then it is probably Ok. For obvious reasons I don’t proofread my kids writing. In my former life as a computer programmer whenever I had a memo that was going to top management my boss looked it over just to make sure. And DH is a really good memo writer so his bosses boss has him rewrite/ proofread stuff. However in the end it’s better to know how to do it yourself. </p>
<p>Just a note on writing centers: at the schools I work at, writing centers do NOT proofread. Or edit, for that matter. They’re more to help with working through the thinking on an essay, outllining, structure, revision strategies, etc. So telling a student to go there for proofreading, or a “set of eyes” will not work. I’m not saying there are no writing centers that will do that, but it would be outside the norm.</p>
<p>My husband and I work together. He is dyslexic and I take a glance at almost everything that he sends out. He asks me, I don’t insert. I don’t find anything wrong with the kind of editing that takes place when there are learning disabilities involved. My son is also dyslexic, but he chose a non humanities major. For his required writing he took an extra 1 credit writing lab. </p>
<p>D recently worked in an office with a woman who still sent important copy to her mother for proofreading because she was an English professor. I was responsible for travel brochure production, and I would always send a copy of the final brochure to a number of people in the office for proofing before it was printed. Not just those who would only look at rates and dates, but those who would look out for misplaced commas or stylistic continuity.</p>
<p>I don’t see proofreading for minor edits as an ethical issue, but just as a matter of practicality and independence, I don’t think any adult (barring ESL or LD issues) should need a proofreader for every assignment or project. Most of the time the consequences of a couple of typos or a repeated word or two aren’t so dire anyway, so reserve the outside proofreader for the most important cases, and otherwise just get in the habit of rereading your own work. Sure, if your job is creating brochures for the public, you’ll probably always want a second set of eyes to look over the final copy, but if it is a matter of college papers and ordinary business communications, it shouldn’t be a routine thing. </p>
<p>If you’re going to have someone proofread the occasional paper or work assignment, it might as well be your parents as anyone else. </p>
<p>No, I think they know better. They never asked my husband either and he is a native English speaker. There are spell check on some of the word document, so they should to use and get adapted to technology. They will need it when they get to a work place.</p>
<p>No. With the exceptions of the college essays, I never saw my kids’ high school or college papers before they were turned in. I’m sure they made some mistakes that I could have caught, but I think they learned from making them most of the time. My Dd had a junior English instructor who was so tough he would subtract a point for a missing comma. Dd became very careful in her proofreading during that year!
In the past she has asked me to read cover letters when applying for jobs, but that was more for content-to make sure she presented her best case- than for grammar or writing style, and I was happy to do it.</p>
<p>My son has never asked me to look over anything since, well, ever. He was a fairly weak writer in junior high but rose to the challenge in a very demanding high school and, like his sister, learned a lot from making mistakes. By the time he finished college, writing had become one of his strengths. Both kids currently have jobs that require a lot of writing and are proficient enough that I assume they act as proofreaders for their friends and colleagues at this point.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
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