Is Professional Editing Plagiarism?

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Is professional editing plagiarism? Many colleges and universities think so. After all, if learning to write better is part of the academic goal, isn't paying someone to fix your writing cheating?

Clearly, if the university says professional editing is against the rules, then it's against the rules. According to the University of Puget Sound, "allowing others to manipulate your words and sentences to the point that they are obviously not your own is a form of plagiarism."

What institutions suggest is that students have someone point out writing problems and then attempt to correct these problems themselves. But I don't think I'd offer value for money if I returned an essay that merely showed sentence after sentence highlighted with a list of grammar terms that my client didn't understand.

I'd argue that these rules privilege those of us who arrive at university with a good writing background and fluent in English. It's just unfair. I argue that professional editing is part of the learning process, not an attempt to plagiarize.

I'm a high school teacher, and by law, I'm only allowed to mark students on the established curriculum. So, I can't take marks off for students who come late, hand in work late, have a bad attitude, etc. Then suddenly at university, students are losing marks in sociological theory, nursing practice, or psychology because they make errors of capitalization, comma usage, and syntax. Or worse, they are charged with plagiarism when after all their careful research and original writing, they hire a professional editor to polish the essay.

There's no doubt that these are essential skills to master to be a competent professional in your chosen field. But I'd classify these as part of the "soft" skills that make a big difference in your professional success, like how you dress, comport yourself, and speak. They are not part of the core skills on which the university should be marking you in the course. Further, although a few students may be going on to academic careers, the majority are going to go into the working world and practice a profession. And in the real world, it's not considered cheating to hire an editor. In fact, the more advanced the writer, the more likely he or she is to work with an editor!

I use "track changes" in my editing, and I've seen students grow in their writing over several years as they use my professional editing service to polish their university writing. I can't imagine how some of these students would have managed to progress through their education without my help.
I had one client working on a Master's degree in Nursing whom I suspect had a learning disability. As a learning support specialist, I see students like this in high school—otherwise, intelligent students for whom writing is an extreme challenge. Add the use of English as a second language, and the writing can be almost unintelligible at times. But this student knew her nursing. She never misspelled the names of drugs, body parts, or scientific theories. She understood the core curricular material clearly. Over time, I watched her writing improve. She never mastered strong writing skills, but she was undoubtedly paying attention to my edits and learning from them.

I believe that only highlighting errors without correcting them is not sufficient for struggling students. That's why many grammar correction programs are not useful. When I see a run-on sentence with some word errors, comma errors, and capitalization errors mixed in, is it helpful to just name the mistakes? I think students need to see correct sentences to learn to write correctly.

Many of my clients are the first in their families to go to college. Many do not speak standard English at home, or they use another language altogether. Insisting that students produce polished, grammatically correct essays when they are struggling to read the texts as well as do academic research with critical thinking is unfair. For students who attended a top high school with advanced English classes, this is an easy first step to college writing. But my high school has many struggling students. The grade 12 English teachers are struggling to help the majority of students meet the minimum criteria for graduation; they don't have enough time to coach the college-bound students in the finer points of writing.

For students of color in the United States, calling professional editing plagiarism is nothing less than institutional racism. It privileges those students whose parents were college educated and who attended better high schools. My clients include university professors who use English as a second language. Are their professional publications "plagiarized" because they have an editor?

Worst of all, many university and college professors continue to enforce "zombie" grammar rules such as not splitting an infinitive or not ending a sentence in a preposition, which are seen by grammarians as arbitrary and not part of the natural grammar of English. My editing practice is to ensure students avoid these grammar errors just in case the professor believes in these outmoded ideas of grammar.

I'm going to continue to assist students at all levels to hand in grammatically correct essays because I believe professional editing is not plagiarism. In a world where students can purchase custom-written essays easily, I support those who have done the hard work of research and writing but need additional help to hand in an essay that meets all academic writing requirements for grammar and format.

It's too late to learn APA when you're finishing your thesis

Frankly, I'm amazed how far people can get without learning the basics of citation styles. I've edited many Master's theses and even a few PhD dissertations in which key parts of citations were done incorrectly. These things should be mastered in first year college.

Let's review the purpose of citation. We use citations to provide credibility to the arguments we are making. A citation answers the question "How do you know?" for each fact that you assert.

APA style uses two criteria to show how much weight a source has: author and date. It assumes that later citations are more likely to be correct than earlier citations. It also assumes that some authors are more credible than others.

But APA doesn't want you to fill up your page with a lot of other junk that's not necessary to show the credibility of your source. That's why the URL and publisher information are listed in the reference section. The whole idea is to keep the body of the paper nice and tight, and leave it up to the reader to check out the reference section if he/she wants more information or to track down the original source.

I just finished editing a Master's thesis in which almost all of the in-text citations did not appear in the reference list. In the reference list was a whole bunch of stuff that was not cited in the paper. It's a complete disaster from a credibility point of view. The reference list is not suggested extra reading for anyone with a burning interest in the topic. The point of a thesis is to make an argument and to show that the facts behind your argument are credible. References should be strictly a list of sources of information actually used in the paper.

Don't Master's programs require you to write a number of essays in courses leading up to your thesis? I know that some undergraduate teachers can be lazy or inconsistent in checking writing for APA style, but surely there must be some kind of course for people who are required to write a thesis? I'm actually shocked at some of the people working in graduate-level programs. I think (private universities are particularly guilty of this) that the admissions offices looks at the tuition fees more than the academic ability.

I think part of the problem is the move to teach undergraduate courses by sessional instructors. These instructors are underpaid and over-worked. They may not have the luxury of time to carefully critique papers, thus teaching undergraduates how to write proper academic essays. When I was early in my education, I thought references were for the birds. I was casual about citing sources. A great teacher set me straight. After that I was diligent in citing sources, but rarely did I get a paper back where a teacher had corrected some technical aspect of my citations. Really, it took until I became a professional editor that I learned about sources like Purdue's OWL, which sets out clearly all the formatting to properly reference a paper in MLA or APA style as well as providing other writing instruction.

If you are an undergraduate and you intend to go to graduate school, or continue your academic career in any way, you need to ensure you understand how to use citation styles properly. Access your school's writing resources, or take the time to look things up online. Even if your mark doesn't depend on it now, it may be important later. And it could be too late then.

You can't buy a plagiarism-free essay

It's depressing both as an editor and as a teacher to see how many sites are catering to the overwhelming feeling students get as they approach the challenge of essay writing. Of course you feel stressed and it seems difficult. Your life is busy and writing is work. Hard work. But buying an essay isn't the answer. And it's plagiarism.

Don't be fooled by claims by sites that they will write a "plagiarism-free essay." One of the definitions of plagiarism is "passing off someone else's work as your own." If buying an essay isn't "passing off someone else's work as your own," then what is it? The essay could be custom written for you, but that doesn't make it your work.

In addition, these companies crank out thousands of essays. In high school and the early years of university, the topics don't change much. Loneliness in "Of Mice and Men", Compare and Contrast "The Yellow Wallpaper" with "A Well-Worn Path". The Great Gatsby. Shakespeare. Political Theory. History. The topics barely change. So the guy writing your "custom written" essay has probably written the same essay a dozen times. Do you think it's going to be "original"?

Plagiarism checking services like Turnitin use algorithms to check the writing of a paper against their database of millions of papers. (Each paper it checks gets added to the database.) It then cranks out a plagiarism score. Score too high and your essay gets flagged. Even if it's not a duplicate, you could get called down to discuss why your paper is eerily similar to another paper. And if you didn't write the paper, chances are you won't be able to discuss the details of the paper or the thought processes that went into drafting the paper. You'll have no notes and no outline. Schools don't have to live up to the same evidentiary standards as courts. Unless you dad bought them a new library or gym, you could be out on your ear with a transcript that reads "expelled for plagiarism."

An investigation by the Sydney Herald in Australia, revealed numerous incidents of students purchasing papers from a service called MyMaster. Aided by Turnitin, computer algorithms easily identified papers that were not original. Sydney University, one of a number of institutions named in the investigation, launched its own probe to determine the extent of the cheating. You can be sure that many people's academic careers will be permanently scarred by the fall out from this case.

So that's not the only reason to write your own paper. The best reason to write it yourself is to learn how to write. If you are in university or college for the purpose of getting a better job when you graduate, chances are that you are going to be expected to be able to do some research and writing when you graduate. Your idea of what the working world looks like might have been formed from watching TV or movies, but take it from someone who has been working for a living for 30 years, there is actually a lot more than hanging out at the water cooler. If your idea of work is "The Office" then you are in for a rude awakening.

What are you going to do when, as a young office worker, you are asked to write a summary of some business file? What if you get asked to write the office newsletter? What about a business letter to a client? You need to know how to write if you are going to have a degree.

Enough of the gloom and doom. If your essay is due tomorrow and you stumbled onto this blog post searching for a plagiarism-free essay to buy, don't  get too discouraged. Go ask for three days' extension. That's all you need. Here's the plan.

On day 1, do all the background reading you can for the essay. Yeah, that means reading the novel, if that's what you are writing about. Visit enotes, if you must, for an outline and a discussion of the important plot points and symbolism of most literary works. Read Wikipedia (but don't cite it as a source--find really reliable, academic sources). Ask me for free essay writing help, if you need to. TAKE NOTES. Note page numbers and place sticky notes on the pages where something important happens. By the end of the first day, you should have some general idea of what the topic is.

On day 2, start by making an outline of the argument you need to make. IN POINT FORM, jot down all the ideas you have. Try to have one or two ideas per required paragraph (2 paragraphs per page). For each idea, have one citation. Take that outline, and write out all the ideas and citations. One sentence at a time. One sentence after another. Don't stop until you've written it all out. Go back and write an introduction. Use one of these ideas for an introduction.

On day 3, send the essay to me for editing and polishing. Editing is not plagiarism. I can make the necessary grammatical revisions to your research and writing to ensure your essay gets you the grade you deserve. When I return the edited essay (within 24 or 12 hours depending on your choice) review the changes I've made so you can write better next time.