Paying for Proofreading

Professional and paid proofreading is a growing but also unregulated business. An increasing number of services offer students support with their proofreading. The choice of options is wide and among the professional proofreading services students can find, there are:

• anonymous websites that offer spell- and grammar check for a fixed price
• more individual proofreading companies that match proofreaders according to disciplines
• private proofreaders with whom students can negotiate what should be proofread
• editing and essay writing services (which can cause severe ethical problems)

Communicating your expectations

Despite the wide choices students may not always get what they were looking for, as a text without any mistakes does not immediately make a good text.  Further, even a professional proofreader might be unfamiliar with the jargon of the discipline or the departmental expectations.  Students who hope to get a perfect text from their proofreader will probably find themselves disappointed with the outcome.  If more than just technical mistakes are corrected, and sometimes this is necessary for the text to make sense, it is important to communicate your own expectations to the proofreader and discuss in detail what will be done to the text.  Many professional proofreaders ask for an excerpt of the text in advance to see what changes are necessary and how much time they would take to make students a realistic offer.  Some proofreaders even take their time to explain their work to the students and give some advice on how to avoid repeating mistakes.  But even a professional proofreader cannot produce the perfect text for any occasion as they also have their personal style, preferences and limited knowledge of academic disciplines.  To avoid frustration it is helpful to discuss the proofreader's work in advance.

Payment

As professional proofreading is an unregulated area, each proofreader has his or her own payment system and it is hard to say which price is fair.  Anonymous services which mainly correct mistakes may charge per word number, private proofreaders can have hourly rates and others are open for students' price suggestions.  The prices range from around £6.00 per 1000 words for basic typo and grammar correction to £30.00 per hour for extensive stylistic correction.  As writing is a creative and personal process, it is difficult to account for its value in an objective way.