Editing in the Writing Center: Exploring a Graduate Editing Service and the Role of Instructional Editing in Graduate Student Support

Dana Driscoll, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Islam Farag, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

This article describes one writing center’s creation and assessment of a graduate editing service, a service for advanced graduate students at the end of their thesis or dissertation writing. Through discussion of the training, features, and assessment of the graduate editing service as well as its role in our larger suite of graduate writing support, we offer a roadmap for how other writing centers can develop writer-focused graduate editing services that support a range of diverse learners and their needs. Our two-stage analysis of 20 student texts includes a robust analysis of 6933 edits made by 10 editors and offers an overview of the common edits and the number of accepted edits in our service. This article also provides operationalized definitions of three kinds of editing practices in our service, including instructional editing, copyediting, and hybrid, and a taxonomy of common instructional practices including guidance (offering direct edits with information and instruction), question asking, responding as a reader, and shifting responsibility to the writer. With the presentation of instructional editing and its features, our article offers clear implications for training and ongoing assessment of editing services in a variety of contexts and helps provide an ethical response to the role that writing centers may play in editing student work.

Keywords: graduate writers, dissertation, thesis, graduate student support, editing, copyediting, editing service

Introduction

The question of how to provide the best levels of support for diverse students who seek writing center services is a critical one. Central to this question is how to effectively handle grammar and editing support, with many writing centers expressing longstanding and continued tensions or resistance to editing or offering direct grammar feedback (Carter, 2016; Grimm, 2011a; Rafoth, 2016). For example, Carter’s (2016) analysis of writing center websites in the South Eastern Writing Center region revealed that 52% directly indicated on their website that they do not edit or proofread for students (pp. 21-22). We see two pressing issues that compel us to develop, assess, and support the editing of graduate student writing in writing center settings. The first pressing issue is that we can serve diverse students–—including those who are multilingual, minorities, come from underprivileged backgrounds that include diverse dialects, working class, neurodiverse, and/or those who have disabilities—best by helping edit their work. Further, a growing body of research (Grimm, 2011b; Denny, Nordlof, and Salem, 2018) demonstrates that providing directive feedback and editing can offer a substantial benefit to a variety of diverse student constituents and help “level the playing field” for these students. As Denny, Nordlof, and Salem (2018) describe, students of low socioeconomic background (who often have intersectional identities as immigrants, minorities, or speakers of non-standard dialects) substantially benefit from grammar instruction, and editing grammar is critical because “sounding right” was a top priority for them to feel like they belong at a university (p. 82). The idea of grammar as a top priority concern for certain students speaks directly to Caswell’s (2022) and Greenfield’s (2011) arguments that we need to acknowledge that Standard English(es) is not a neutral tool but serves as the language of white privilege. Thus, it is important that writing centers offer language tools and support to assist students in their larger writing goals—when many of those goals are gatekept by Standard English(es). By offering minority, low-income, multilingual, learning disabled, and diverse dialect-speaking students access to these tools, we help level the playing field and serve as allies in their larger educational journey.

Students with disabilities and neurodiverse students are other groups that substantially benefit from grammar support and direct editing. Babcock (2008) suggested that for students who have disabilities, the refusal to edit student work is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Babcock demonstrates contradictions of some writing centers’ emphasis on “we don’t edit” with language that suggests writing centers are unwilling to support the needs of students with disabilities. Denton (2017) demonstrated that asynchronous tutoring practices, which use directive and textual editing methods, can be extremely effective in supporting diverse students. Clouder et al. (2020) note the challenges neurodiverse students have with grammar and refer to their poor performance in assessment tests that are heavily focused on grammar or grammatical applications.

Yet another student group that substantially benefits from editing services is multilingual writers (MLWs).  Kyle (2018) notes the “mismatch” in services writing centers provide vs. those that graduate international students are seeking, echoing earlier issues raised by Rafoth (2015). In this view, Kyle notes that L2 graduate students are in a double bind where “challenges to two of the most basic writing center principles become apparent: writing centers seeking to accommodate the graduate multilingual writer (GMLW) must find a suitable balance between process and product, and, consequently, must often reconceptualize the role of tutors as tutor-editors” (para. 2).  Kyle describes a writing center in China that focuses on both editing and writing for high-stakes work of L2 writers, including those who are completing coursework in Chinese but who must publish successfully internationally in English. As Rafoth (2015) notes, these kinds of challenges are present for many international graduate students studying in the US as well.

As MLWs continue to grow in number in the US and abroad, Hartwood (2019) notes that graduate students are increasingly turning towards paid editorial services for support, particularly if university services are unavailable. For a 100-page dissertation, these services can cost $750-$2670^[1], which is unaffordable to many students and creates unequal opportunities for writing support. The prevalence of paid services offers a clear imperative for writing centers to consider providing editing support to advanced MLWs so that all may equally benefit, not only those who can afford them. AI tools may level the playing field a bit, although these tools are also not free and require substantial knowledge of how to prompt for the best feedback (Tajik and Tajik, 2023).

The needs of these specific diverse graduate students are what promoted our writing center to create specific services to meet their needs. Given this body of compelling evidence and the willingness of writing centers to support diverse writers with grammar and editing, one of our goals is to expand this discussion by offering a taxonomy of editing practices that can help writing centers address both the needs of these students and their texts, but also do so in a way that provides instruction, scaffolding, and promotes local concerns. We provide a roadmap for how writing centers can create editing services that level the playing field for diverse writers and support both better writing and better writers.

This idea of balancing better writing and better writers also leads to another rising issue: the growing role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays in the shaping of manuscripts and texts, particularly professional documents like dissertations or articles. In the process of revising our manuscript, generative AI and chatbots like ChatGPT came into prominence, and with these new technologies come new challenges. With a paid service or a click of a button, students can recieve a range of editing and writing support from Chatbots or other AI services (Tajik and Tajik, 2023). A growing prevalence of AI-based technical editing and language tools is potentially replacing human feedback (Kim and Tan, 2023). Given this new frontier of advanced AI writing support, where editing, rewriting, and paraphrasing tools are even easier and more cost-effective than paid editing services, we believe it is also useful to consider how different writing centers approach editing from the principles of student learning and engagement—how can we offer more than “just” editing texts, but use editing as a learning-based experience with direct human interaction. We note that this research was conducted before the release of generative AI, but future work on our service is exploring how to use AI for editing.

Thus, this article offers a roadmap for a comprehensive editing service that supports diverse students through a systematic study of our writing center’s Graduate Editing Service (GES), a thesis and dissertation editing service. We present a taxonomy of approaches to editing student work and offer implications for graduate editing service design, training, and assessment. Then we describe a repblicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD)-based (Babcock and Thonus, 2012; Driscoll and Perdue, 2012;) assessment of our GES service, which included assessing 6933 edits on 20 manuscripts with 11 different graduate student editors. Results from our assessment include a description of the kinds of edits made and accepted by writers and a taxonomy of editing style, including instructional editing and copyediting strategies employed by editors. These results offer the writing center community a roadmap of useful editing practices, including tools for assessment, training, and program development. Thus our work explores how to assist with grammar and proofreading without rewriting and seeks to find a balance long-term learning goals.pecifically, we argue that through “instructional” editing, we can provide advanced graduate writers customized and learning-based editing services and that doing so allows us to meet diverse student needs, allows us to offer something “beyond” what AI may offer, and create fair and equitable access to editorial services for less advantaged graduate students.

Background: Describing, Assessing, and Researching Existing Editing Services

As we began to explore, we follow Rafoth (2016), Babcock (2008), Grimm (2011), and others who have argued that editing does have a place in writing center theory and practice. In our case, we focus on editing support for professional, public, and/or high-stakes works, such as dissertations, articles, and grants produced by graduate student writers. Vorhies (2015) notes that graduate students often face the double challenge of having little to no writing instruction in doctoral programs paired with assumptions that they already have mastered the ability to write. Graduate students are often desperate for writing center services because of the increasingly difficult rhetorical challenges and high-stakes writing they face. Some graduate student-specific services, like the NC State Thesis and Dissertation Support Service described by Autry and Carter (2015), offer workshops and higher-order feedback but do not edit students’ dissertations.

And yet, editing services are growing more common, and perhaps because of many writing centers’ firm “no editing” policy even for graduate-level work (Carter, 2016), a growing number of editing services are offered by other academic units or are published about in places beyond our writing center peer-reviewed journals. A broader movement with STEM and healthcare situates editing in academic libraries (Clark and Sullivan, 2014), student success centers (Corcoran et al., 2018), academic hospitals (Lim et al., 2019), and hospital libraries (Stephens and Campbell, 1995). Most of these editing services are focused on professional academic writing and supporting multilingual writers. Thus, they cater to dissertations, writing for publication, or professional writers in health sciences or other industries. Further, despite a growing number of editing services described in the literature, very few of these have been formally assessed or researched using data-driven approaches, a gap our article seeks to fill.

Editing services are beginning to be described in the literature, although data-driven research on such services is rare. Stephens and Campbell (1995), librarians at Johns Hopkins University, describe a fee-based editing service created because the medical dean recognized that faculty needed additional publication support. Their article describes how their service functions but does not provide any assessment data on the efficacy of the service. Employing auto-ethnographic methods, Corcoran et. al. (2018) describe their own experiences as tutors and supervising faculty in a graduate-focused academic skills center that supports multilingual international students working on theses and dissertations, suggesting the urgent need for editing (p.18). They specifically argue that we must “adapt policies to focus on instructional editing rather than espousing a “we do not edit” policy” (p. 19). Their suggestions are particularly useful for writing centers wanting to balance between supporting writing and writers and have influenced our present study. And again, while their article offers a useful reflection on editing service, it does not provide any assessment or outcomes data on the service.  Within writing centers, Kyle (2018) describes a small English language writing center in a Chinese university that works with students in Engineering and provides both writing tutoring and editing support. Kyle’s work provides international contextualization for why graduate students benefit from editing, but like the above, the work does not provide any assessment data on the efficacy of these services. We will note that very few descriptions of these kinds of services are offered by the writing center community or published about in our journals. We will also note the many rejections this manuscript had from other journals due to these longstanding and unproductive ideologies (see Coda at the end of article).

Only two studies have provided a data-driven investigation or assessment of existing editing services, neither of which are located in writing centers. Lim et. al (2019) examine exit surveys for multilingual medical writers who use an editing service for writing for publication. They explored the results of 936 surveys and found that client satisfaction with these editorial services was more tied to the quality of edits than to a fast turnaround. Clark and Sullivan (2014) offer an editing service through the National Institute of Health’s library. They examined 5 randomly selected article manuscripts from their editing service and found that 84% of editors’ suggestions were accepted for their manuscripts. While they described different edits in their article, they did not provide an analysis of the specific edits employed. These two studies have offered some indication about author satisfaction and how writers may use the edits provided, but do not provide extensive research or assessment.

Given the recency of most of these publications (nearly all in the last 5-10 years), editing services are a new phenomenon that are, as of yet, under-researched, under-assessed, and under-theorized, particularly in writing center contexts. It is clear that most editing services are tailored toward the needs of advanced writers (graduate students, faculty, and professionals) and often serve multilingual writers. Our article serves to fill this gap by 1) providing a writing center-based model of how our editing service functions; 2) providing assessment and insight into the nature of edits produced for theory and training purposes and 3) articulating a service that places emphasis on supporting diverse student learning.

One additional issue shapes the choice of offering a dedicated editing service—and that is how “editing” is defined. Editing and proofreading are terms that may refer to a variety of different textual activities with differing levels of direct alteration or rewriting of texts, raising a third ethical challenge. As Conrad (2019) describes, in professional publishing, “proofreading” refers to a final quality check on a manuscript, while in higher education, “proofreading” can refer to anything from stylistic editing to grammar to addressing higher-order concerns. Beyond terminology, editors may apply radically different strategies, including rewriting full sentences and paragraphs. In Hartwood’s study (2019a), nine faculty from the United Kingdom edited a sample graduate student work with very inconsistent strategies: some offered only basic copy editing while others went well beyond proofreading and made meaning-making changes to texts. Hartwood notes that each faculty participant described a different ethical “line” for what they saw as too many changes to a student text, calling into question the consistency of edits. Likewise, Hartwood (2019b) demonstrated that editors often provide quite inconsistent edits, meaning that different levels of editing support (29-30). Further, Baumeister examined the paid editing industry in South Africa and found a range of practices including complete rewriting of student texts. This evolving situation has recently prompted at least one professional organization, Editors Canada, to release specific guidelines for the editing of student work (Conrad, 2019). Applying this body of research to writing centers illustrates that if writing centers are to provide editing services, we need to offer them in consistent, systematic ways; develop best practices for editing support; and offer consistent professional development for any tutors who are taking on editing roles.

Given both the scarcity of systematic research on editing services and the lack of published models on how a writing center might successfully offer an editing service that supports both writers and writing, we now turn to our own Graduate Editing Service (GES). We describe how we worked to provide our diverse graduate students at our university access to consistent editing practices for high-stakes documents and how this service evolved. We argue that writing centers can offer editing services to advanced students that are consistent, reliable, and rooted in the best practices of the field. We define such a service as one that meets a clear student need, provides free and equal opportunity for all students (including disadvantaged/less privileged), offers consistent edits across texts, and supports writers’ long-term learning through what we describe as instructional editing.

The Graduate Editing Service at Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Context: Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) is a public, doctoral-granting institution (R2) located in a rural setting in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. [University] has approximately 7000 undergraduate students and 3000 graduate students in a range of master’s and doctoral programs. Our institution has many advanced degree programs that cater to working professionals, and thus, many graduate programs that offer summer, fully online, hybrid, or weekend options. IUP also has a large number of international graduate students.

IUP has a 50+ year-old writing center that conducts approximately 4000 tutorials per year and has almost 8000 contacts with students in total. The Writing Center’s primary services include one-on-one tutorials, campus-wide writing workshops, workshops for individual classes by faculty request, and a suite of graduate writer services. Starting in 2016 under the direction of Dr. Ben Rafoth, the Writing Center began a multi-year expansion of our services for graduate writers to increase graduate student completion rates, in partnership with our School for Graduate Studies and Research. The first of these initiatives was our Graduate Editing Services (GES), which assists 50-60 students a year with editing dissertations and theses. In 2020, under the direction of Dr. Dana Driscoll, the Writing Center began offering Dissertation and Thesis writing boot camps and graduate writing groups (Cui, Zhang, and Driscoll, 2022), offering additional training for tutors, and expanding our graduate-level writing workshops. We will note that this sequence for graduate writers is tied to our philosophy of supporting student learning—by providing a range of different support at different stages, graduate students have plenty of opportunities to learn, work collaboratively with tutors, and build their writing knowledge. We see the GES as the final step on the end of a long learning journey that has included many other learning-focused services.

We will also note that having a larger suite of services available to graduate students also emphasizes the different options for graduate support and allows us to cross-promote all services (along with services available from other campus units). Because we have a larger suite of services,  our model has allowed us to address the need for editing in specific ways while still funneling students into earlier services that emphasize key aspects of our work: one-on-one conversations, student learning, and small group interactions. In the last three years, approximately 75% of students who use our GES are also using at least one of our other services. Thus, editing is not done in a vacuum; it is the final step providing support throughout the entire course of a student’s degree. Each institution considering implementing a similar program will need to consider what kind of writing they choose to edit and what other services they can include as part of a suite of writing support.

Features. The GES offers both direct manuscript editing and support for avoiding plagiarism in a single asynchronous, online service. Students can make an appointment to submit their manuscript at two points—when a graduate student will defend a proposal and at their final defense. Our editors offer feedback on graduate students’ manuscripts using in-text comments and track changes features of MS Word. Our editors focus on lower-order concerns including word choice, clarity, grammar and punctuation, and formatting. If students want HOC feedback, they are encouraged to work with a graduate tutor through our regular tutorial services.

Our are trained to focus their comments on “instructional editing” which we define below.

One impetus for the creation of the GES is that our graduate school uses a program called iThenticate to check for plagiarism on submitted theses and dissertations. Each year, a number of graduate students experience graduation delays due to improper borrowing from sources, plagiarism, and patchwriting. Students have a relatively small window to submit and then revise their manuscripts to graduate on time—and students would be unaware of the seriousness of plagiarism and patchwriting in their manuscripts.  Thus, as part of our editorial service, editors submit the manuscript to the iThenticate program, share the report with the student, and offer instructions interpreting the report, resources, and suggestions for how to remedy any issues. Depending on the manuscript, this may be a small portion or a considerable portion of the service we provide.  We note that while many writing professionals express rightful concerns about plagiarism detection software (Vie, 2013), our Writing Center’s role in using this service to assist students is to provide support, feedback, and direct help in addressing any source use issues and to navigate the complex gatekeeping systems present at our institution. Our graduate editors do not use the terms “plagiarism” or label writers in any way but rather provide students with friendly instruction and guidance on how to ensure the readiness of their manuscripts for submission before graduation. This support is critical,  many students find the process of formatting, submitting, and depositing one of the most unexpectedly stressful parts of their final semester, and we can alleviate that stress. This particular feature of our graduate editing service is also one lauded by both administrators from the Graduate School as well as faculty and students on campus.

Due to funding constraints and to serve as many students as possible, editors are allotted up to 7 hours per manuscript. This typically allows them to get through three full chapters or offer editing on 50-75% of each chapter, depending on the length and nature of the manuscript. Given our time constraints, editors work to point out systematic errors that can help writers self-edit the rest (using techniques described in Linville, 2009) and also provide additional resources for students to correct their own systematic errors such as links to handouts or more information. When students receive their edited manuscript within 7 days of their scheduled submission, they receive three documents. The first is an Editor’s letter, where the editor describes the kinds of edits, insights, and how to interpret the iThenticate report. This letter is a form that each editor modifies as appropriate (see results). The second document is the dissertation with the edits themselves. Finally, students receive a PDF copy of their iThenticate report[2].

Usage. In the five years we ran this service prior to the start of this study (2014-2019), the GES edited 221 manuscripts from ten graduate programs: 161 full dissertations, 24 dissertation proposals, and 37 complete theses. In the 2019-2020 year (when we began our research), we edited 57 manuscripts, which is the maximum for our capacity and funding. This represents about 25% of the total manuscripts submitted for degree completion in a given year, and we note that not all graduate programs require a thesis or dissertation.

Hiring and Staffing: To edit 50-60 manuscripts per year, the GES maintains a staff of 4-5 editors who are paid on an hourly basis. GES editors are a completely separate staff from our regular tutors and have separate training. Editors are hired primarily from advanced students in two doctoral programs in the English department. Most also have tutoring experience and some may be tutors before moving into our editing service.

After hiring, GES editors participate in a 4-hour training session with the Writing Center Director and one or more experienced editors. All editors receive our in-house editor’s handbook (30 pages), copies of the latest editions of the MLA and APA guidelines, and access to our large handout library to refer students to as necessary. Our current training includes initial training on the following:

• Role and responsibilities of the graduate editor
• How the GES functions
• Instructional editing as a practice, including examples and parallels to in-person tutoring from Thompson and Mackiewicz*
• Common kinds of edits (drawn from our assessment data, see results)*
• Common challenges with graduate writing (including MLW and diverse writer needs)
• The ethics of editing (rewording, rewriting, tone)**
• A review of models from our service**
• Practice in editing manuscripts**
• Reading iThenticate reports and offering feedback
• Tips from experienced graduate editors

*Added after the research described in this article

**Expanded after the research described in this article

Because we are situated in a writing center that commits to student learning, major issues we address are the role of editors, our position on issues of language diversity and the hegemony of standard Academic English, and how to engage in editing that still supports students’ unique identities and voices (Corcoran et al., 2018; Conrad, 2019). Further, moving beyond the false binary of helping writers vs. helping texts, our training asks editors to consider the role of instructional editing (a concept we articulated through the assessment provided in the second half of this article, and explored further in our results). We define instructional editing as a practice that includes:

• Using the basic principles of error analysis to identify systematic errors
• Providing edits on systematic errors with clear information on the error so that writers can learn the error and learn how to address it
• Raising questions for writers
• Responding as a reader to confusing passages or phrases
• Providing scaffolded learning opportunities to build a writer’s knowledge
• Being careful with how we frame edits and changes to honor students’ dialects, language uses, and ways of meaning-making

As part of instructional editing, we present material from Mackiewicz and Thompson (2018) that fits in with the definitions above including examining the difference in instructional strategies of telling, suggesting, and explaining (p. 57). The following is an example passage that GES editors practice as part of our current training. A dissertation writer is consistently using demonstrative pronouns with unclear referents in their writing:

“There have been a number of issues with secondary education classrooms as raised before. This causes a situation where students may feel isolated and alone. This also may lead to students to feel they do not belong in their classroom. To address this, teachers should implement key strategies.”

In our training, when we review this paragraph (in the context of the larger dissertation) we discuss how to use instructional editing techniques. Specifically, we discuss how to guide the writer by suggesting and explaining to A) learn what is problematic from a readability standpoint and B) apply that learning to other parts of their manuscript and beyond.  For this segment, we identify A) the usefulness of asking questions: (what is “this?” refer to in the three sentences? The same thing or something else?); B) responding as a reader (“I am confused here—can you clarify?”; and C) being aware that terms like “number of issues,” “raised before,” and “key strategies” are unclear and need more specificity. We also note that depending on the field, the heavy use of the passive voice may be more or less appropriate. The editor would conclude with general information on how to review their overall demonstrative pronoun use for clarity and precision. The editor would also give them a handout we have prepared surrounding clarity and precision. Thus, we provide professional development for our tutors that goes beyond just “fixing” the errors but focuses on providing students with the information about what, why, and how to resolve these in the future—similar to how a typical writing center tutorial would work.

Beyond instructional editing, this is also accomplished by examining the choices in how we frame edits with writers so that we can talk about systematic issues, while also recognizing these as aspects of Standard English rather than “correct” or “wrong” and also talking about “academic conventions” or “genre expectations.” Like other writing center practices, we discuss limits to editing: editors, like tutors, may be unfamiliar with field-specific conventions, complex terminology, or genre unfamiliarity.

After our initial training session, the director will continue to work with the graduate editors through their first few months, reviewing their work, offering formative feedback and suggestions, and providing additional training. All editors have ongoing formative feedback on their editing and meet for regular training sessions.

GES training and procedures have gone through substantial revisions as we developed the service and as we conducted the assessment described in this study. The concept of instructional editing evolved from being largely unarticulated to very specific, which allowed us to create more robust training, a form letter, and a clear emphasis on instructional editing and articulate better our values for the service.

Reception: The GES has been extremely well received on campus. Campus leadership recognizes the GES as a unique and “value-added” service, and a service that is now even advertised as part of graduate admissions. We believe that the GES has helped our writing center be viewed on campus as a “center for writing” and more than just a service to support first-year or struggling writers. Further, it has helped us obtain funding for other graduate-level initiatives, such as our boot camps and graduate writing groups. Internally, it allows us to relegate the very common request editing away from our regular tutorials and into a dedicated service where staff are specifically trained in how to do this work ethically, consistently, and effectively. Overall, we have found many positive benefits to offering this service through our writing center.

Methods

Our IRB-approved, mixed methods study focused on conducting an assessment of our GES to answer three key questions:

1. What is the nature and amount of edits made on writers’ texts?
2. How many edits are “accepted” by writers? (as a basic measure of effectiveness, as per Clark and Sullivan)
3. What kinds of editing strategies do editors use with writers?
   1. What is the role of instructional editing in our service?

Because there are so few systematic studies of editing services, we developed a novel method for our study. We split our pool of 221 manuscripts into two categories to ensure adequate representation of two major groups who use our service: 10 randomly selected manuscripts from L1 writers and 10 from international MLWs[3]. These 20 manuscripts were edited by 10 different editors over a period of 5 years. Because all editor communication happened within the manuscripts and documents that were saved by our writing center, we have a complete picture of our feedback.

Round 1 Coding: Types of Edits and Acceptance of Edits. Drawing on Clark and Sullivan (2014), two co-authors individually coded the edits of three manuscripts that were not included in the sample. We met and developed an initial coding glossary and then tested the glossary by independently coding two more manuscripts (not in the sample). We finalized our glossary and began coding the 10 manuscripts. Three coders, two co-authors, and a writing center tutor, coded. 20% of coded manuscripts were reviewed by a second coder, although we discovered that edits were fairly straightforward to code and we had very little disagreement. When a disagreement took place, we discussed discrepancies and resulted in 100% agreement. Table 1 offers our coding glossary.

Table 1

Round 1 Coding Glossary for Edits: Informed by Clark and Sullivan (2014)

Criteria	Definition
Formatting	Adherence to formatting guidelines including title, chapter titles, fonts, spacing, headings, and indentation
Vocabulary	Spelling, hyphenation, word choice, synonyms, prepositions, or phrasal verbs
Grammar	Subject-verb agreement, tense use, definite and indefinite articles, possessive S, singular and plural nouns, etc.
Punctuation	Commas, semi-colons, colons, capitalization, etc.
Clarity	Edits that aim to decrease sentence ambiguity, offer clarity, rephrase or restructure a sentence, deleting extra unnecessary words, or asking for clarification
Documentation	APA or MLA documentation style
Higher-Order Concerns	Suggestions related to the organization of ideas, the focus, and the overall argument. Editors may suggest adding, deleting ideas, or rearranging paragraphs.
Tables	Editing suggestions related to formatting and labeling tables and figures in the manuscript

For each graduate writer, we have three manuscripts: the original manuscript submitted to the GES, the edited manuscript from our service, and the final manuscript submitted to the graduate school. By examining the edited manuscript, we were able to code each type of edit and count the number of edits. Using MS Word’s “Draft Compare” feature, we were able to compare both the edited and final documents to see how many of the edits were accepted or rejected by writers before their final manuscript submission to our graduate school.

Round 2 Coding: Instructional, Copyediting, and Hybrid Approaches. After understanding the nature of the edits that took place and how many edits were accepted or rejected by writers (research questions 1-2), we performed a second round of analysis to answer our third research question. From our larger sample of 20 dissertations, we randomly sampled a manuscript from each of the 10 editors. Using procedures as described above and Johnny Saldaña’s (2021) practice of open coding, we developed a second coding glossary exploring editing approaches and then coded the editor’s letter and the first chapter of edits. This work led to three categories of editing: instructional, copyediting, and hybrid (described in results).

After six months of extensive coding, where we examined 6933 edits and 20 editor’s letters, we used MS Excel and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) to perform a descriptive analysis of these findings.

Limitations. Those considering this kind of research should be cautioned that we had no idea what an enormous amount of work it would be to code 6933 edits. While we acknowledge that 20 manuscripts seemed like a small number compared to the total in our service (221, a 5% sample), only one study has used a similar methodology, and their sample was 5 manuscripts. With this said, we acknowledge the challenges of generalizing across a small sample and generalizing beyond our institution. In hindsight, we would have been better served to sample more manuscripts and examine only one or two chapters per manuscript or even select a subset of pages, each from a wider number of manuscripts—something we put to use in our second round of coding by only examining edits on the first chapter.

A second limitation is that our editing service is rooted in a specific institutional context and serves several unique populations of graduate students (multilingual writers, working professionals, first-generation, low socioeconomic students, and international programs). These graduate students may not represent traditional groups at larger doctoral universities. Regardless of generalizability, this offers clear direction for the nature of typical edits made as well as features of instructional editing that can be directly applied in diverse writing center contexts.

A final limitation is that this study focuses on our assessment of the editing service itself. Students using GES are very near graduation and under tight deadlines to deposit their dissertations and graduate, so we have a very low response rate to post-surveys of our service because they are graduating. Thus, we have focused primarily on the edits, how edits are received, and the consistency of our service.

Results

Demographics. Our manuscript writers were 8 males and 12 females. Manuscripts came from four doctoral programs within our university, representing the highest usages of our service in education, humanities, and social sciences. Six manuscripts used MLA and 14 used APA. Our editors were 10 advanced doctoral students from English, five from Literature and Criticism, and five from Composition and Applied Linguistics, including three MLWs. Four of the editors also had experience tutoring in our writing center.

Total Edits

Our coding revealed 8 categories of edits made by editors (Table 2). The highest number of edits were sentence clarity, followed by grammar, punctuation, and document style. Table 2 provides an overview of edits made to the manuscript.

Table 2

Percent of Total Edits

Category	Edits	Percent
Sentence Clarity	1951	28.1%
Grammar	1248	18.0%
Punctuation	1234	17.8%
Document Style	1133	16.3%
Vocabulary	594	8.6%
Organization and Formatting	462	6.7%
Higher Order Concerns	179	2.6%
Table formatting	132	1.9%
Total	6933	100%

Total vs. Accepted Edits

One way to assess the efficacy of the service is to see how many students accepted the edits offered vs. those that rejected them (a method used by Clark and Sullivan, 2014). As described in Table 3, 83.1% of the edits were accepted by writers and are reflected in the final manuscript submitted to the university.

Table 3

Edits Made, Accepted, and Rejected

	Number of Dissertations	Sum	Percentage
Total Edits Made	20	6933	100%
Total Accepted Edits	20	5763	83.1%
Total Rejected Edits	20	1170	16.9%

Table 4  shows that while 17% of the total edits were rejected, in 16% of those cases (201 edits), writers still changed something about their text but made an alternative choice to what the editor had recommended. This demonstrates cognitive engagement and agency with the edited text, in the sense that while a student recognizes an issue marked by an editor, they choose to employ their own fix to the issue rather than accepting the editor’s suggestions. Thus, students don’t unilaterally accept what an editor has suggested, and the editing process is not one-sided but dynamic. Further,  the other 968 refused edits demonstrate that students actively ignored the editor’s suggestions and retained agency over their work.

Table 4

Distribution of the Rejected Edits

	Number of Dissertations	Sum	Percentage
Total Refused Edits	20	969	82.8%
Total Alternative Edits	20	201	17.2%

Copyediting, Hybrid, and Instructional Editing Styles

The second part of this study offered an in-depth look into the different editing practices by examining the editor’s letters and the first manuscript chapter. We identified three kinds of editing:

• Instructional Editing: An editor works—through questions, responses as a reader, and instructions—to guide the writer to understand and address systematic errors with a goal of contributing to the students’ writing knowledge and textual responsibility. 40% or more of edits in a document are classified as “instructional” for an editor to fit in this category. We see this as an editing practice that attends to student learning and supports diverse learners.
• Copyediting: An editor focuses on textual changes with the goal of producing an error-free text. Copyeditors employ less than 10% of instructional features in their editing approach.
• An editor that uses a combination of instructional editing and copyediting; instructional editing comprises 10-39% of their editing choices.

Table 5

Instructional and Copyediting Percentages

Ed. #	Style	Ch 1 Instructional Edits	Ch 1 Copyedits	Instructional Edits Percentage	Manuscript Year
1	Copyediting	4	73	5.5%	2016
2	Hybrid	10	58	17.2%	2017
3	Copyediting	8	110	7.3%	2017
4	Hybrid	13	89	14.6%	2017
5	Copyediting	9	120	7.5%	2018
6	Instructional	31	74	41.9%	2018
7	Instructional	38	55	69.1%	2019
8	Instructional	20	33	60.6%	2019
9	Copyediting	12	136	8.8%	2019
10	Instructional	24	36	66.7%	2019

As Table 5 describes, four of ten editors demonstrated a strong preference for instructional editing; three editors a copyediting preference, and three editors hybrid preference. Instructional editors employed instructional editing more than 40% of the time, while hybrid editors engaged in less instructional editing than copyediting, but their instructional editing was still present throughout the manuscripts (above 10%). Editors employing copyediting primarily offered direct copyedits and the total ratio of instructional editing was below 10%. Also included in Table 5 is the year the manuscript was edited: the 2016-2017 academic year represented the first year of the GES when we were still developing best practices for both training and responding to writers. In later years, with more training in instructional editing and with more templates that encouraged editors to offer instruction, our data demonstrates this shift in our editors’ practices.

Copyediting Style

Editors that demonstrated a copyediting style focused on producing an error-free text. These editors functioned like a traditional copyeditor, making corrections and providing little to nothing in the way of explanation. Editors using the copyediting style did, however, offer occasional questions for clarification throughout the text. The following is a section of an editor’s letter that employs a copyediting style.

I reviewed your document through iThenticate, and while there were no concerns for plagiarism, there were a number of missed ending and/or beginning quotations for your direct quotes. Additionally, there are a few areas where I wasn’t sure if there was a missing citation. I tried to correct some of these errors, but it is up to you to go through your document and make sure all of your sources are properly quoted and cited. For your editing: 1)    I focused on clarity and while your dissertation is very dense in its theory and language, I did not find many clarity concerns. 2)    I did fix a number of formatting errors, including spacing. 3)    There are few quotes that should be block quotes, which I noted. 4)    For chapters 2 and 3, I did not have time to edit the entire chapter, so I noted where I ended my editing. However, I did skim each of these chapters for formatting errors. You will notice my comments are made in [[ ]] (double-brackets), which will make it easy for you to find and delete once you have made the changes.

While this editor’s note includes references to writer responsibility (in the first and last paragraph), there are no moments of instructional editing present, just a list of what the editor did with the manuscript.

Instructional Editing Style

An instructional editing style is one where the editor works—through questions, responses as a reader, and instruction—to guide the writer to understand and address systematic errors. Instructional editing helps a writer eliminate a variety of errors in their manuscript but also provides the writer with additional information on why the change needs to be made, engages in instruction or scaffolding, and offers additional resources (links, information) for the writer’s learning.

Instructional Editing Letter (Abbreviated)

…I read approximately the first 15 pages of each chapter line-by-line with greater overall attention to detail, then focused on clarity, transitions, and word choice, as you requested; I also found myself focusing on APA format as I edited your dissertation. I used Purdue Owl, the APA style blog, and other reputable websites that cite the APA Manual (6th edition) as sources for the information I provided about APA format in your dissertation. Keep in mind that comments I made in each chapter should be applied to the rest of your manuscript. This is because I stopped marking errors that occurred consistently so that I could spend more time focusing on any new issues that came up.…. One of the areas I focused on was transitions. There were areas that I struggled to make the connection between sentences or paragraphs. Sometimes, paragraph transitions were very abrupt, which was jarring for me as a reader. Especially in Chapter Four, I noticed that some paragraphs read like a collection of statements instead of a flowing paragraph, stating a lot of information without providing clear transitions from one statement to the next. For these areas, I marked them and added a phrase like [[Transition needed here.]], sometimes adding extra information to hopefully help you brainstorm. Transitions are all about connections. When you are reading, try to ask yourself, “How does this paragraph/sentence connect to the next paragraph/sentence?” If you answer the question and the answer is not found in your dissertation, it is likely a transition needs to be added.  If you cannot answer that question, it is possible that something needs moved to increase flow….

In comparing these two letters, we can see that the editor using copyediting style points out errors and briefly indicates what a writer still has to do, while an instructional editor focuses not only on the systematic errors but also provides resources and information for a writer to engage in learning about those errors towards their own revisions.

Features of Instructional Editing

In addition to the editor letters, we found that four key features were present in all instructional editors’ work. Fig.1 demonstrates the total edits per each instructional edit category (of 169 edits across 10 documents)

Figure 1

Total Edits per Instructional Category

The following describes the taxonomy of instructional editing features developed through this study:

Guidance: Guidance refers to an editor making a direct textual change to a writer’s manuscript and then offering clarification, information, and additional resources that support a writer’s learning. Guidance edits comprised 53.8% of instructional features. Here is an example (editor comments and changes are in brackets and italics):

Some of those scholars were responding to the Conference on College Composition and Communication[[’s]] (CCCC) (2014) call for more attention to undergraduate research in composition courses. [[Since you’re referring to the call of the CCCC, Communication’s needs to be possessive. Here is a useful page from the Purdue OWL on apostrophes: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/punctuation/apostrophe_introduction.html]]

Questioning: Question asking is a feature of both copyediting and instructional editing, but editors employing instructional editing approaches use it nearly four times more frequently (mean of 5.3 questions/chapter) than those employing copyediting (mean of 1 question/chapter) or hybrid approaches (mean of 0.5 questions/chapter). Questioning was used 19.5% of the time as part of instructional editing.

Though built on the past movements of the 60s and the 70s, #BlackLivesMatter is more inclusive of differences of class, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and other many elements of identity [[should you include the word intersectional here somewhere?]].

Responding as a Reader: Responses as a reader fell into two categories: responses that indicated where the editor was lost and needed additional details or clarification, or responses that indicated that reader expectations were not met. One editor also offered positive comments. Responding as a reader was a strategy that comprised 14.8% of all instructional features.

Additionally, it is possible that a single teacher could have completed multiple surveys.  [[I know you probably explain this later, but in this context, I am not sure what this sentence means. I suggest adding a sentence to clarify.]]

Writer responsibility. A final feature of instructional editing was writer responsibility, where editors indicated to the writer that they were discontinuing a task (e.g. they would not continue to edit an ongoing issue) and encouraged the writer to take responsibility for the task. Writer responsibility accounted for 11.8% of the instructional features.

From an editor letter: Some issues to work on include: occasional shift in verb tense as noted; a few incomplete in-text citations; some clarification of terms would assist the reader.  I have noted in the draft these things that you should address.

These four instructional categories, developed through our grounded analysis, offer many possibilities for training and assessing any editing in a writing center setting, a point we will return to in the discussion section of this article.

Discussion and Implications: A Roadmap to Instructional Editing Services

This article has offered a description of the practice of one writing center’s graduate editing service and has demonstrated through a systematic, fine-grained analysis the kinds of edits made and the clear differences in editing styles: instructional, hybrid, and copyediting.  Part of this article is the story of how our editing service evolved as we considered issues of language support and equity for diverse populations, developing our concept of instructional editing.  Thus, through our data, we offer a method for how writing centers might successfully integrate advanced editing services for graduate student writers using principles of instructional editing that align with principles that guide writing center practice. We now discuss our major findings and implications that can help writing centers develop, train, and assess an editing service on their campus.

We believe that using the framework of instructional editing along with our suite of graduate services provides a clear roadmap for one way to provide key services and support to a diverse group of students: multilinguals, speakers of non-standard dialects of English, those with learning disabilities, or those who come from other underprivileged backgrounds. As our work has suggested, providing editing services in an accessible and safe way has allowed our students to have a “safe” space in which to get support for their highest-level writing, ensure a timely graduation, and help level the playing field for all students. Our careful training and development of instructional editing as a core pedagogy of this service allows us to “level the playing field” as we explored in the introduction, while also providing a safe, supportive environment with respect for language differences.

One of our key contributions is offering a framework for the kinds of editing (instructional, hybrid, and copyediting) and the features of instructional editing: guidance, questions, responding as a reader, and writer responsibility. This framework offers writing centers a set of best practices that are simple to learn, simple to train, offer a clear method for constantly editing of student texts, and offer an assessment framework that allows directors to systematically engage in informal and informal assessment.

We want to stress that developing and operationalizing an instructional editing practice as part of our GES was an evolving process, one that is clearly reflected in our data. When we started this service, most of the literature presented in the opening of this article had not yet been written and we did not have our suite of graduate-level services, and thus, our own practices evolved drastically. Most of the documents in our dataset that were in a hybrid or copyediting style were from the first two years of our service—as we continued to offer the service, we offered more robust training and oversight, which gradually shifted to the instructional style more present in later years of the GES.

The four instructional editing features allow us to put the “learning” into editing and ensure that graduate students who use our service learn about systematic errors in their own work, how to correct them, and how to self-edit in the future. After developing this framework through our data, we also noted its similarity to Mackiewicz and Thompson’s (2018) categorization of the different kinds of instruction and cognitive scaffolding found in face-to-face tutoring practices. While their categories described conversations about writing rather than asynchronous editing, our instructional editing features have much in common with their categories of “explaining and exemplifying” where a tutor offers information for why the change is suggested; “pumping” or questioning, and “demonstrating,” where a tutor shows a student how to do something (57-58). Thus, we can see some features of F2F tutoring pedagogy present in our instructional editing practice.

Further, our concept of instructional editing is supported by previous research on teacher feedback and student error reduction. Chandler (2003) found that students’ accuracy improved when they were specifically directed to self-edit; Ferris (2011) also recognized the importance of multilingual writers’ identification of systematic errors as part of their learning. This body of research suggests a rich area for future study and program implementation about instructional editing practices and student learning in writing center settings.

Our presentation of the categories of editing and the total number of edits offers a fine-grained look into the kinds of editing practices that take place on student dissertation manuscripts in our service, providing a framework for training and assessment for other writing centers and editing services. This data has supported changes to our training—by providing the most common edits made and examining those categories in depth, we can better prepare editors for the realities of the work they do. This data can be of use to anyone starting or currently offering an editing service: by understanding what the common errors are, and how often they occur, we can target training in specific areas. As per Clark and Sullivan (2014), one useful assessment of an editing service is examining the total edits made vs. accepted by writers. Clark and Sullivan (2014) found that 84% of edits in their service were accepted, while in our service, we had an 83% acceptance rate with a very different population (professionals vs. students). While this only represents two services’ percentage of edits, it is all of the current data we have and may form a baseline for additional research and assessment of editing services.

Finally, the choice of what to edit is one important consideration for those considering an editing service. While the demand for editing is high, in consultation with our graduate school, we have made the decision to focus only on editing the highest stakes and publicly visible document that students produce as part of their degree—the thesis or dissertation. We knew that this was the document that students routinely paid to have edited and that problems with plagiarism and university-specific formatting routinely prevented students from graduating on time. By offering this service and performing the above assessment, we are ensuring that students receive consistent editorial feedback that is equally accessible, that focuses on instructional editing, and that does not rewrite student texts. We hope that other writing centers may use our model as a guide to develop their own editing services.

We will also note that the data collected for this article took place before the rise of generative AI. We see great possibility in weaving AI-supported editing with a service like ours—AI could allow copyediting to be more efficient, and tutors could provide more time with instructional editing, iThenticate, and university-specific formatting and be able to get through more of the document. Thus, our writing center is currently exploring these as possible additions to our service to be able to serve more students and we encourage other writing centers to explore generative AI may support these types of services.

Conclusion

Services like our Graduate Editing Service will allow writing centers to expand support in new directions and fill serious needs among our graduate student populations. With an understanding of the features and strategies of instructional editing and the taxonomies presented here, a writing center is poised to both provide consistent editing services that support diverse student needs and assess those services effectively. Further, with the rise of AI, it is also important that writing centers create services that can distinguish and expand beyond what AI offers.

Coda

In 2012, Dana and Sherry Wynn Purdue published “Theory, Lore and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in the Writing Center Journal.” That publication and several others identified that the field of Writing Centers was largely lore-driven and made calls to support a more empirical, robust approach to writing center work. While we would hope that much has changed since the publication of this piece in the last 14 years—that is, that the writing center community has come to respect robust data-driven approaches rooted in sound theory over ideology, our experiences with bringing this article to print suggest that there is still much more work to do. To provide some positionality and context: Islam is a multilingual writer and graduate student and is new to writing for publication, and this was his first publication experience. Dana is a dyslexic scholar and writing center director who has published over 65 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, currently has an academic book on writing for publication in press, and has served as editor on multiple edited collections and book series.

Due to the topic and ideologies surrounding grammar (Grimm, 2011), the review process for this piece was fraught with adversity. This process included range of reviews that had hostile tones, unhelpful critiques, and offered no way forward—and this was one of the worst review processes that Dana has experienced in her career. The feedback did not provide a substantive critique of the core of our work nor offered clear suggestions for revision. Most ironically,  reviewers often provided a level of grammar-based feedback that was hostile. This left us in a position of being asked to revise over and over again but having no clear path forward to achieve success. Thus, we came to a place where we simply did not believe we could have a fair review and believed this piece would not find a place in any Writing Center-themed journal. Thankfully, the editors and reviewers at TPR saw differently.

This piece has always been about grammar in some form—supporting grammar, our own grammar, and ultimately, about grammar ideologies in the writing center. One of the things we had reinforced firsthand in this review process is that grammar is about power and privilege. As we experienced firsthand, hostile reviewers weaponized grammar and feedback about grammar to otherwise mask ideological issues surrounding the topic. The irony was not lost on us that, as multilingual and dyslexic authors and grammatically disadvantaged scholars, the very service that we were describing for graduate students to help them succeed could have assisted us. If anything, this entire experience prior to submission at TPR demonstrates just how far the field still has to go concerning ethical review processes but also in addressing and examining the field’s ongoing ideologies surrounding grammar and grammar support.

For a new scholar, this kind of review experience deters publication and makes the entire publication process seem unsurmountable, unmanageable, and demoralizing. For a senior scholar and faculty mentor, this experience creates an emotional labor burden insofar as requiring countless hours navigating the revision and feedback process alongside mentoring a new scholar through such a difficult process. We note that many in our field are at an invisible disadvantage when it comes to blind peer review processes and scholarly writing—they are contingent, untenured, in staff positions without job security, or graduate students.  Like us, they may also have other invisible cultural, linguistic, or personal disadvantages. And yet, these voices are critical to the field. The need for more ethical and fair review processes—especially on topics that are ideological or contentious—is critical if we are to keep these voices in the field rather than driving them out.

It is possible that many writing centers may not be ideologically ready to consider making grammar support a core service. Disagreement is the prerogative of our colleagues and peers; however, without publishing and collecting good data surrounding contentious or otherwise controversial ideas, we dilute our professional and scholarly discourse.  We stay in the realm of our ideology; and this is exactly what RAD-based scholarship and approaches, like this one, can help us explore. As this publication and experience have shown, we believe that the position of writing centers saying “we don’t support grammar” is a position of privilege; it is also a privilege that neither one of us has ever held in the English language. This “no grammar support” stance prevents disadvantaged students and scholars from being supported in ways that they need. As a field, and as a profession, we can and ought to do more to address systemic inequities in our review and support processes. We can do better.

After our experience in publishing this article, Dana has made the decision to expand our graduate editing service into a scholarly editing service.  The goal of this expanded service will be not only to provide editing and formatting but also to help all writers on campus (faculty, staff, and students) navigate the publication process. Thus, part of our service will include supporting authors in working through reviewer feedback and engaging in good faith in the peer review process. We hope reviewers and journals will do the same.

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Footnotes

^[1] https://americanmanuscripteditors.com/general_academic_editing.aspx

[2] We note that iThenticate uses a database of published scholarship and does not add documents submitted for checking into the database. Thus, multiple submissions of graduate student work (through GES and later our Graduate School) do not flag as plagiarism.

[3] Please note that this article focuses on our editing service as a whole and the role of instructional editing; we have a separate manuscript in preparation on exploring the L1 and MLW texts. This we do not distinguish them in this manuscript.