i helped university students with their essays for quite a while. mostly of the rich postgraduate variety, normally attending elite british universities with english as a second language. to be honest, even when the topic interested me and aligned with my own corner of knowledge, i found the work to be unrewarding and strenuous. (i hooked up with not a few of them too but that's not for here.)
doesn't help that everything below actually respectable scholarship - that is, all those homework Jay Galt book report style assignments - have that extremely wooden and formulaic way about them. it's very boring and overly sign-posted. not fun to read and definitely not fun to wade through to fix the grammar. not many people can write with flair, wit, verve, or whatever -- the lower slopes are a kind of chat-gptised slog.
editing isn't hard if you have a good ear, tbh. good writing 'sounds' right to the internal ear. most times, a literate person could intuit how to fix a sentence even without understanding the nuts and bolts of grammar and syntax. i use a sort of 'speed bump' principle, in which anything that snags my attention or inner narration probably needs some diving into. very rarely now do i need to actually consult, like, a usage guide or reach for my trusty 'oxford handbook to ...' vade mecums (acquired in my eager journeyman days). like any job you develop a faculty for it pretty quickly.
i'd find marking papers very arduous at first, too.
Last edited by uziq (2025-02-20 11:58:29)
