I don’t know where to put it!
What is the going rate for reading and correcting a thesis in English? I’ve been offered 3000NT for 21k words – it sounds to me nowhere near enough. Any ideas?
[quote=“smithsgj”]I don’t know where to put it!
What is the going rate for reading and correcting a thesis in English? I’ve been offered 3000NT for 21k words – it sounds to me nowhere near enough. Any ideas?[/quote]
US$0.05 per word. 21,000 x 0.05 = $1,050.00, which works out to 35,017.50 TWD.
I wouldn’t do it for a penny less. Then again, I’m no longer in Taiwan, and I didn’t do that much editing there, so I don’t know what the going rate is on Ilha Formosa.
Ask for at least 15,000 TWD, as this is going to take you more than a week.
Scratch that. Ask for 20,000 TWD. At least.
It all depends on how bad the English is. And to a less expect whether you are interested in the subject.
Correcting a bad thesis is in fact “rewriting a thesis” and it does mess with your head.
Ask to see a couple of pages to get an idea what it is like.
However, the NT$3000 for 21 k words is a piss-take.
Take a look at the whole thesis, to get an idea of what it’s like, then spend some time actually correcting some of it. From that you’ll be able to guess how long it will take you to do the whole thing. Multiply your guess of the time required by how much you want per hour.
The problem with giving you a number is it all depends on how badly written the English is. I’ve seen writing here so bad that I couldn’t even figure out what it meant, and would have to ask for explanations for almost every sentence. Others write quite well, and correcting their work is not much more difficult than proofreading a native speaker’s work.
Thanks people. I’ll get into haggling mode.
The English isn’t too bad (I’m guessing a lot of it is plagiarized from bad published translations, but what do I care!?). I’ve made it clear that I’ll only correct grammar, vocab and spelling, and won’t consider the content.
I personally charge NT$0.75 per English word (original version) to edit (when I do it, which isn’t often).
Also emphasize that it is the writer’s responsibility to have the thing organized. Not your job to impose logic or organization on anything, nor to “add a little bit where it’s not clear”, and so on.
It’s really about time these schools took the responsibility to teach their students how to write a decent academic paper. :fume:
I don’t know Terry. No-one really taught me “how to write a decent academic paper”, I just read lots of papers (you need to do that in research anyway!) and sort of figured it out. The students here don’t read enough source materials to see how it’s done; or if they do they just copy them blindly.
I’ve read about half this thing now and I’d swear blind a lot of it is unattributed copying. The way he keeps chopping and changing between British and American spelling, and reasonable and appalling style – these are real giveaways!
Well, native speakers are probably going to be more apt at picking up “how to write” in English, plus, we are raised with the idea that it’s not fair to copy other people’s work.
In Taiwan, working in groups and having one student (the best student in a particular subject, obviously) do all the work is considered “teamwork”, not “cheating”.
I used to teach research writing at a medical school here. It’s not impossible to teach Chinese students how to write an acceptable paper (that is, one that is structurally sound, might have some grammar and usage errors, but is basically something that can be edited without the editor a) throwing up or b) wondering just where all this text was copied from. Of course you have to throw in a few things that you wouldn’t normally think of in a writing curriculum (like saying, here’s some data: which of the following conclusions can we legitimately draw from this data? The results are frightening at times…)
Of course the problem is that many professors were never taught to write good research papers themselves (in Chinese or English) – by “good” I mean “acceptable for publication after editing in international-standard academic journals”. So the problem has become a vicious cycle.