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Richfilth · Joined: 24 Sep 2007 Posts: 225 Location: Warszawa

In the region of 40 hours, considering this is only a proofread and not a copy-edit. But it would take me a month to find enough useable chunks of time to get through a project that size.

My prices are set so that my hourly rate comfortably aligns with my page rate, calculated off the error rate of the text. For a light read like this doc, I'd do about 20 pages in an hour, but I have to read it twice. That brings it down to 10/hour, giving a page rate of 10zl and an hourly of 100zl, which is in line with my teaching rate.

That's the one advantage of Phd-level texts; the language is usually a very high quality to begin with, although it does make the inevitable mistakes that much harder to find.

ecocks · Joined: 06 Nov 2007 Posts: 899 Location: Gdansk, Poland

delphian-domine · Joined: 11 Mar 2011 Posts: 674

Rich/others - did you take any particular courses in proofreading before starting?

I've never had any interest whatsoever in doing it, but I always wondered how people started doing it.

Richfilth · Joined: 24 Sep 2007 Posts: 225 Location: Warszawa

I looked into courses, but the curricula for most of them covered the sort of stuff I was already teaching my students; checking for faulty parallelism, finding run-on sentences and so on. And a large portion of my week is working with professional writers, correcting their copy and finding the smallest errors, so it was no real chore to move into proofing and editing as a sideline.

It's not something I'd want full time, and I'm not sure there's a luxurious desk job with a full-time contract and health benefits that would justify the need for a certificate in proof-reading, so I doubt I'll get certified in the near future.

Master Shake · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 1202 Location: Colorado, USA

ecocks · Joined: 06 Nov 2007 Posts: 899 Location: Gdansk, Poland

Like Rich, it just sort of comes with my students. The ones in university classes ask for help and I give it from time to time but if it involves more than a 5 minute reading of a letter or it doesn't fit to do a one-time lesson on writing, then I tell them it's going to be a charged activity.

Grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence construction are the basics. If the scanning indicates they are off-topic on their paragraphs then I warn them it will be higher if they expect content assistance. The rate goes up a bit.

I've seen a couple that were hopeless from my perspective. They had no understanding of context or even the structure of presenting support for their hypothesis. I refuse that business.