Become an EarthChronicle.com Proofreader!

It is each author’s responsibility to create the best possible essay, and we expect them to double check their submissions for readability, grammar, and punctuation. However, even the best writers can use a different perspective, a fresh look at their writing, and a second pair of eyes to look for mistakes.

Also remember that submissions to EarthChronicle.com must be of the highest quality, so your secondary responbility is to keep their eyes open for public domain and research issues. If you notice an idea or quotation that isn’t properly cited, address it! Don’t hope that the researcher will catch it too… what if they don’t? What if you recognize a paragraph that has been plagiarized from a magazine article or a book that the researcher hasn’t read? Ideally, you will work collaboratively with your team members in their primary responsibilities just as they will in yours.

Finally, I've proofread my own papers for a couple dozen different English professors while earning my MA in English, and proofread other people's papers for perhaps a hundred more professors. NOT ONE had the same interpretation about the rules of punctuation but each one refused to believe that a different professor could think differently… Obviously, they don’t talk about it with each other much. grrrr… So if all my English professor’s can’t agree on what’s correct grammar and punctuation, I don't think there's any reason we have to any better. I would rather EarthChronicle.com uphold a common sense principle to the rules of grammar and punctuation:

If applying a rule makes a submission more readable and clearer, then it is necessary. If a rule does not contribute to the quality of the essay except to make it conform to the manual of style… then it is unecessary or optional.

In short, there is no need to put commas everywhere your style manual says; even my 8th grade English teacher (hardly my most learned mentor) recognized that this was simply “comma crazy”. Similarly, there is no need to rewrite Star Trek’s dramatic injunction from “To boldly go where no one has gone before!” into “To go boldly…” simply because your style manual deplores the split infinitive. Sometimes conjunctions begin sentences quite nicely and prepositions sometimes sit just fine at the end of a sentence. If you’d like more information, check out our Proofreader’s Bible. Most importantly use your common sense. Make the essays you’re responsible for as clear and readable as possible. Use grammar and punctuation to clarify and guide the reader to the meaning the author is trying to achieve. If you can use the tools of good grammar and punctuation to help an essay communicate to the reader, you are applying them successfully… if you’re using them for no higher purpose than to conform to your style manual, you’re not. This is the challenge for our proofreaders at EarthChronicle.com, so if you think you have the excellent editing skills necessary, tell us you’d like to volunteer as a proofreader. Email us now!

Note: Your time and support are very valuable to us and we respect your contributions. You can work as much you are interested in, and take a break whenever you want. You can work at whatever pace is acceptable to both yourself and your team. All we ask is that you keep us posted. If you wish to take a break while you’re in the middle of a project, tell your team so they can get a replacement; if you’ve got too much going on to keep pace with the rest of your team, it’s perfectly fine to withdraw as long as you let us know. We’ll assign another proofreader to the project. Also, since ideally, you will support the research issues of your articles let us know what kinds of papers you’re interested in working on so we can try to steer those topics your way.