I'm lucky if I ever get to see any of my son's college work. I think he has shown me a couple papers after they were graded, but I don't recall him ever asking em to look at them beforehand.
DS 11 just won a local essay contest, and his paper has also won the district and gone on to the state level. Frankly, I don't think it's that good. But it's all his, and I only offered some very small suggestions when he was in the process of writing it. The topic was, "What is an American?" and he chose to go with the dead white guy angle. He talked about the American Revolutionary war, great inventors, etc. *I* would have gone in a completely different direction, and made reference to our "great American melting pot", different religions, etc. Maybe I should have edited it to give him a better chance. But you know, he very rarely makes the sort of grammatical or spelling mistakes that I would feel comfortable pointing out as wrong. It seems there is a fine line between editing those types of errors and rewriting sentences for better flow or to enhance the vocabulary used. Then there's going all out and changing a writer's ideas!
I guess it's another case of the word "editing" being somewhat vague and possibly meaning vastly different things to people. Just as people differ in the way they define when a child is actually "reading"- editing might be perfectly legit and ethical, or it might be a bit shady.
