This article highlights the potential of academic literacies as a theoretical framework for EAP, encompassing not only work on texts, but the wider, socio-political, geopolitical, and institutional contexts and practices in and with which EAP operates. An academic literacies approach foregrounds social practices, and one particular practice, that has become socio-politically and ethically sensitive with regard to student writing in English in the contemporary university is that of "proofreading". The article looks specifically at the reception of students' writing by professors in the humanities and social sciences, and the ambivalent and contestatory role that proofreading plays within this.