Original	Revisions
It is said that she widely read when she was a child ....	It is said that she read widely when she was a child ....
	It is said that she was widely read when she was (still) a child ...

The following concordance shows the sorts of examples that we found to distinguish 'read widely' ('read' = verb) and 'widely read' (compound adjective). It also shows a point that we did not have time to investigate during the consultation: that 'widely read' may refer to a text (ie many people have read it) as in citations 11-13, or to a person (ie (s)he has read a great deal - cf 'well read'), as in citations 14-16, and the intended meaning in the student's essay.

A problem is that there remain a number of citations such as 17-20 where it may not be immediately clear which meaning is intended: does citation 17 mean that a lot of people read Patric Walker's astrological column, or that Patric Walker is (for an astrologer) very well educated? For that citation, and for 18-20, commonsense together with clues in the context persuade me that the first meaning is intended (compare with the clues to the second meaning in 14-16).

 1 felt a deep horror about the Holocaust. I have read widely about it and, truth be told, will not be going 
 2 nitis confined him to a sick bed for a year he read widely and established what was to be a lifetime's pas
 3  bust, profit and loss, life and death. He has read widely and (in places) researched deeply. He is to be 
 4 lio Society at the time, it was my business to read widely, and to know all the more obvious landmarks in 
 5 entually comes to seem quite apt. Mr Kelly has read widely and in some cases surprisingly deeply. (He has 
 6 inner life was clearly quite different. He had read widely and eclectically in contemporary American poetr
 7 the humanities. All of the faculty urged us to read widely, to visit the museums and galleries, to attend 
 8  prescribed set texts. We all want children to read widely, but fear this approach turns them off.' Englis
 9 Best Horror Stories. As a committed editor, he read widely and encouraged new writers - one reason perhaps
10 t without knowing languages and without having read widely." His own conducting technique was greatly admi

11 which will presumably mean that the essay is not as widely read as it deserves to be.  Jestaz's great gift
12 own as the Psychology of Mathematics Education. His widely read and often-quoted book, The Psychology of L
13 's critical stock was already high, helped along by widely read reviews by John Updike in The New Yorker. 

14 cularly in the intelligence field. A cultivated and widely read scholar with a strong sense of public serv
15 n this. He was uncommonly clever, well-educated and widely read. He probably knew more history and more la
16 't that great?' The story of how the smartest, most widely read and best-intentioned American President fo

17 dizzying heights of Patric Walker, the world's most widely read astrologer, syndicated everywhere from the
18 ich Fromm, claims the flyleaf, was perhaps the most widely read psychoanalyst after Sigmund Freud, yet Dan
19 used to. Yet, given that Pearce is a well-known and widely read journalist, it's a surprise to discover hi
20                     Tom Paine was probably the most widely read writer of the 18th century. His three grea