My Experience Correcting English Articles Written By Non-Native Speakers, And Hiring Good Copywriters
“One wants edit a article that is wrote in language english and not native speaker patience is best.”
Lol, translated, that means…
“If one wants to edit an article that’s written in the English language by a non-native speaker, patience is the key.”
Now, hopefully your non-native English writing copywriter will do a much better job than that. Here’s my experience working with and editing articles from non-native English speakers, with some tips and suggestions.
Experiences Of An Editor
As Head Editor, one of my main responsibilities revolves around checking and correcting documents, emails, and messages from company team members (none of which are currently native English speakers), as well as articles from our freelance copywriters (most of which are not native English speakers either).
As an editor, it’s important for me that the articles be at least decent and easy enough to understand and make corrections. I’ve often come across sentences that grind all the gears in my noggin to a halt, and I have to ask myself “what is that saying!?” often times to no avail. In times like that, the delete key may be your best friend, if you don’t have time to ask and wait for the copywriter to respond. Other times, it’s like every other sentence is a mental hurdle to jump over, which can be extremely annoying, and make an otherwise short document take much longer to edit than it normally would. Good times for an editor is when you only have spotted edits to make, which don’t twist your brain into knots. And then there’s the sweet spot, where you have very few to no edits necessary (because of a good copywriter), those moments make me proud, sniff* — on a more serious note, I’m very thankful for those moments and copywriters.
What To Expect & What To Do About It
The most common mistakes for a decent copywriter who’s a non-native English speaker, are things like improper placement of commas (or no commas at all), run-on sentences that make 1 or 2 sentences an entire paragraph, problems with tenses, no contractions (robot speech), problems with singular/plural, etc. Patience and understanding is key, remember, you’re writer doesn’t have English as their first language, and hopefully, they’re aiming to please. Mentoring and feedback can be extremely useful as time goes by with your copywriter. Give them tidbits and pointers on something they can improve upon for the next article (small steps at a time), and/or show them a screenshot of your edits in Google Docs, or make a screen capture video with commentary as you’re editing and then share it with them (and please, be nice). And remember: honesty is key, if there’s a problem that can’t go unchecked, let them know, and be as clear and concise as possible with your drafts, revision requests, and suggestions for improvement. Also, they’re not the only ones who should be learning, you learn how to properly communicate with them and understand what they’re saying as well.
Choosing A Writer
For me, this has probably been one of my most arduous tasks. The good thing is, if you take the time and do it write, er, right, then you’ll hopefully have a good copywriter that you can work with long-term, and not have to worry about constantly finding new writers to replace old ones (not to mention save yourself from having to edit a whole lot of badly written articles). Now if you’re in my position, clients’ articles are still expected to get done, so you have to make sure that you’re as quick and efficient as possible, while having planned for clients’ articles to get done. You might even decide to have the best candidates do 1 article each (depending on how many articles need to get done), that way you can give their writing skills a really good test. Compare the best of the best, and get your clients’ articles done at the same time — make sure you pay them for their test-work as well.
But before you do that, you have to first choose and categorize your best candidates. We usually use Upwork, which makes the hiring process straightforward and simple. First, decide the criteria that you’ll use. This can include things such as: how long the person has worked on the platform, how many projects they’ve successfully completed vs those they’ve done in total, how much money they’ve earned on the platform, client feedback and star ratings, their bios and introductions, sample work, how well they’ve paid attention to your job post, how willing they are to work with your offering, and of course their personal interactions with you and any tests you may have for them. You can also take into account their country of origin, time zone, etc.
First, it’s a good thing to peruse through all of your applicants and get rid of the ones you definitely don’t want. In this first pass, feel free to make notes of anyone that stands out or could be a maybe option. Then, after the first round is finished, go through whoever you have left, looking for whoever looks like the best and second best candidates. Feel free to keep anyone else as a third option at this point, or get rid of them as well. Once you have your picks, go ahead and send them a congratulations message that they’ve been chosen as one of the candidates in consideration for the job, and ask for their further explanation of why you should choose them, as well as any other questions you may have for them. At this point, do whatever you feel is necessary in choosing the final person(s) for the job, including potentially having them do a sample task. It’s a nice gesture once the final decision has been made and the winning candidate(s) is chosen and notified, to send out another message to those that didn’t quite make the cut, and let them know you’re sorry but they didn’t get this offer, and thank them for their application and effort/interactions (and if you might have them work for you in the future, you can let them know that you may consider them for future tasks).
Of course, you could just try picking the best out on your first run through, it may be simpler that way :D
Note on sample tasks: It’s been my personal feeling, that if you’re going to ask them to do a full-on work task as a sample project, then you should compensate them for it. However, I know some in HR would disagree, and I can understand their reasons for doing so. I am willing to be persuaded :)
Know What’s Working, And What’s Not
Finally, you have to know what’s working, and what’s not. This applies pretty much to everything we just talked about, whether it be giving feedback to your copywriter, hiring a new one, or knowing when to get rid of a current one. Remember to be honest and concise, use simple and clear language, be patient, and… be human, not some crabby cakes, because your copywriter or candidate on the other side of your computer screen is (most likely) another human being.
Thank you for reading Cyberius’ blog
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