I’ve just recently joined LingQ and wanted to give back a little by doing some writing correction in English. I do a lot of editing in my real life, so I edited with a lot of detail, to make the English not just grammatical but natural, and so it would not sound as if it were written by a non-native speaker.
I looked at a few examples of other people’s corrections and noticed that they are a lot more minimal, mostly to correct for strict grammatical errors rather than for sentences that are valid but awkward, etc. Looking back up at my own corrections, everything looks all marked out in red, as if every word of the original were wrong––that was not my intention at all. In hindsight, I worry that the original writers will find all those corrections discouraging, or overwhelming. The interface is fairly basic, so there’s no way to communicate why corrections were made, there’s just a lot of ugly red.
So, what do you think? When you submit a writing sample, what level of correction do you want? Do you want to sound like a native speaker in your writing, or would you prefer to focus on grammar mistakes only? Or something in between?