If English is not your first language, but you need to write in it to sell your products or services, you’re at a disadvantage. English is complicated, and minor errors can be obvious to native speakers, but hard to catch when it’s your second language.

Whether you’re a small business owner, online seller, or a large corporation seeking to make an impression on a native English-speaking audience, small mistakes and awkward phrasing can distract your potential customers.

They think, “How can I trust this product when no one bothered to write a good description? How can I believe this message, when I see typos and bad grammar?”

Here are some problems I commonly see:

The Writing is Too Formal
Using outdated or overly formal words such as “thus”, “henceforth” or “herewith” in casual contexts, like blog posts, emails, or product descriptions.

Strange Phrases Are Used
Literal translations of idiomatic expressions or phrases from their native language, resulting in phrases that don’t make sense in English. For instance, a Spanish speaker might say “It costs an eye from the face” instead of the English equivalent idiom “It costs an arm and a leg,” meaning that something is very expensive.

It’s Too Polite
Overusing phrases like “I beg your pardon”, “Would you be so kind as to”, or “Might I suggest” in an attempt to be polite, but which can come across as overly deferential or even insincere in certain contexts.

Bad Grammar
Misuse of prepositions, such as saying “on the morning” instead of “in the morning” or “wait me in the car,” instead of “wait for me in the car.” Incorrect verb tenses, such as saying “I have seen him yesterday” instead of “I saw him yesterday.”

Typos
Common typos that often go unnoticed until a customer sees them, such as “definately” instead of “definitely,” or “recieve” instead of “receive.”

Spelling
Inconsistent spellings due to confusion between British and American English, like “colour” vs “color” or “realise” vs “realize”.

Homonyms
Many words sound the same, have similar spellings, but have totally different meanings.
See vs. sea
To vs. too vs two
Toe vs. tow
Here vs. hear
Arc vs. ark
Red vs. read
It’s easy to have these words end up where they don’t belong!

Someone might say to you, “Don’t worry, we’ll just get English AI to write everything without mistakes.”

AI is a great tool, but it’s only as good as the prompts it is given, and raw AI output still needs human editing, just as much as human writing needs to be edited. If your English writing is in trouble, simply giving it to the AI won’t fix the problem.

On top of that, as AI writing becomes more common, customers will become better at spotting it and dismissing it as “Just more AI-generated boilerplate.”

If you’re worried that your text may have been roughly translated, or written by someone who isn’t fluent in English, let me have a look. As a native English speaker and experienced writer of both fiction and non-fiction, I can refine your message so that it resonates with your English-speaking audience.

I’ll make sure your writing is clear and persuasive, whether it takes a simple grammar correction or a full rewrite. Your text will flow smoothly and naturally, be free of embarrassing mistakes, and contain all the nuances and idioms that a native speaker would expect.

I can handle a wide array of content types and formats, from product descriptions, to About pages, to email campaigns, and more.

Don’t let simple language errors or cultural miscommunications stand in the way of connecting with your audience. Let your competition worry about the quality of their English, while you relax in the knowledge that you’re making a good impression on customers and colleagues.