Scribendi Reviews

Pros

it's a smart and fair company

Cons

there is hardly any work available; it seems they have hired (way) too many editors

Pros

I liked the flexible hours and great training.

Cons

The expectations are unrealistic and the timeframes are exceedingly tight. At most the time allows for a simple grammar check. But the expectation is that you also provide extensive comments and suggestions for improving the writing. If you don’t, you have to do it again or risk no pay. As the editor, you’re under so much pressure just to get through the doc. once and get it back on time, that you hardly have time to go back and check your work. Plus, they pay about half the rate you would get if you got the work on your own. It’s a editing sweatshop.

Pros

For editors who can't find work otherwise, or who want to earn a tiny bit of supplementary income in the evening when they'd rather be spending time with their family, the Scribendi platform connects them with short-term editing projects they wouldn't otherwise have access to. For EFL students who don't want to actually do the work of learning English, or for university students incapable of writing grammatically correct sentences but who feel they should be given a degree anyway, the Scribendi platform offers an inexpensive way out of doing the hard work of studying and applying learned knowledge to a task they'd rather not be bothered with.

Cons

I will say this: you are required to go through a THREE-HOUR online "test" for them to consider allowing you onto their platform to take on projects you won't have enough time to complete, for clients who'll pass their EFL course because YOU wrote their essays, for what will end up being a third of the salary you thought you'd make..

Pros

Yes, editors can work when they want, but the writing they must edit is so terrible and the pay so little, that the freedom is not worth it.

Cons

Thanks to Scribendi, hundreds of students who can barely write a sentence are getting advanced degrees because they have their papers rewritten by Scribendi editors. You can make a living wage if you can work 8-10 straight hours every day and, thus, do one-day turnaround jobs. But I am a caregiver, so I could not take any jobs that had to be returned in fewer than 5 days. As a result, the most I ever made for an edit was $8/hour, but I averaged $5/hour. For one two-page document that took me 30 minutes to edit, I made $3.25. I was a teacher, so I liked to explain why an edit was necessary. In one of my Quality Assurance checks, I had points taken away for this and was told, "Don't explain how to fix it, just fix it." So the writer, in other words, learns nothing. Many editors obviously pander for positive feedback, which is just sad.

Pros

They helped me transition from medical transcription to proofing/copy editing

Cons

They contacted me 11 months after I'd submitted a resume. They were fine with my work when they were a little Mom&Pop shop, but then they applied for all these accreditations and my Editor number (#8) didn't look good. They were looking for a constant turnover of editors and, years after I'd been working for them, they introduced training. I aced the training, even finding typos that the "experts" had missed. Then they introduced a QA department that docked editors for such nonsense as "US writers don't use 'hence'; they use 'thus.' Only UK writers use 'hence." They kept picking at me and picking at me until I felt as if there was some chirpy little QA person watching over my shoulder. In short, I'd been there too long. Eventually they told me I no longer fit their business model, and I was dismissed.

Pros

Flexibility. Large variety of work. Excellent in-house staff and management who treat their remote editors with the respect and the attention they need.

Cons

You must be fast to earn a decent income. Unfortunately, many of the documents that you begin with barely past muster and require very careful attention and substantive edits. Until you reach a certain rating and/or average QA score, you'll be stuck with ESL and technical documents regardless of your credentials or background.