Scribendi Reviews

Pros

Competitive and fair salary and benefits

Cons

Can get busy at times

Pros

You can decide exactly when to work, and how much to work, if you're a freelancer/contractor with Scribendi. If you don't feel like editing for a week or two or five, that's fine.

Cons

Through thick and thin, Scribendi holds on to its belief that editors should be able to edit 1000 words per hour. However, this is an unrealistic number when you're dealing with the sort of deeply ungrammatical and often impenetrable ESL writing that Scribendi editors work with. Untangling the knots -- and querying up a storm because there's often no way to determine what the writer is trying to say from the source material -- ensures that the hourly editing expectation is very impractical, especially so given the rigorous quality that Scribendi (fairly) demands. To be sure, there's no one breathing down your neck telling you that you need to finish a 1000-word edit in an hour (not for freelancers anyway). The problem instead is that you can't make enough money in a day to make this work as a career when an essay that pays, say, $15 total takes three or four hours to edit properly, in a way that will pass Scribendi's QA checks. That's not a hyperbolic example, by the way. If anything, a tangled, messy ESL essay that pays that much could take longer than that before it's readable and presentable, with the necessary, dozen-plus author queries added. The inevitable replies from Scribendi to this argument that everything is transparent -- you can read over the essay before you accept it; you don't have to accept anything you don't want; the 1000-word-per-hour expectation is known to all -- are accurate as far as they go. But there's never an acknowledgment at how incredibly challenging most of the material we have to work with is. I would estimate about 80% of available documents are by writers who have a poor, often extremely poor, grasp of academic English. That's Scribendi's core clientele, which is of course fine, but an expectation of 1000 words/hour for that type of writing just isn't realistic.

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

It is flexible There is a high work volume Excellent editing software, which is free for contracted freelancers

Cons

The QA system until recently was based too much on the mood or attitude of the QA agent or the manager you would appeal to. It's like a game. The QA agent fails you over petty stuff; then, you apply to the QA manager, who reverses it if he is in a good mood. The QA agent grading your work struggles to understand how "the" should be used and ignores technical word usage. Rate of pay standard, but still too low based on demands and length of time given to complete orders.

Pros

Remote work opportunities for freelancers Free training resources Freelancers can choose their own schedules and workload

Cons

They're weirdly serious about making everyone sign a three-year non-compete agreement, which seems excessive and unfair to freelancers. They aren't even hiring in American states that won't enforce it anymore. Remote editors are kept anonymous from each other, which makes for a weird experience on the forums since everyone knows each other by their four-digit identifier instead of just a pseudonym or something. The in-house folks take every opportunity to remind freelancers that they aren't technically employees of the company. When my current employer needed to verify that I was freelancing for Scribendi, I had to convince the freelance rep to stop screening their calls because I "was only a contractor."

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

I started in October of 2014, editing remotely. I've been impressed with Scribendi's professionalism from the beginning - everything is well organized and I've learned a tremendous amount through working here. Feedback from both clients and internal review comes frequently, and they keep you on your toes. I could see that if you were not a top-notch editor, things could go downhill for you quickly, but it seems that they are quite rigorous in their hiring practices to get good editors in the first place. The pay is good - it depends on how rough the English is on the assignments you get - but you have 20 minutes to decline an order if it seems like it will not be worth the effort. Overall I'm averaging about $20/hour, although the first month was a little below that.

Cons

None that I can think of.

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.