I'm sure we all appreciate when people correct our entries but some methods of corrections are more helpful than others. Perhaps we can share one thing we like and dislike so people can learn how to better help others.
Like: Using different font colours or highlighting so that I don't need to look through the whole entry to find the mistakes.
Dislike: Striking out Chinese characters instead of using a dark colour (or some other way to indicate it should be deleted) making it hard to actually notice any change.
For example 看 is 看 [strikethrough] instead of 看.
Like: When people list many alternatives to see the possible word order and/or vocabulary which can be used.
Dislike: When people change the original so much that it's almost like they've written their own entry instead.
I really like people to make a clear difference between what was really wrong, and what sentence just could have been written better. I mean just in a better style.
I hate it when people comment on a notebook entry as if it were a discussion subject. Once I got like 15 comments, but nobody bothered to correct the entry.
Not really to do with corrections, but more with the entries. I totally and completely and utterly hate it when people write notebook entries and apparently are not even interested in getting a correction. Stuff like: Repeatedly spreading your political view, sort of blogs about your personal life, or even copy and pasting texts found on the internet that you just liked.... et cetera. It keeps my entries from getting a proper correction.
Yes I've noticed the correcting of British English to American English and also changes which alter the meaning from what I thought the original poster meant. I think it might be good if italki posted guidelines on a standard way to correct. Sometimes it can be confusing if you get three posts and each of them have similarities but for other words or phrases there can be three different changes. It leaves you confused. However for correcting the notebooks it can be a long process to correct lots of mistakes and then to explain why you did it. So I think for low levels it's probably best to stick to a short length.
I'm starting to think writing notebook entries aren't really that helpful. Most of the time I find multiple people correcting different things. It's impossible to know who is right, if someone missed something, misunderstood or changed something needlessly. What I do find helpful is when someone explains every bit of the correction (which of course could take a lot of work), but I still tend to find someone whose correction challenges that, leaving me with doubt.
Another thing I see is people changing the spelling of words, mainly from British English to American English even when it's impossible to tell which version it was written in.
Similarly, with all my stuff in simplified Chinese, sometimes people convert it to traditional, add corrections/notes in traditional, and then don't convert it back, which is a bit of a nuisance.
