I make mistakes, others make mistakes, some people try too hard and some people really need to learn how to write their own languages and I personally think all of them should be approached carefully, with kindness and appreciation for what they are attempting to do... which is help another person for FREE!

Everyone here could HIRE someone to correct their writing and therefore know that what they are getting is actually correct as teachers are trained! (or at least one should hope so). When I correct I am just some native speaker trying to be nice. That's why I personally like it in Spanish when I get A LOT of corrections because it helps me to see what really must be changed and what might be questionable. Then I start a question in the question section regarding my doubts. If a student wants something for free, sometimes they have to think, work and explore more to have it really make sense, but that could be part of the learning too!

What would be really not good is if teachers and native speakers get scared away from trying to help others out of a fear of being harshly judged. No one is perfect. We can still be nice to one another while getting our points across about how we would do things differently. It takes more effort and time, but I think it's worth it!

Yes, definitely. There is one corrector here who has rewritten many thousands of English notebook entries, filling them all with bizarre and unnecessary alterations.

There are also a great many unreliable correctors here. In recent weeks, I've seen a non-native learner of scarcely B1 level who has taken to 'correcting' English notebook entries. More worrying still, there is a barely literate native English speaker who also corrects entries, leaving them littered with misspellings and grammatical inaccuracies. There is even the odd professional teacher on this site who doesn't know the difference between 'its' and 'it's'.

But what can you do?

Hi,

I don't want to go into great length and debate, but I agree with Dorothy that those corrections are gifts from others, that we are not even obliged to accept (unless Xmas presents).

Having said that, in support of Angela's observation, some guidelines (do's and dont's wouldn't hurt) for correctors could help spread could correction practices especially for the newbees (like me)

Me personally...

I keep thinking that every single native speaker who gives their time and effort to even to <em>try</em> to help another person for free should be appreciated even if they aren't perfect! 

That's why when I see a convoluted correction that tries too hard or is beyond someone's level, I think the solution is to politely say that I would like to offer another correction that is just changing what must be changed to make it correct to be added to the other persons interesting or fine suggestions on how to make it even better than it already is as it is. Something like that. It comes out differently each time of course depending on what the person did before. I've done my share of awful corrections while learning how to correct correctly too! Correcting is learned skill. 

I will explain my changes. I might say, what so and so suggested is correct, but so is what you wrote already in this sentence or if the correction is simply incorrect, I will even look up a grammatical rule about what is correct (the horror for me as a hater of grammar! hahaha) and then the person will know WHY and maybe even the native speaker that did the previous correction will learn something. I will say that I am going to try a correction in the way I most like being corrected for you because of such and such although the other correction is also correct. I do a great many fewer corrections this way because it takes more time, but then I think it could be good for not only the original writer but the corrector as well and even me!  

I've learned a great deal about English hanging out here on Italki. Sometimes I wonder if I haven't learned more English than Spanish! lol 

to be continued...

It's constant and very annoying. If I find a language partner who changes texts that were already correct, I quickly dump them. Some people think it's their job to completely rewrite a text to how they would have written it, rather than correct errors. If anybody reading this does this stop it.