For the past few months, I've been writing LinkedIn posts and articles for a company called 1stContact.ai. It's a CRM software for small businesses, creative professionals, and freelancers. And it’s not exactly the dreamy, sunset-over-Angkor-Wat content I'm usually chasing. I realized it was making me a sharper travel writer.

I’ve been updating articles lately. Not writing new ones but revisiting old ones. Ones published between 2020 and 2022. Five years doesn’t feel that long in human years. A five-year-old is still a child. A five-year-old car is still fine. A five-year-old pair of jeans is probably just getting comfortable. But on the internet, five years is ancient.

I don’t like tennis. I don’t dislike it either. I’m simply neutral. If you put a match on TV, I wouldn’t change the channel, but I’m not sure how much of it I’d actually watch. Tennis exists in my world the way zookeeping exists. I am glad someone is doing it, but that someone is not me. So when I was hired on UpWork to beta read a tennis-themed motivational book, I had two reactions.

I recently wrote a phrase that Grammarly did not like: "from-scratch pantry." The context was clear. I was talking about making things from scratch: sauces, breads, pickles, condiments, etc. The kind of pantry where nothing comes from a jar or a box, where everything is made by hand. Grammarly suggested a correction. It wanted me to change "from-scratch pantry" to "pantry from scratch." Wait. Isn’t that a completely different sentence?

Look at the photo next to this paragraph. It’s the one I use on LinkedIn. The one that’s supposed to make me look professional and trustworthy. Here is what you can’t see. Just outside the frame, in both of my hands, are two pastel de nata. Portuguese custard tarts. My favorite pastry to eat anywhere in the world. What else am I cropping out?

A native English speaker writes: "I could care less about the outcome." A non-native English speaker writes the exact same sentence. Same words. Same grammar. One is wrong. The other is a common idiom that makes no sense if you think about it for two seconds. A good editor has to know the difference.

I’ve been playing piano since I was five years old. That’s over thirty years of sitting in front of a keyboard, learning how to make my fingers do what my ears expect to hear. I’ve played in churches, rock bands, country bands, and folk groups. Each genre has its own rhythm. And copywriting is the same instrument played in different rooms.

For a few years now, I have had two articles floating around the internet about how to choose the best mortar and pestle. I wrote them, published them, and mostly forgot about them. They ranked well, brought in traffic, and did their job. Last week, I searched "how do I choose the best mortar and pestle to buy" on Google. The AI pulled material recommendations from the Cookly article and size and shape advice from the KROK article. Two different brands, one AI answer, zero clicks required.

A single mistranslation on your website can make your brand look amateur. I have seen it happen to billion-dollar companies. They cost real money to fix. They also cost something harder to measure: trust.

International brands have a problem. They sand down their edges to appeal to everyone, and the result is copy that is inoffensive and forgettable. I have seen this happen over and over. A brand hires a translator or uses AI to produce English copy. The grammar is fine. The meaning is clear. But something is missing, the copy has no personality. It sounds like it could have been written by anyone.

I’ve been in Shanghai for almost three years now. I have ordered coffee with hand gestures, paid for vegetables by showing my phone screen, and explained my job to taxi drivers who definitely did not understand what a copywriter does. But the hardest thing I have done here is read WeChat. And it’s not because of the Chinese, it’s because of the English translated from Chinese!

I have two literary tattoos. The first is Kurt Vonnegut’s asterisk on my hand, a reminder to write clearly and respect the reader. The second is smaller, two words, tucked against my collarbone where only I notice it most days. “And yet.”

If English is not your first language, you have probably written a sentence that felt correct but looked wrong. The grammar checked out. Everything seemed okay. But something was off. Word order is the most common mistake I see. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it.

Native English speakers never learn the royal order of adjectives. We just know it, even if we couldn't explain the rule to save our lives. You'd never say "leather brown boots" because "brown leather boots" is the only version that sounds right. The same goes for "old French wine" instead of "French old wine." The rule exists somewhere in the background, but no one teaches it to us directly.

AI translation tools are fast and they are cheap. They are also confidently wrong in ways that can damage your brand. Here are three red flags that your AI translation needs a human editor.