Proofreading a cover letter when English is your second language

What a recruiter actually notices

Not the things people worry about. Almost nobody is counting commas.

What registers, in order: articles (a, an, the — the hardest part of English for speakers of languages that do not use them, and the most visible); prepositions ("apply for a job" but "apply to a company"; "responsible for" but "in charge of"); tense consistency, especially drifting between past and present while describing one job; and register — a letter that is slightly too formal, or slightly too casual, in a way that is hard to name.

That is a short list, and it is the same short list for most writers. Fix those four and a letter reads as fluent, which is the only bar that matters here.

Fluent is the goal, not native

This is worth saying plainly, because the anxiety around it is out of proportion to the reality. A letter does not need to read as though a native speaker wrote it. It needs to read as though a competent professional wrote it, with the errors removed.

Being multilingual is a fact about you that is closer to an advantage than a liability, and an edit that flattens your letter into generic recruiter-speak has made it worse, not better. The changes worth accepting are the ones that fix an error or untangle a sentence. The ones that replace a perfectly good phrase with a more expected one are the ones to reject.

This is also the argument against pasting a letter into a general AI tool and taking what comes out: it will not just correct you, it will rewrite you into its own voice, and often add achievements you never claimed.

A method that works without paying anything

Do these in order before you spend money.

One. Run the free checker you already have — Word's Editor, Google Docs, or LanguageTool's free tier. This clears the spelling and the mechanical errors so you can see the real ones.

Two. Read it aloud, slowly. Every place you hesitate is a sentence to rewrite. This catches unnatural word order better than any tool, because your ear knows more English than your grammar rules do.

Three. Check the four categories above one at a time. Read the letter once looking only at articles, once looking only at prepositions, once for tense. Sequential passes find far more than one general read.

Four. Search any phrase you are unsure of in quotation marks. If native speakers write it, you will see thousands of results; if they do not, you will see yours and nothing much else.

When to pay, and for what

After all that, a letter that matters is still worth one careful read by something better than a free checker — the pass that fixes the sentences that are correct and still awkward.

What you do not need is a year of a writing plan for one application. Per-use editing exists for exactly this: polishdoc gives you a free sample of the edit on your own opening paragraph, so you can see whether it helps before paying, and then one payment covers the whole letter. It edits in the language you wrote in and is not permitted to add anything you did not say — which for a job application is the property that matters most.

A university writing centre, if you have access to one, is better still, and free. Book it if the deadline allows.

Before you send it

Two checks that catch what everything above misses.

The name check. Company name, role title, hiring manager's name, and any sentence you carried over from the last application. This is the error that actually loses interviews, and no grammar tool will find it.

The claims check. If anything was rewritten, read the result against what you originally wrote and confirm that every fact is still yours. An edit that quietly upgraded "assisted with" into "led" is a problem you own at the interview, whoever introduced it.