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I find that some users are not able to express their questions properly. This happens due to their lack of skills in English.

I usually suggest edits if the question has a lot of grammatical mistakes along with improper presentation of code. I tend to ignore suggesting an edit for grammatical corrections only since I have observed very little grammatical suggestions taking place on the site from the day I joined.

I recently corrected a whole post since I understood the post well enough but I don't know if it's appropriate to do so.

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    90% of my edits are grammar! – ouflak Mar 7 '16 at 13:34
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    @ouflak: 90% of your edits are grammatical. ;-) – T.J. Crowder Mar 7 '16 at 17:03
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    @T.J.Crowder, you get that moment a few times in a lifetime. – Juzer Ali Mar 7 '16 at 17:19
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    I think it is a great kindness to non-English speakers that (a) readers try to understand people's questions, and (b) editors try to improve people's questions to make it easier for readers in group (a). – halfer Mar 8 '16 at 21:17
  • Does this also apply to the "Requires Editing" button in the Triage queue? I'm never confident whether something technically correct but a bit off in grammar "Looks OK" or not, and I frequently find myself resolving this dilemma by suggesting a grammar^Htical edit myself. – Umopepisdn Mar 9 '16 at 0:12
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    @umo "Requires Editing" means that the post has quality problems that give you pause, but you recognize that they can be solved by community-provided edits. "Unsalvageable" means that the post has quality problems that cannot be solved by the community (the post is either completely beyond repair, or the edits would have to come from the asker because only she knows the required information). "Looks OK" literally means that it looks fine, little or no action is required. For grammar problems, it would depend on if the problems are impeding comprehension. Of course, editing yourself is great! – Cody Gray Mar 9 '16 at 5:43
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Yes, edits that significantly improve a post are always welcome! That improvement can come either by way of fixing formatting, correcting spelling/grammar mistakes, clarifying a title, and adding omitted tags.

A good edit will fix all of the problems with a post. If there are both formatting and grammar problems, for example, then you need to fix both of those things in your edit. It sounds like that's what you've been doing—that's good.

But if a post only has grammar problems, then an edit that fixes those is still welcome. In other words, a post does not have to be completely broken or unreadable in order to benefit from an edit. If you can improve the post in a noticeable way, then you should suggest an edit.

This is all covered in the Help Center. In brief, all content here is collaboratively edited, which helps to maintain its high quality. Whenever you see a post that can be improved by editing, please do so.

It is hard to give more specifics (although if you search around on Meta, you'll find lots of attempts), but one good test is if your edits are being approved by the community. If you are making edits that the community finds beneficial, then you're doing the right thing. If you start having your edits rejected, pay attention to the rejection reasons. If you don't understand why an edit was rejected, even after doing a little research, ask about it specifically on Meta.

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    What happens when I am not able to cross that 6 characters limit? Sometimes valuable edits are as short as 3 chars and then, this 6 char limit forces me to add unwanted spaces or stretch the original sentences used by the OP (with no change in meaning). Will adding extra spaces to bypass the lower limit lead to rejection of edits? – Mathews Mathai Mar 6 '16 at 10:17
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    @MathewsMathai If there's only 3 characters to correct then it can't be that bad can it? You should probably just leave it till you get the edit any post privilege. – Robert Longson Mar 6 '16 at 10:20
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    @RobertLongson Formatting a code block never satisfies that 6 chars limit and that is an important edit in case of SO. – Mathews Mathai Mar 6 '16 at 10:21
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    Suggested edits are not currently supported on Meta sites. As for your first question, @Mathews, yes, if you add nonsense to a post to skirt edit limits, then your edits will be rejected. Please don't do that. It is very rare to come across a post that is so perfect there is nothing else that can be improved. If you do come across one, you will just have to leave it alone until you get full editing privileges (at 2k reputation). Suggested edits have to be reviewed by at least 3 other people, and as such, we prefer to make the most of their time by not allowing trivial, insignificant edits. – Cody Gray Mar 6 '16 at 10:23
  • If I come across a post that has both spelling/grammar problems and code formatting problems - and I only fix the formatting, because I'm unsure if I change the meaning of the question - is that still ok? Even if its not a "good" edit any more? – Rhayene Mar 7 '16 at 13:10
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    @rha If you aren't sure how to fix the grammar, but the code formatting is so bad that it makes the question difficult or impossible to read, then you should still edit it. That's a good edit. Hopefully, one of the people who review it will choose to "Approve and Edit" so that they can fix the things you couldn't. – Cody Gray Mar 7 '16 at 13:11
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    Sorry, @RobertLongson, but I can think of problems even shorter than 3 characters. For instance, I recently edited a post where the PO had forgotten the "//" after the protocol name when writing a URL, like http:localhost/this/that. This is not a minor thing, but it is only a 2 characters edit. – Ed de Almeida Mar 7 '16 at 13:40
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    @EddeAlmeida as Cody suggested above, leave it to someone who has edit privileges. You can probably find someone in one of the chat rooms to do it for you. – Robert Longson Mar 7 '16 at 13:53
  • @MathewsMathai, regarding formatting code, see: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/285176/2535467 and the comment left by Jeffrey Bosboom. – CaptJak Mar 7 '16 at 17:37
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    Fixing spelling mistakes helps with search too; making it worthwhile depending on the word of course. – Martin Serrano Mar 7 '16 at 19:21
  • @RobertLongson, even a 1 character edit can be "that bad". Consider the difference between "extra-marital sex" and "extra, marital sex" . See what I mean? – Ken Clement Mar 7 '16 at 19:44
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    @KenClement that would be changing the posts meaning and reviewers would almost certainly reject it so it would be a waste of time submitting it. – Robert Longson Mar 7 '16 at 21:02
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    Fairly routinely while going through the "first post" review queue I come across otherwise-reasonable posts where the user has just failed to do the code-formatting thing. It would seem sensible to make an exception to the six character rule for edits that introduce new code blocks (as that by itself can mean the difference between a good post and an incomprehensible mess) – Chris Kitching Mar 8 '16 at 3:21
  • @RobertLongson: It depends. The rest of the post may make it clear that the comma is required. As such just adding the comma is worthwhile. (OTOH, it doesn't take long posting reasonable answers to get up to 2k, and then you can do it yourself.) – Martin Bonner supports Monica Mar 8 '16 at 15:48
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    That is the idea. If you want to make trivial edits, then you can just earn the reputation required to do so. It isn't that hard. Everyone who want to submit these edits appears to be forgetting that the process entails a huge cost: edits must be evaluated by at least 3 trusted users who could be spending that time making edits themselves or answering questions. Since we want to maximize the amount of value added to the site, we don't want them to waste time approving trivial edits. Trivial was arbitrarily defined at < 6 characters. There might be edge cases, but they're rare. – Cody Gray Mar 9 '16 at 5:40
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Correcting grammar to make a question more clear and understandable? Yes, absolutely.

But a word of caution: it's often not a good idea to correct mistakes of terminology in a question.

Here's an example. Many developers confuse JSON with a JavaScript object literal. While closely related, they are not the same thing. I saw a question a while back that asked something about JSON, but it turned out the question actually involved object literals, not JSON.

Someone edited the question to change "JSON" to "object literal" throughout. On the face of it, that sounds like a fine idea. After all, the question is now more specific and correct about what it's asking.

But the problem is that now the question will no longer be found by people who mistakenly search for JSON when they should be searching for "JavaScript object literal". And that's a fairly large group of developers.

If you do make an edit like this to correct some terminology, give some thought to whether it's just a completely off the wall mistake that other devs are unlikely to make, or whether it may be a more common mistake like this one.

If there's even the slightest chance that other people may search using the "mistaken" terminology, and you still want to correct the question, keep both terms in the question. It should be easy enough to do that, even as a footnote. That way people who search for the wrong term may still find the question.

This is also why "duplicate" questions are so valuable and shouldn't be deleted merely because they are duplicates. Even if the question has been asked and answered before, it won't have been asked in the exact same way. There may be some keyword, some bit of context in the duplicate that wasn't in the original, and that will help searchers find their way to the answer.

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    +1 That thought about duplicates is really good. Duplicates would indeed make searching more efficient and it would probably widen the possibilities of reaching a particular answer. – Mathews Mathai Mar 8 '16 at 18:35
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    Of course, if an editor isn't sure if they are understanding a question correctly, then can (and perhaps should) ask the OP beforehand. – halfer Mar 8 '16 at 21:19
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I often see posts with spelling and grammar errors. I would rather edit them than leaving them be, because of the following reasons:

  1. People who are learning English might get a false impression and accidently learn wrong terms and grammar.

  2. People who search for specific terms might not find the proper answer because of spelling errors.

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