Thursday, April 2, 2026
Writing take-home assignment examples (and translation tests)
Writing tests have a length problem. Teams that would never ask an engineer for a free weekend will happily ask a writer for "a sample 1,500-word post on our topic," which is exactly the post they were going to commission next month anyway. Writers notice. The good ones say no.
A better writing test is short, built on a brief you made up for the purpose, and paid. It should test what's hard to see in a portfolio: whether the writer can follow someone else's style guide, hit a tone they wouldn't choose themselves, and hand in a draft that doesn't need a heavy edit.
Why portfolios aren't enough for writers
Published writing is edited writing. A clip in someone's portfolio might have gone through an editor, a legal review and a brand pass before it ran, and you can't tell how much of it is theirs. Portfolios also show the writer's best topics, not yours.
A short test shows you their first draft. For most writing jobs, the first draft is the thing you're hiring for.
Examples by role
Content writer (2 to 3 hours, about 700 words). "Using the attached outline, sources and style guide, write a 700-word section of a guide titled 'How to choose a payroll provider for a 10-person company.' Include two internal-link suggestions and a meta description." Give them the outline so you're testing the writing, not asking for free strategy.
UX writer (1 to 1.5 hours). "Here are eight screens from a fictional budgeting app's onboarding flow, with placeholder text. Rewrite every string. Keep buttons under 20 characters and error messages under 80, and explain your three hardest calls."
Copywriter (1.5 to 2 hours). "Write three subject lines and one 150-word email for the fictional coffee subscription in the attached brief. The goal is reactivating customers who paused. Tell us which subject line you'd test first and why."
Technical writer (2 to 3 hours). "Here are an engineer's raw release notes and a short screen recording of the feature. Turn them into a help-center article for non-technical admins." This is close to the real job: turning messy input into something clear.
Editor (1 to 1.5 hours). "Here's a 1,000-word draft with structural and line-level problems. Edit it with tracked changes and write a short note to the writer." The note to the writer is half the test.
Translation tests are shorter than you think
For translators, a little text goes a long way. The American Translators Association's certification exam, one of the more demanding credentials in the field, uses general-topic passages of about 225 to 275 words, and candidates get three hours to do two of them. If that's enough to certify a professional translator, a 250 to 400 word passage is enough to screen one.
Pick a passage that reflects the hard parts of your content, such as idioms, product terms, legal phrasing or a playful brand voice. Ask for a short translator's note on any choices that weren't obvious. That note shows judgment better than the translation itself.
Don't require a paid CAT tool like Trados or memoQ. Accept a bilingual Word file, or provide a login to whatever tool your team uses.
Paid test or free sample?
A quick way to check your own brief: would you publish what comes back? If yes, it's commissioned work and you should pay a commission rate. If the topic is invented and the output is useless to you, it's a test. You should still pay for it, but now you're paying for the candidate's time, not buying content.
On rates: the US median for writers and authors was $76,910 in May 2025, and specialists charge more. For a two-hour test, a flat fee of a couple of hundred dollars is reasonable. Pay it whether you hire them or not, and pay quickly.
How to grade writing without it turning into taste
Writing reviews go wrong when "I liked it" becomes the rubric. Decide on four or five checks before you read anything, and have two people score each piece blind:
- Followed the brief. Length, audience, required points and style-guide rules like serial commas or sentence-case headings.
- Got the tone right. Does it sound like the brand described in the brief, not like the writer's own voice?
- Accurate. Facts match the sources provided, and nothing is invented.
- Ready to edit. How long would an editor need to get this publishable? Five minutes and an hour are very different hires.
- Explained the choices. Did their note explain the hard decisions?
A word about AI
Assume candidates will use AI tools, because they'll use them on the job. A writing test that a chatbot can pass on the first try isn't testing much. Briefs with real constraints (a specific source pack, a strict style guide, a tone that's slightly unusual) are harder to fake. A short recorded walkthrough, where the writer talks through their edits and choices, closes most of the remaining gap. That's how Pudding runs writing assessments. For more on why the walkthrough adds so much signal, see How many words does each hiring step give you?
Related reading
- Are unpaid take-home assignments exploitative?
- Marketing take-home examples
- Paid case studies for ops, PM and strategy roles
Josh Priollaud
Founder @ Pudding
Josh Priollaud is the founder and CEO of Pudding, a Siligo Ventures portfolio company. Josh has worked in business development roles at Cloud9 IDE, Webgility, MuleSoft and Adobe. Before his Silicon Valley career, Josh served as an Economic Development Adviser in the Peace Corps. Josh holds an MBA from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University and a BS in Business Administration from Portland State University. Josh has been a full stack developer (Ruby on Rails, React) since 2020.