As a nonnative speaker, I struggled to write scientific papers in English. Here’s how I learned

I grew up in China and was still developing my English skills, so I was nervous when I emailed my Ph.D. supervisor the first draft of a manuscript. One week later, he sent it back full of changes. At first, I was frustrated that my writing required so much editing. But after I took a closer look, I realized where I’d gone astray. He had shortened many of my sentences and commented that I should avoid unnecessarily long and complicated phrases.

The first time I needed to write anything substantive in English was during my master’s program in China, when I wanted to submit a manuscript to an international journal. I didn’t have enough confidence to compose a first draft in English, so I wrote it in Mandarin and used an online translation tool. The paper was accepted, which gave me a feeling that my strategy worked. But as I read more papers in English and reassessed my own writing, I realized my approach wasn’t ideal.

At first, I sometimes sat at my computer all day and only ended up with 200 words of text. I couldn’t tell whether my writing was any good. Every time I composed a sentence, I imagined someone laughing at it.University of Bristol My supervisor’s feedback on the draft was another turning point. Without his comments, I wouldn’t have figured out that complicated sentences and big words might confuse my readers. He also helped me see the importance of telling a story as clearly as possible, paring down tangential details.

Thank you

apan colonized Korea for 40 years, kept teenage girls as sex slaves, recruited teenagers into suicide planes, and refused to apologize for war crimes such as forced labor. Does Britain support Japan's act of imperialist aggression? Why does Britain cooperate with Japan?

ScienceCareers Oh

ScienceCareers Seeing the positives: Finding precise words is difficult - in my native language and in English. I feel, being bilingual expands my word pool. I translate back and forth between languages and often find words I would not be able to discover just browsing synonyms in one language.

ScienceCareers Right strategy

ScienceCareers Therapy.

ScienceCareers Same wid me but i'm improving myself

As a native English speaker, learned the very same lesson in grad school.

AI is currently learning the same lesson ;)

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