Academic Writing as a Non-Native Writer

Writing is perhaps the most critical skill for a Ph.D. student to succeed in this academic game. We write to persuade paper reviewers, document results and apply for scholarships/grants. However, writing is hard. Many native English speakers who communicate well verbally can still struggle to write a well-organized document, not to mention non-native speakers.

I started writing in academic English in 2016 when I wrote a paragraph of related work for a UIST paper I co-authored. The first draft was terrible — it was logically unrigorous, Mandarin-oriented, and my vocabulary was somewhat limited. Unlike native writers, we need to not only learn to write with rigorous logic but also to “think in English” and constantly grow the number of words we know. Sometimes I feel this puts international students/researchers in an unfair position as one must make additional efforts to write as good as native writers. But life has always been unfair for everyone in different ways; you just gotta roll with it.

Though I’m still far from a good writer, I believe I have improved a lot over the past few years. I will start by describing the different stages I have gone through as a non-native writer, which I believe may generalize well to other people’s experiences, and share some tips that I found useful.

Stage 1: Writing Whatever Popping Up in Mind

Naively writing down sentences containing keywords is quite common for people who just start writing in English. This could result in unconnected sentences that lack coherent structures since the writers only think at word-level, i.e. their objective is to generate a sentence, not a paragraph. Therefore, it reads like the writer is casually talking to you. For example:

Today I went to get a haircut. The salon was in the east district of Taipei city. I really like the style and then I went home. I met my mom, she said she also likes it. This made my day.

I’ve seen this writing style a lot when I marked students’ reports at the University of Toronto. Interestingly, I can always tell the writers’ native languages by how their writing styles deviate from English writing.

Stage 2: Writing Long Sentences with Hard Words

Typically, people in stage 1 would quickly realize they have to improve the writing. For me, I did so when I was laughed at by another senior co-author of a paper (don’t get me wrong, we were pretty close friends). After that, I started thinking that it might be a good idea to use many conjunctions and relative pronouns that seem to make a sentence longer and look more professional, which in reality only makes it harder to read. Oops, the previous sentence is exactly the type of writing I’m talking about, if you noticed.

Another common mistake is using lots of GRE-style vocabulary. The GRE-style vocab here refers to hard words that would only appear in domain-specific scientific articles. Using one or two words like that can be a great add-on to your writing, but some may go too far and end up writing sentences that are hard to understand, violating academic writing’s goal: To communicate ideas clearly.

Stage 2 is better than stage 1 as it considers the relations between sentences and organizes them logically. However, having wordy and complicated sentences everywhere will make a paper hard to read. In my experience, writing like that always resulted in major revisions by my Ph.D. advisor, which signals that I should refrain from it. The lesson then becomes when and how to write less.

Stage 3: Maximizing Information Density Per Sentence (IDPS)

This stage is somewhere I always try my best to achieve: To write concisely while providing the maximum information possible. In other words, to maximize the information density of each sentence. I can’t over-emphasize the importance of this maximization in academic writing. For example, there are usually page limits for paper submissions. Having low information density can make your paper exceed the limits and look boring. Despite being important, the ability to maximize information density in writing is difficult to learn. Sometimes it feels more like a form of art; it can’t be taught, the only way to master it is to practice.

My Writing Tips

Again, I’m nowhere close to a great writer but I will share some tips I found useful to improve writing outcomes.

Rewriting is Always Better Writing

If you have ever tracked the changes you made from the first draft of a paper to the completed one, you will notice the power of rewriting, e.g. better word selections or a higher IDPS. It is almost guaranteed that you will spot errors or imperfections when re-reading and rewriting.

Follow the Rule of Conciseness

If removing a word/phrase does not change a sentence’s meaning, remove it. The same rule applies to sentences for a paragraph and paragraphs of an article. I once heard this tip from a researcher I know and found it particularly useful since the rule provides an objective metric to decide if a segment of writing should be discarded or shortened.

Use Grammarly or Similar Tools

Since humans inevitably make mistakes, I am a strong believer in human-machine hybrid approaches for doing literally everything. Using automatic grammar check tools can help you spot errors that are hard to notice or beyond your knowledge. I use Grammarly for every document I write, e.g., email, paper, and of course, this article.

Read Your Writing on Different Devices

This one might be a bit tricky, but I usually spot typos when I read a paper using an iPad, even if I have proofread it multiple times on a laptop. My conjecture is that human’s reading patterns change along with different screen sizes and eye-screen relative positions.

In conclusion, this article summarizes my personal experience in English academic writing and tips that I found useful. I hope this essay can be helpful for people who want to improve their writing, especially those who just got started!