Guest Post: Some Common English-Language Mistakes

[This week’s blog post is from AuthorAID intern Wenhua LU. As you may have seen, Lu has been translating many AuthorAID materials into Chinese. In fact, a Chinese version of this blog post already is available in the AuthorAID Resource Library. Thank you, Lu, for your contributions! —Barbara]

Non-native users of English often find it difficult to write in English. As a native speaker of Chinese, I feel this way. Here are some mistakes that Chinese researchers often make when writing in English.

Flowery writing: Some English teachers in China tell their students to try to use long words and complicated sentence structures. This strategy may result in a good grade in the writing part of exams graded by those teachers. However, it does not work in scientific writing, where we look for clarity and conciseness.

Redundant Pairs: Using a pair of synonyms is acceptable in Chinese; it can help reinforce meaning and achieve symmetry. However, this kind of duplication is often redundant in English, especially in scientific writing. For example, “steps and measures”, “major and important (findings)”, and “accurate or precise (statistics)” are all redundant pairs. The best way to deal with redundant pairs is to keep only one of the words.

Misuse of verb tenses: There are no verb tenses in Chinese, so Chinese writers often have difficulty using them. For example, we sometimes forget to use past tense when talking about experiments or research done in the past.

Overuse of passive voice: To sound more objective, Chinese researchers tend to use passive voice; however, the overuse of passive voice can make a paper look weak and lackluster. For example, instead of saying “The samples were collected in a 5-year period of time,” say “We collected the samples in a 5-year period.”

I hope this blog post can raise your awareness of the tendency to make these mistakes so that you can avoid them when writing in English.