How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

6. The other tongue
Part two. Artisanal habits

When asked to describe their experiences of writing in English, a group of Danish doctoral students got creative. “Writing in English is like a bad hair day,” one observed. “You can leave the house, but you’re not really comfortable with the situation.” Others said that writing in English feels like making an Italian pizza for Italians (“The result is almost always edible, but I am embarrassingly aware that the Italians can make it better themselves”); like driving without a global positioning system (“Without GPS, sometimes you may have to take a detour”); like riding a rusty bicycle (“You can keep your balance, but you’ll never win the Tour de France”); or like walking in high heels (“Sometimes it goes smoothly and well, but other times it’s unsightly and wobbly.”)1

For better or for worse, English has become the primary language of international research scholarship—which means a lot of bad hair days, rusty bicycles, and wobbly shoes for academics worldwide. The L2 colleagues I interviewed were quick to list the disadvantages they face when compelled to write and publish in English. Linguistic subtleties get trampled:

I feel really handicapped when I write and speak in English. Being a lawyer, I’m used to arguing: I find words easily, and I have so many nuances. That’s lost to me when I speak and write in English. (Ann-Sofie Henriksson, Teaching and Learning Development, Uppsala University)

Vocabulary gets muddled:

We have a problem in Sweden with Swenglish—mixed languages—and that’s very common in academia. We have proper Swedish words, so why don’t we use them? (Christer Nilsson, Ecology, Umeå University)

And familiar words fly out the window:

Several years ago, I was invited to give a seminar in Italy, so I naturally decided to speak in Italian. I was struggling to find the words. At some point, I said nitrogeno, meaning nitrogen, but in Italian you say azoto. I thought, “Nitrogeno?! That doesn’t sound right!” But I couldn’t figure out what the Italian word was. (Marialuisa Aliotta, Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)

For the most part, however, the L2 colleagues I spoke to (25 percent of my overall interview sample) proved more likely to dwell on the positives than the negatives. Writing in English, they told me, encourages precision and concision:

It forces me to be much more concise and precise and to write shorter sentences. When I choose a word, I have to think about it very carefully. (Claudia Bernardi, Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington)

A firm grounding in foreign languages and grammar can even put them at an advantage over native English speakers:

The current generation of British PhD students didn’t have grammar at school, and as a result, they make lots of mistakes, which I have to catch. This is very ironic—here I am, the nonnative speaker, but my grammar is better. (Wim Vanderbauwhede, Computing Science, University of Glasgow)

When asked to recommend specific strategies for mastering written English, L2 academics offer (predictably?) varied and even contradictory advice:

First they have to get the basic grammar correct. If they cannot parse sentences, then they won’t be able to figure out which is the main verb, and if they cannot figure out which is the main verb, then they get into all kinds of problems. (Agnes Lam, Applied English Studies, University of Hong Kong)

It’s not the grammar which makes the difference. If you make a mistake or a comma is wrong, of course that matters—but it’s the clarity of thinking which is really important. (Fabrizio Gilardi, Political Science, University of Zurich)

“Something universal about languages”

Sun Kwok

Department of Physics, University of Hong Kong (China)

Astronomer Sun Kwok grew up attending Chinese-language schools in Hong Kong, where literature and writing were among his favorite subjects. Many years later, having become an international expert on planetary nebulae, he started publishing articles in astronomy magazines such as Sky and Telescope and Amateur Astronomy. Before long, he found himself in demand as a popular science writer:

Many amateurs look at planetary nebulae, which are bright enough to be seen by an amateur telescope, yet they usually don’t know much about what they are and their role in stellar evolution. I’m happy that I have the chance to relate the latest goings-on in research to people who are interested but may not have the technical background to read the scientific literature.

His 2001 book Cosmic Butterflies, lavishly illustrated with photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope, found a wide and enthusiastic readership:

I was invited by quite a few North American amateur astronomy societies, and I also spoke at two major conventions. I got to meet the readers and hear their reactions and how much they enjoyed the book.

Writing for a wider public gives him “a lot of satisfaction,” Kwok says, “totally different from the satisfaction of doing science; it’s a different kind of reward.” Although popular science writing places him in the role of a teacher, he has discovered that the learning flowed both ways:

When you write for the layman, you put yourself in a totally different mindset; you really think about the research. The process of looking for a simple explanation actually helps me to understand the subject better.

Writing in English rather than Chinese has never been a major issue:

After I submitted my first magazine article, the editor wrote back right away and said, “This is magnificent writing.” That gave me a huge amount of confidence, because I’d never written for the wider public before. I have often seen with people of Chinese origin that if their Chinese writing is good, their English writing is also good. It’s something universal about languages: I can organize things, I can express things in a clear way—all this helps.

Nonetheless, one consistent theme emerged from my interviews. Learning to write sophisticated academic English is not just a matter of reading a textbook or enrolling in a language course. Like any other artisanal skill, the art of communicating fluently and elegantly in a foreign tongue requires, at the top end of achievement, thousands of hours of practice—and there are no shortcuts.

To be sure, if you grew up in a country where schoolchildren learn English from an early age, where British and American television shows are subtitled rather than dubbed, and where most people speak a language closely related to English—for example Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands—you will naturally have a significant head start compared to someone from, say, Indonesia or Thailand, where the educational, cultural, and linguistic divide yawns much wider. Likewise, academics with a multilingual family background and an innate talent for languages will no doubt express themselves more confidently in English than will L2 colleagues who struggle to wrap their tongues around every new word or phrase. But when it comes to writing stylistically nuanced English, no one gets a free ride—except, of course, for the millions of Britons, Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and other native English speakers born in countries or into families where their own local lingo just happens to be the lingua franca of international academe. Having won the global language lottery, we bemoan our lot as academic writers— “My supervisor is so demanding!” “Those peer reviewers were so unfair!”—without realizing just how fortunate we are.

“A matter of the writerly code”

Ann Blair

Department of History, Harvard University (USA)

Historian Ann Blair grew up in an English-speaking household in Geneva, where she attended a French-speaking school. As an undergraduate student in the United States, she had to learn how to write and think in academic English rather than translating in her head from French, which, she says, “obviously dragged my English down”:

The challenging differences aren’t linguistic as much as a matter of the writerly code: how you’re supposed to structure an essay and move through it and conclude.

Later, while doing doctoral research in France, she was taken under the wing of a French literary scholar:

I showed him an article that I was writing in English, and he ripped it to shreds on a basic level of clarity of expression and grammatical accuracy—finding all kinds of little problems—even though he always spoke to me in French and was very self-conscious about his mastery of English. That really got me thinking: how can this guy who is unwilling to open his mouth in English have such good criticisms of how I use my native language?

Blair realized that her mentor’s professional experience as a writer trumped his command of spoken English: “When it comes to rigor and precision of expression and grammatical agreement and how you build a sentence, those things carry over very nicely from French.” Her intensive interaction with him—“an hour-long session where he basically pointed out all the places where the subject was not really the subject of the verb I was using or was inappropriate”—also alerted her to the value of one-on-one feedback, which in turn has influenced her work as a teacher:

People are often aware once you point it out to them that they’ve broken various rules of proper language. I’m very big on getting the words to say what you want them to say and not assuming that the reader will read your mind.

Blair allows herself to be “draconian about concision and precision in student writing” only because she applies those same precepts to her own writing as well: “no wordiness, no roundabout expressions, no impersonals or passives or malapropisms.” Over time, she says, “writing doesn’t necessarily get easier, but I think I write better.”

Fluent L2 English speakers typically muster a wide range of strategies to help them improve and extend their English. Martin Fellenz, a German academic who teaches business studies in Ireland, recalls that he spoke “woeful” schoolboy English until he picked up an English-language thriller while doing his military service; he found the vocabulary to be so straightforward, the plot so gripping, that he could make his way through it even without a dictionary. From that moment forward, he resolved to read only novels published in English, a decision that paid off several years later when he won a PhD scholarship to the United States: “Within three weeks, four weeks, everything I knew about English from reading novels became active, and I started speaking and writing it as well.” He advises L2 English speakers to immerse themselves in English-language media:

It doesn’t matter what medium you use. It could be TV. It could be books on tape. It could be reading. It doesn’t matter. That’s how you get to know what is right and wrong. I don’t speak English by rules. I speak it out of an intuitive understanding of where the words should go. (Martin Fellenz, Business, Trinity College Dublin)

Likewise, French-Canadian zoologist Robert Poulin urges L2 colleagues to consume English novels in their leisure time—“Why read a translation of the Harry Potter books when you could read the original?”—and to spend time in an English-speaking environment. “But most of them don’t,” he notes:

They’ll go to a conference, where they’ll meet with other people who speak their own language, and this is the group they go out to dinner with. They struggle through their talk, and those fifteen minutes when they speak English—that’s about the only English they speak. (Robert Poulin, Zoology, University of Otago)

Poulin’s attitude is one of resigned pragmatism rather than resistance or resentment. “English is now the international language not just of science but of everything—diplomacy and commerce and so on,” he says. “If you’re ambitious and want to make it as a scientist, you have to sort this out early on. It will not come easy.”

Behavioral habits such as reading British novels or watching American movies can help L2 scholars improve their artisanal skills as speakers and writers of academic English. However, given the powerful interpersonal dimensions of language, social habits such as cultivating a network of English-speaking friends, collaborating with English-speaking coauthors, and seeking help from English-speaking colleagues can lead to even more lasting and satisfying gains. Some L2 scholars, such as Malaysian linguist Mei Fung Yong, have benefited from the generosity of a supervisor or mentor:

When I was doing my PhD in New Zealand, my supervisor spent a couple of weekends with me in her office, looking through my work paragraph by paragraph and talking about signposting and clarity in writing to make the text reader-friendly. (Mei Fung Yong, Applied Linguistics, Universiti Putra Malaysia)

Others, such as French-Canadian sociologist Michèle Lamont, have hired professional editors to help them hone and polish their prose, an experience that Lamont says she would recommend to any academic who wants to become a better writer, “not just those who are nonnative English speakers”:

I always thought I wrote very well, but the editor made me much more aware of how to put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s not an expert. (Michèle Lamont, Sociology, Harvard University)

Swedish immunologist Kristina Lejon spent several years in a research group that included an L1 researcher who helped them get their academic English up to publication standards:

But now when we’re getting manuscripts ready for submission to English-speaking journals, we have to send them out for English correction. We make some common mistakes that we try to learn from; but it’s harder when you have to use a central organization, because they don’t always know your field so well. (Kristina Lejon, Clinical Microbiology, Umeå University)

A potential downside of cross-lingual collaboration is that L1 academics may assume a position of false superiority based purely on their command of English. One Swedish academic described to me the frustrations of working in a department where two senior colleagues are native English speakers:

They have this attitude that “we are so good at writing in English, we know how to write it better than you,” which at one point actually caused me to go off and publish some academic articles in Swedish, just to prove that I’m better than them at something. In fact, I’m not that bad in English. But still there’s always this power struggle: “We know English better than you. Don’t dare to point too high.” (Name withheld)

An attitude of mutual respect and empathy can go a long way toward mitigating such tensions. For colleagues in a multilingual research group, it’s worth undertaking a frank and respectful inventory of the strengths and weaknesses that each coauthor brings to the table; for example, you might end up agreeing that an L2 speaker in your group is the most lucid and persuasive writer but that an L1 speaker should be assigned to do final editorial sweep before the manuscript gets sent out for review. Meanwhile, at the gatekeeping end of the publication process, editors can do their part to resist the sometimes brutal hegemony of academic English:

As an editor, I’m always thinking I don’t want to change this person’s voice to be mine. I just edited a memoir by a guy who is Russian. I have left a lot of the strangeness in it, because that’s its charm. I think you have to remember that different voices make the journal. (Margery Fee, English, University of British Columbia)

Attention to the social dynamics of writing in English exposes, inevitably, its complex emotional dynamics as well. Some of the L2 academics I interviewed addressed that tension through spatial metaphors that confounded predictable dualisms of alienation versus belonging. Writing in English, they said, can provide a safe haven amid stormy political seas:

I come from an Urdu-speaking Muslim minority but lived in a Hindi-speaking area and attended an English-medium school. Every time I composed something in Hindi but put in something that was actually Urdu, it was crossed out. I didn’t always know what I was doing wrong. English was neutral territory. I knew what its rules were. (Tabish Khair, English, Aarhus University)

It can launch a journey of discovery:

I’m a migrant who comes from Sri Lanka. Having had to learn a different culture and write in a different language than my native language, writing to me is something like that journey as well, because you’re picking up some things that may not necessarily be coming to you even in words. (Shanthi Ameratunga, Population Health, University of Auckland)

Conversely, L2 speakers may draw on ideas and images from languages that sit closer to their emotional core than English:

If I find that I’m getting too academic, if the work is getting a bit cold, and if I think it’s missing some emotion, then I’ll grab a Māori phrase, a Māori proverb, and I’ll drop that inside the academic writing and let that allow me to pull over some of my Māori history, narratives, beliefs, and concepts and embed that in the academic writing. (Poia Rewi, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

“There’s definitely a learning curve”

Massimo Morelli

Department of Economics, Columbia University (USA)

Imagine that you are a native Italian speaker who writes and lectures in English about complex economic and political issues. Now add an additional challenge: you are blind. For Massimo Morelli, a professor of economics at Columbia University, it’s all about “learning by doing.” He mastered spoken English during an undergraduate exchange to Michigan—“at school in Italy, they only teach you the grammar”—before enrolling for a PhD at Harvard:

Some of the professors were speaking very fast, and my understanding of English wasn’t very good then. So I had to record their lectures and then listen again at home to make my notes comprehensible. I made a lot of spelling mistakes (and still do now) when I typed, so there would be lots of stories about emails to department chairs where the spelling mistakes led to really funny interpretations.

The affordances of technology shaped Morelli’s research trajectory. Having relied mostly on oral communication through his school years—“listening to books on tape and making recordings of the lectures, then taking notes in Braille and rereading and relistening”—he initially gravitated toward the study of history, sociology, law, and political science. Then, in 1993, the first computerized Braille board became available, and he was able to access software that allowed him to work with mathematical formulae:

At that time, the PDF files of academic papers were not as easy to find as they are now, and I always needed someone to go with me to the library to check out books and read them to me. Therefore, a PhD in history looked like something quite difficult to do quickly and productively and competitively with sighted students. I found it easier and more rewarding to switch to scientific writing.

However, Morelli is not one to stay in his comfort zone for long. Having established himself as an economist, he started publishing articles in political science journals—“you have to be much more long-handed, long-winded”—and now writes about the European economy for Italian newspapers:

It was quite interesting to see the reaction of the editors to sentences that in the context of an academic paper look perfectly clear, but when you’re writing for a newspaper, they want a different level of clarification. So there’s definitely a learning curve there.

Such metaphors of added value—the safe haven, the intrepid journey, the warm emotional core—offer a compelling counternarrative to the dominant discourse of English-speaking academe, where second-language speakers are often implicitly regarded as second-class citizens. Far from portraying their own L2 status as a deficit, the writers I spoke to show how the behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional resources that they bring to their work from other languages can enrich the sometimes barren terrain of academic English.

Things to try

Swap services

All academics possess knowledge and skills from which other people could benefit. Conversely, all academics could benefit from other people’s knowledge and skills. So why not offer or solicit support in English-language writing in exchange for services such as critical feedback, tuition in another language, or even cooking lessons? Whether you are an L1 or L2 English speaker, such arrangements may have benefits that go far beyond language learning alone; and asking for favors becomes so much easier when you have something to give in return.

Pay it forward

If you don’t need language lessons or cooking classes, consider “paying it forward”: that is, performing a good deed with no expectation of reciprocity. The hour or two that you devote to giving constructive, thoughtful, one-on-one English-language support to an L2 colleague or student can have positive resonances in that person’s life and work far beyond what you can imagine. In turn, the beneficiary of your generosity may later feel inspired to undertake similar acts of academic altruism.

Find your emotional language

If you speak more than one language fluently, take some time to reflect on and analyze your emotional relationship to each—for example, by writing down all the emotion words that you associate with each language or by freewriting in each language for ten minutes and comparing the two experiences. How do your differing emotions about each language inflect or impinge on your academic identity? Can you find creative ways of building on the positive emotions and ameliorating the negative ones?

Read a book

If you are an L2 English speaker, any book will do: children’s stories, spy novels, poetry. As long as it’s in English, it will help you improve your fluency as a writer. You may also want to seek out how-to books aimed specifically at L2 students and academics: for example, Stephen Bailey’s Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students, Caroline Brandt’s Read, Research and Write: Academic Skills for ESL Students in Higher Education, Ernest Hall and Carrie Jung’s Reflecting on Writing: Composing in English for ESL Students, Sheryl Holt’s Success with Graduate and Scholarly Writing: A Guide for Non-native Writers of English, or Hilary Glasman-Deal’s Science Research Writing for Non-native Speakers of English. (Just don’t let your own academic writing be unduly influenced by their bland, workmanlike titles!) For supervisors, a number of edited collections offer varied, context-specific advice on working with L2 students: for example, Valerie Matarese’s Supporting Research Writing: Roles and Challenges in Multilingual Settings, Norman Evans, Neil Anderson, and William Eggington’s ESL Readers and Writers in Higher Education, and Donna Johnson and Duane Roen’s Richness in Writing: Empowering ESL Students. And finally, L1 and L2 writers alike may benefit from the theoretical, critical, and political perspectives offered in volumes such as John Flowerdew and Matthew Peacock’s Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes, Claire Kramsch’s The Multilingual Subject, Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry’s Academic Writing in a Global Context, Ramona Tang’s Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language, and Vaughan Rapatahana and Pauline Bunce’s lively coedited essay collection, English Language as Hydra.2