Three things I learned from trying to write an academic paper in English as a Japanese

As everybody knows, writing is hard. It is even harder to write in a foreign language. Being a Japanese graduate student, I want to publish papers in international journals. So, I have to write in English. Last year, I made my first attempt to publish an article in English and had the manuscript examined by native speakers of English so that it won’t be ungrammatical, unidiomatic, illogical, or unclear. I learned a lot from this experience. Apart from mental (or spiritual?) lessons, here are three that are concerned with writing in English.

1. It does not suffice to imitate natives.

It appears each native speaker has their own way of writing, such as favorite phrases, idioms, or sentence structures. Some sound natural or concise to most, while others sound unfamiliar or redundant to some. This subtle difference is difficult for me to grasp. I used to believe that if you imitated authors of English when writing in English, there would be no mistake. However, reviewers of my manuscript taught me there were exceptions. For example, how does a sentence that begins with “What follows is …” sound to you? Or how about this phrase “I will bring into sharp relief other aspects of …”? Would you change them to “… as follows” and “I will clarify other aspects of …” respectively?

2. Being grammatical does not mean writing well.

Humans are creative creatures, as the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem contended. I thought grammar would give you rules about how to create sentences that you have never heard before. Therefore, I used to believe that as long as you follow grammar rules correctly, you can convey what you mean. But the editors of my manuscript told me that being grammatical is only one of the conditions of good writing. So, one of them consistently changed the relative pronoun “which” to “that” in every sentence where I used “which” without a proposition preceding it (e.g. “in which” or “for which”). I think you can never learn about this kind of rule unless you have your manuscript checked by a native.

3. Native speakers do not always know grammar well.

Humans are not perfect, as someone like me believes. Some editors who reviewed my manuscript did not seem to know some grammar rules I teach my students. Here are some of them: the use of subjunctive present tense or the difference between “do so” and “do it.” I do not mean to criticize them. I was just interested in this fact. Maybe it means there are some trivial grammatical rules you need not care about. As a teacher of English, I seem to have been too serious about them.

All in all, I learned that I can learn from the interaction with native speakers of English many things that I cannot learn from books.