Timothy Skern - Writing Scientific English

In short, if you receive unpleasant remarks about your level of English, do not despair. Read through your text again and see whether the reviewer is correct. Obtain the opinion of an English native-speaker and accept their comments. If they agree with the reviewer, then your manuscript will have been improved; if not, then you can write back in the way that I mentioned in the last paragraph.

Finally, reviewers themselves are also human. Here are two reviewers’ comments on the standard of English in two manuscripts written and/or read by English native speakers.

“Finally if authors should improve their English lnguage that will be helpful.”

(The misspelling of the word “language” was in the original comment)

“This study is better to understand the concepts of how they determine protein degradation in some proteins. The data are interesting, however it is not suitable for publication unless language extensively was edited."

Both manuscripts were not surprisingly returned to the journals concerned without any English language corrections.

Box 2.4Vocabulary of “A word in your ear” (Campbell, 1998)

The editor of “Nature” wrote the text cited in (Campbell, 1998). 20 words from the text (printed in blue) that may be unfamiliar are explained below. You may also be unaware of the identity of Ionesco mentioned in the text. He was a Romanian and French playwright who liked to make fun of ordinary situations and felt that much of life repeated itself without purpose.

dumbfounded – speechless with surprise

exasperate – annoy

convey – transmit

bestow – place a talent upon someone

overwhelm – overload with something

intricate – made with a complex design which is difficult to understand

sustain – keep going

ply – follow

considerable – significant or a large amount

bemoan – complain about pore

over – study closely and seriously

dismantle – take something apart

equation – an expression that certain quantities are equal to each other. They usually contain an equals sign (=). a + b = c is a basic equation.

tenure – have a permanent position, especially at a university

breed – a type or variety. This word is very important in genetics.

relish – look forward to and enjoy

nurture – look after and train

commendably – doing something in a way which deserves praise

conscientious – doing something very carefully

ineptness – inability

The take-home messages from this chapter are simply the eight headings from section 2.1. Write them down yourself without referring back to the chapter.

Campbell, P. (1998) A Word in Your Ear. Nature 394, 403.

Carter-Siglow, J. (1997) Beyond the language barrier. Nature 384, 509.

Hyland, K. and Jiang, F. (2017). Is academic writing becoming more informal? Engl. Specific Purp. 45, 40–51.

Bronowski, J. (1973) The Ascent of Man.

O'Toole, F. (2018) Heroic Failure.

Strunk, W., Jr. and White, E. B. (1918) The Elements of Style.

www.bartleby.com/141

www.pubmed.gov

1. To be a good scientist, you have to be tolerant and patient when experiments or interpretations do not turn out as you had predicted. You must be able to stand high levels of frustration.

2. 62% of certified drug addicts believe that cannabis has effects on the behaviour of car drivers and machine operators which lengthen their reaction time. 45% of students shared this opinion whereas only 38% of customers interviewed at discotheques were aware of this negative effect of cannabis.

3. Finally, the correlation has been clearly shown. However, some parameters remain to be examined and further investigations should be done.

4. This results in texts which are extremely difficult to read. In addition, they also reveal to the world that their authors are clueless about paragraph structure.

1. The experiment failed.

2. All variables tested remained constant.

3. This hypothesis lacks supporting evidence.

4. The variation was always less than 1%.

5. All alternative explanations seemed implausible.

6. Car drivers ignore both the fear of global warming and the number of fatal accidents.

7. This method is safe.

8. Everybody overlooked the discrepancy between the two sets of data.

9. The desired compound was absent from all the samples.

10. The mixture contained at least eleven substances.

1. Figure 1 shows that the incidences of heart disease and television viewing correlate well.

2. 20% of the world population lacks clean water and sufficient food.

3. The effect of compound X on blood pressure remains to be determined.

4. Another important reason for this optimisation is to eliminate pollution.

5. Synergy will significantly reduce the amount of funding required.

6. Much work has demonstrated that the spherical Earth travels around the similarly shaped Sun.

Or: The Earth orbits the Sun.

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