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Technical Writing: Second Language Technical Writing

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T.R. Girill T.R. 2550 Points

T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]

Technical Writing: Second Language Technical Writing

In a short essay in the Feb. 8, 2024, issue of AAAS's Science journal,
now successful clinician and research biologist Yaowu Zhang looks
back on his early struggles to share his technical work in effective,
professionally competent English text. Many English-as-a-second-
language science students face the same extra writing problems that
he overcame, and his gradually-discovered coping strategies can
help them too ('I thought I could conquer academic writing on my
own,' Science, Feb. 8, 2024, doi: 10.1126/science.zwxt4sv).

The Cross-Language Challenge

Some of Zhang's technical writing challenges are shared by everyone:
focusing on his most important claims, organizing them for maximum
clarity, and avoiding textual redundancies to save space and help
his readers. But as a second-language English writer, his early
drafts were often sabotaged by persistent cross-language challenges
that those drafting text as native English speakers may never even
think about when they write:
(1) verb tenses: go, went, (have) gone--if scrambled, can render
procedure sequences confusing or unintelligible,
(2) adjective order: in English it is always 'the quick brown fox,'
never 'the brown quick fox,' but almost no one can state the 'rules'
for such expected adjectival sequences,
(3) articles--'a', 'an', and 'the' are crucial for effective
English prose, but mysterious to speakers of languages that don't
use them, and inserting articles randomly in hopes of success
usually makes the resulting prose unintelligible in English.

Reader Frustration

Mishandling such cross-language English idiosyncrasies can
render a technical text incoherent even when the underlying
science is both adequate and interesting. Readers of linguistically
flawed technical passages are really in trouble: is it just me?
am I misunderstanding some genuine scientifically complex topic?
or is this text just so ineptly constructed that anyone, no
matter how fluent in English, would find it confusing?

Solution Strategies

Zhang's solution was to seek feedback on his technical English
drafts from work-group science colleagues. But that often failed
him for two reasons:
(1) his science colleagues were also second-language English
writers. None were easily able to draft effective English prose
themselves, nor spell out for him the latent grammar or usage
issues that plagued them all, and
(2) 'we weren't accustomed to commenting on each other's
writing,' so they lacked practice in formulating helpful,
specific feedback on and verbal alternatives to his inadequate
technical text.

Zhang's eventual solution to his second-language text drafting
challenges was twofold, and fortunately it generalizes well to
help other cross-language student science writers:

(1) He embraced the insight that 'Academic English is a second
language for everyone, even native speakers--and getting feedback
is part of the learning process.' The 'successful' text that
readers eventually see is almost always revised many times,
and it achieved adequacy only iteratively, not in one flash of
inspiration.

(2) Equally important, feedback on preliminary drafts is most
useful if it comes from someone who actually knows fluent
technical English AND is able to share what they know by calling
out specific weaknesses and offering overt, focused alternative
text. 'Help' from other students who are also struggling along
with the requester in a second language probably will not
achieve much improvement. That's where your role as science
teacher becomes crucial for communication progress.

[For a big-picture overview of effective technical text, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/handbooktoc
For more on how students can design effective text, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/usability]

 

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