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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