​COMMON MISTAKES IN ACADEMIC WRITING

​​COMMON MISTAKES IN ACADEMIC WRITING
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 In this series of blog posts, Anne reflects on the common mistakes she reads in academic texts.

​What I've just learnt from the latest research - Transition markers       
Jan 2021

Recently, I was browsing through The Journal of English for Academic Purposes - I can't recommend it as bedtime reading, but for language geeks like me, it sometimes contains pertinent information. One article (DOI.org/101010/j.jeap.wowo.100874) was on the use of transitions markers. They are the words used to guide your readers through your text and help them understand it, e.g., Therefore, Finally, … Interestingly, the paper concluded that teachers should discourage the use of too many transition markers (something I have also picked up from peer-reviewers comments) and that those writing in  English as a second language would be well advised to take their clues from papers in their area of work (or from concordancers - I'll be writing about those at a later date - rather than from the text books on the matter.

The trials of translating - französischsprachig
Nov 2020

As you can see from the title here, this post isn't about proofreading; its about  translating. To be more precise, it's about translating a literary analysis. Don't get me wrong, I don't often translate and am thus not good at it, but a friend asked me, so I did. My friend had written in the German text französischsprachige Literaturen. I started  by pondering  whether one could write literatures in English, i.e., in the plural (and, yes, you can if you are a literary analyst). I then jumped back a step and wondered whether I could translate  französischsprachig  by using French-speaking ,  the obvious translation. My problem wasn't the adjective itself, it was whether literature, in English, could speak. Luckily my friend had the answer. Nowadays, referring to French-speaking isn't considered correct  because so many people in so many countries speak (and write) in their own national language, which  in this instance just happens to derive from the French language. The correct phrase here would be Francophone literatures. For English-speaking, it would be Anglophone, and, to my surprise, for Portuguese, it would be Lusophone. Now I've solved that problem, I can move on to pondering on where   Lusophone  originates and what words you use to translate the  x-speaking  of all the other languages in the world.


The verb "to allow"

My proofreader job often finds me sitting in front of texts that contain a mistake I've seen before, multiple times. One of the mistakes that continues to confuse me, because I don't know where it is coming from, is having a verb directly after the verb allow, e.g., "The longitudinal nature of the GIP allows  tracing  changes in political preferences over time". This should be written as "The longitudinal nature of the GIP allows changes in political preferences to be traced over time", i.e., it is not possible to put a verb directly after the verb   allow  (and many other similar verbs, e.g.,  permit).

However, the phrasal verb  to allow for   can be followed by a verb as it means something slightly different. The phrase  to allow for means to think about or plan for something that will happen in the future, e.g.,  "When thinking about how much money you need when you retire, you should allow for increasing living costs". And, of course, if you are writing  to be allowed to, then you can use an infinitive verb directly afterwards, e.g.,  "You are not allowed to make the same mistake again".


Commas and "such as"

I'll keep my punctuation blogs, such as this one, as short as possible. The question is, should there be a comma before the phrase  "such as" ?

The answer is, it depends. If the phrase is restricting what you are referring to, then don't write a comma before it, e.g., " Authors such as Smith (2018) were not writing about narrative".   I'm not writing here about all authors, only about Smith and those like Smith. If the phrase isn't restricting what you are referring to but   is simply adding a bit of information, then  insert a comma, e.g., "Authors on the topic, such as Smith (2018), were not writing about narrative." I am referring here to all authors on that particular topic and am using Smith as an example.


Using "beside/besides"
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Beside  means physically next to, e.g., "Anne was sitting beside Jill".
Besides   means in addition to, e.g., "Besides Anne and Jill, Roger was also present".

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By Anne Wegner

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