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Developing your own writing skills

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You have built the solid foundations for your article in your research and planning. The content has been prepared and it is now time to dive in and begin writing.

Thankfully, it is not as scary as it sounds. The beauty (and the curse) of the writing process is the extent to which you will write and rewrite your article. There will be proofreads, edits and perhaps even the occasional panic at 2am where you decide to change absolutely everything (we’ve all been there). In short, the final version that you submit to journal editors will look nothing like your first draft, so take a deep breath and just start writing!

Jump straight to:

Writing

The most important first step is simply getting words on the page. Once the task of meeting the word count is complete, then you can work to improve your arguments and your linguistic choices. Here are some tips to keep in mind during the first draft:

  • Don’t rely on your native language

    If you were using a mix of the target language and your mother tongue during the planning stages, now is the time to remove the safety net and write entirely in the target language. The more you immerse yourself entirely in the language, the easier you will find it to express your ideas clearly.

  • Keep it simple

    It is important to express your arguments as clearly and simply as you can. This does not necessarily mean choosing the shortest words, rather that it is important to present your ideas and explain them in the most understandable way without losing any of their nuance.  Some key things to think about are:

  • Language conventions

    Many languages, if native to multiple countries, evolve and develop differently in each country where they are spoken. The most common example is UK English vs US English, but other examples include European vs Brazilian Portuguese, Castilian vs Latin American Spanish, and the many dialects of Arabic. Each ‘version’ of a language will likely have its own conventions around what sounds more formal and appropriate in academic writing. So, it is important to choose a ‘version’ of the target language and stick to it.

    If you are writing with a particular journal in mind that you would like to submit to, check their submissions guidelines to see if they specify which version of the target language they would prefer.

  • Formality

    A quick way to migrate your writing to a more formal register is to replace more typically spoken vocabulary (such as shorter sentences or excessive use of ‘and’, ‘but’ or ‘so’) with formal alternatives (such as compound sentences or conjunctions such as ‘however’, ‘although’, ‘moreover’, ‘therefore’ etc.). Be careful, though, to make sure that the formal alternatives that you are using are common in formal writing rather than formal speech. While rhetorical questions are a great formal device for giving a speech to an audience, they are not as effective in written academia and are mainly used in writing for educational resources.

  • Grammatical accuracy

    While judgements on your writing style are a little more subjective, the grammatical rules of the language are, in the main, objective and universally understood by those who speak it. Because of this, grammatical accuracy is a key measure readers will use to judge the fluency of your article. On the other hand, this does also mean it is the easiest element of the language for you to check yourself while armed with a trusted grammatical resource.

    A common error that editors experience with journal submissions from non-native speakers is incorrect subject-verb agreements, especially when the subject and the verb are not next to each other in a sentence.

    For example:
    The difficulties in establishing the genre hallmarks also introduces gaps in the discussion of children’s and young adult science fiction.

    Which should be written, ‘The difficulties […] introduce’.

  • Precision

    ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’. A key factor in maintaining simplicity is to avoid ambiguous language in your writing. In order to avoid generalisations, you can incorporate types of vocabulary such as quantifiers (expressing how large/small or how much of something there is), adverbs or adverbial phrases (to describe verbs), or modal verbs (verbs that express necessity or probability e.g. could, would, shall…).

    For example:
    At first appearance, David Bordwell distinctly defines art cinema as a category in its own right; not without overlap across genres, but with definitive guidelines with which one could construct art cinema’s mode of practice.

AI

Whilst generative AI (such as ChatGPT) can be a useful tool for generating initial ideas, the majority of journals will either not accept AI-authored text in a submission or, you will be required to declare it and be liable for any of the AI’s breaches of publication ethics. Pasting work that you want to publish into AI can also lead to wider issues around publication ethics and copyright. We cover this in more detail in our guide to writing a journal article.

Editing

The editing stage is where you can use your critical eye to perfect your language choices, rearrange arguments, expand paragraphs that are too brief and shorten those that are too long.

It is always good to have a trusted grammatical resource to hand at this stage – you can use this to check any phrases that you are unsure about. While it would be impossible to list resources for every language, some examples of resources that cater to multiple languages are:

  • Government institutions created by speakers of the language (e.g. The British Council for English, l’Académie française for French etc.)
  • Online language dictionaries such as Word Reference or Linguee (often the forums on these websites go into further detail about grammatical rules, differences in register, and use of idioms)
  • Although it is a paid service, FluentU’s freely available blogs provide grammatical resources in multiple languages.

You may already know of resources that are specific to your languages, but these are just a few examples to get you started.

As for tips and tricks to help you through the editing stage…

  • Play with the language

    If you are struggling to find the right wording for your sentence, now is your chance to experiment with your word choices and sentence structures. Perhaps try rearranging the clauses or changing the sentence structure? Would it make sense to change the verb tenses or subject agreements?

  • Refer to your list of common errors

    As mentioned in the advice for research and planning, you may find it useful to keep a list of your most common areas for improvement to refer to while writing. In the editing stages, you can now go through and see if any of your usual errors are still in the article. You could also review any additional errors that you notice in your early drafts, are there any recurring ones to add to the list for future writing?

  • Ask for help

    If you know any native speakers of the target language, ask them to proofread your work. This can be immensely useful for reviewing the quality of language, but also to ensure that your work reads well and makes sense. Often, as an author, you can become too familiar with your work to be able to read it objectively. So, having a second pair of eyes to check both your use of language and the article content can be incredibly helpful.

Final tips

After several rounds of writing, editing, writing, and more editing, you should have an article that’s ready to submit to a journal. One final piece of advice is that practice makes perfect so, if you would like to improve your ability in a second language, write wherever you can! Expand your language practice into other settings outside of academia such as writing a diary, a blog, or to a pen pal. These little things can all be a huge help in improving your skills in your second language and could pave the way to greater fluency in the long term.

Where to now?

Developing your own writing skills | Edinburgh University Press