A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of travelling to Finland to give a course on 鈥淓nglish for academic research鈥. This proved to be a stimulating and, in some respects, surprising experience for several reasons.
Finns have a reputation for good English skills, and indeed, they all spoke well and their emails were fine too. But the demands of academic English are rather different.
In the same way that one encounters 鈥淒english鈥 in Germany and 鈥淔renglish鈥 in France, there is 鈥淔inglish鈥 in Finland. This is inevitable, but it is important that these language barriers do not prevent good work from reaching an international audience.
This was the first time that I had given such a course to a group comprising only professors and lecturers. In Germany, I have always addressed doctoral students, which seems to reveal something about international differences in research processes and the need to publish. Indeed, the Finns wanted only to go through their own papers, and declined my offer of trial conference presentations or more general exercises. 鈥淭he only thing that counts here is to get published,鈥 was the unanimous declaration. I was informed that giving good conference presentations would be nice, but it does not further their careers.
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However, there were some other surprises in store. Particularly amazing was the fact that some of these papers had (allegedly) already been edited, although I would not have known, had I not been told.
These articles had been sent off to one of the many online services that all too often promise significantly more than they deliver. Without exception, these papers had been totally inadequately edited, containing some real English errors. More problematically, they contained style and idiom that was either simply poor, or inappropriate in academic writing.
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What particularly shocked me is that one Finnish professor told me he had paid the top rate for a 鈥減remium editing鈥 of his paper. That is, this online service had charged more than usual for having an 鈥渆xpert鈥 in the area ensure that the use of English was truly optimal. It was painfully obvious that this was not the case.
In the second sentence, I read that 鈥渕any researchers have strongly proposed鈥 conducting such investigations and later on, that 鈥渃ustomer鈥檚 tasks and activities are essential to understand鈥, because 鈥渢hey lead to experiences and value鈥. Methodologically speaking, a previous study was 鈥渁 contrast to a practices perspective鈥 and a more recent project 鈥渇ound applying a practice perspective five different ideal types of co-creation鈥.
Furthermore, some sentences were so academically unclear that they could not be resolved without communicating with the author. Yet, the articles had simply been uploaded in Finland, downloaded goodness knows where and then downloaded again in the allegedly edited form. However, in many cases, an article cannot be edited to a satisfactory level without bilateral communication, especially when it was written by a non-native speaker.
In summary, my many years of academic editing have revealed that writing academic English is a major challenge for all non-native speakers, albeit to differing degrees. Such courses are thus a useful means of conveying what goes wrong and how to get it right, as well as identifying who can really help.
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