![]() In what follows, we begin with an at-a-glance summary of the main clashes in all languages, with tips for each to guide writers. The group met to iteratively identify and discuss the most prominent grammar clashes. Each co-author reviewed all the Writer’s Craft grammar pearls, noting instances where they would need to adapt from the conventions of their native language to accommodate the English convention. These languages are a convenience sample that reflects a range of native languages in the HPE scholarly community and allows insight into similarities and differences. This collaborative piece uses four languages to illustrate this phenomenon: Spanish, French (Canadian), Dutch and German. We hope, through this effort, that EAL writers can apply the grammar pearls in the Writer’s Craft series more successfully, and their co-authors and supervisors can target their writing feedback more accurately. This Writer’s Craft spotlights this challenge with the goal of making explicit and visible some key grammar contradictions. If writing feedback is based in this interpretation that the writer lacks grammatical knowledge, we’ve got the perfect conditions for imposter syndrome to flourish for the EAL writer. It is also invisible to the rest of us, meaning that supervisors and co-authors may interpret as lack of grammatical knowledge what is actually knowledge of a contradictory grammatical convention in the native language. This can create frustration, because the negotiation between clashing conventions is largely tacit, happening beneath the EAL (English as an Additional Language) writer’s surface of consciousness. When grammar or style conventions clash across languages, writing well requires both learning a strategy and unlearning one at the same time. This may explain why applying the grammar lessons of a Writer’s Craft can be such difficult work. As the workshop anecdote opening this piece illustrates, however, what’s true for English grammar may not hold for other languages. ![]() Based in the assumption that writers will maximize their success if they adhere to standard grammatical conventions, these short pearls offer strategies to master sentence structure, strengthen verbs, employ parallel structure, correct punctuation, develop paragraphs, and so on. Over the past five years, the Writer’s Craft section has published a series of grammar pearls designed to help writers produce stronger, more memorable research manuscripts. ![]() Then someone exclaimed: “Really? But that’s how we write in Dutch! We LOVE our prepositional phrases: the more the better!” ![]() I laughed too, but I wasn’t sure why it was funny. I showed an example: “In a study of medical students from rural Australia involved in clerkship rotations at community-based clinics during their final year, we asked …”. Prepositional pile up, I explained, is too many little phrases that layer on contextual details. I gave the example of “prepositional pile-up” as a feature writers should avoid. We encourage readers to share comments on or suggestions for this section on Twitter, using the hashtag: #how’syourwriting?Īt a writing workshop for health professional education (HPE) doctoral students and faculty in the Netherlands, I was explaining how to write more compelling, clear prose. Each entry focuses on a key writing feature or strategy, illustrates how it commonly goes wrong, teaches the grammatical underpinnings necessary to understand it and offers suggestions to wield it effectively. In the Writer’s Craft section we offer simple tips to improve your writing in one of three areas: Energy, Clarity and Persuasiveness.
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