Scientific writing like a native English-speaker: tips for Italian researchers

摘要

Definitely ourselves or some colleagues had, at least once, his/her manuscript returned with the comment “needs to be reviewed by a native English-speaker”. Many researchers receive this response even after translation or revision by an official translator or a native English-speaking co-author. Indeed, not every native English-speaker or non-native English teacher / translator who writes well in English can write well for the scientific literature. Over the past years, I have been collaborating with Italian researchers, and I notice that their English status is, at least in general, relatively weak. The truth is, one thing to write Italian, which is plenty of different regional expression, and another to write well in Italian, the same applies to English. Scientific English writing has its own style, rhythm, and some particularities such as the use of passive voice, which is considered inappropriate in most forms of writing (news, novels, blogs, etc.) outside of science. However, the use of passive voice is acceptable and even most of the time, key in some scientific writing. Whereas Marlow (2) suggests that reviewing take twice longer than translating a manuscript, in my experience so far, there is a usually relationship between conceptual and grammar mistakes. I have spent several hours frustrated and lost within confusing spend hours being frustrated by confusing sentences resulting from simple mistakes, and fixing the same mistakes over and over again. For this reason, taking advantage of my Portuguese knowledge, I took inspiration from the contribution given by Dr. Marlow for Portuguese-speakers (1, 2), to assist to the Italian research community, based on the grammar similarities between the two idioms. Thus, I have assembled a compilation common “errors” made by native Italian-speakers, which according to my experience, are the same to that usually observed in Portuguese speakers (2) when writing scientific papers in English. I was fascinated from reading the tips provided by Marlow (2) as I could applied her suggestion, based on my Portuguese knowledge. Since then, and thank to that editorial as well, my scientific English skills have significantly improved.