Sounds like he'll have to be up there with Gauss and Noether if he is to overcome the social skills handicap his parents are strapping on him.

This may be about the UK but, as a Greek, "a giant heritage museum [...]" hit close to home.

It's terrifying and exciting. Anyone written a guide to the challenges of taking up a legacy package? Others have been through this (@bbolker.bsky.social comes to mind, and surely there are others)

That's great news. Thank you for taking up the torch!

Thank you for "contrastive rhetoric". Looks like a promising rabbithole 😉

It's a bit similar with accents: speaking English with a thick Greek/German/Chinese accent will be a comprehension problem. But the other extreme, cosplaying a member of the British royal family, is also weird.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree. I just think that it is normal for our writing to occasionally have features that are a bit weird to a native speaker.

I simply mean that it is only natural for people whose mother tongue is a language other than English, whose writing culture is therefore one outside of the culture of British or American English, to inevitably use writing conventions that are echoing their own writing cultures.

The common ground is made of the rules of English grammar and syntax. Again, I am not talking about breaking or bending any rules here.

Again, this is not license to make mistakes. English has the same rules whether it's British, American or—let's call it—International.

But sometimes, the feedback we get is "this isn't incorrect, but a native speaker would not write it like that". Isn't that an odd expectation?

Yet, our target readers are Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, French etc as well as Brits and Americans.

Doesn't the very status of English as a lingua franca mean that we are on "international waters"; outside any one writing culture's jurisdiction?

So, if you assemble your paragraphs as a German might, is your writing poor? And who decides?

Lingard et al.'s implicit premise is that, as English is the lingua franca of science, non-native English science writers should be aware of and follow the conventions of native English readers/writers.

I am interested in the latter case. For example, they point out that in German the role of a paragraph is to synthesize; to combine strands of thought. This seems at odds with the "one paragraph – one idea rule" which is prevalent in English writing guides (like Schimel's).

However, they don't distinguish between grammatical errors, committed by applying another language's rules to English text, and cases where there are no errors made; the writing simply follows different conventions from those a native speaker may be accustomed to.

I've found this paper doi.org/10.1007/S400... which is relevant. The authors highlight pitfalls for non-native English users that relate to writing in English as one would write in their mother tongue.

Clarity, sustaining the reader's interest and managing their attention are probably common goals, regardless of language. I just suspect that the conventions around all that might vary somewhat among languages.

I am reading Joshua Schimel's Writing Science (h/t @kjhealy.co). He argues that clear and compelling writing follows some basic principles, regardless if it's journalism, science or fiction. But does it matter if it's in Chinese or English?