Recommendations for Writing Stellar Papers in English
Key Points for French Speakers
Personal Pronouns:
In English, when writing a paper with a single author, notably theses, we use the first person singular pronoun (e.g., “I”). Inevitably there will be work carried out with others that should be cited in these papers; in these cases, colleagues should be identified and the first person plural pronoun (e.g., “we”) can be used.
Of course, papers with more than one author should use the “we” pronoun at all times.
In no case should the author(s) refer to himself/herself/themselves with third person pronouns (e.g., “he”, “she”, or “they”).
Choice of Voice:
Contrary to the grammatical devices of French, written English prefers the active voice. For example, while the phrase “experiments were carried out” is understandable and grammatically correct, the active voice version “we carried out experiments” is preferable in written English.
Nominalization:
French often nominalizes when discussing cause and effect situations. For example, one could say “La classification des données nous a aidé de faire…” with classification being a noun formed from the verb classifier.
In English, however, we would prefer a verb form for this type of phrase. We might write “Classifying our data allowed us to do…” or “Because we classified our data, we were able to do…”. Note that classifying and we classified are verb forms and not nouns.
Other common mistakes:
allow + noun
(not allow + verb), e.g.:
This allowed us to perfect the distribution method of our system.
The system allows for quicker processing of data.
Our findings allow to predict users’ emotions.