The Writing Skills of Academic Paper (1.中国学生经常犯的错误)

Abstract writing

Problem statement: What are we going to do?

Motivation: Why does our solution work or Why do others NOT work?

Solution: How do we do?

Experiments: Yes, we can!

Introduction writing

The logic flow of the Introduction section works the same as that of Abstract Problem statement:

What are we going to do?

Motivation: Why do others NOT work?

Solution: How can we do better than the existing.

Experiments: a brief introduction of experimental results, and we may omit them.

Experiments writing

Figures and tables are good, but never say: “Figure XX shows our method is better than XXX.”

1. The usage of a, an, the (Important) The single most common habit is the omission of articles a, an, and the. Articles signal that a noun will follow and that any modifiers between the article and the noun refer to that noun (a big blue bicycle / the first award).

A and an are indefinite articles.

the is a definite article.

In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.

In the names of business firms the last comma is omitted, as The abbreviation etc., even if only a single term comes before it, is always preceded by a comma.

Words often misspelled

 

 

 Write to-day, to-night, to-morrow (but not together) with hyphen.

Write any one, every one, some one, some time (except the sense of formerly) as two words.

Words and Expressions commonly miss-used

 

 Never begin an English sentence with abbreviations and Arabic numerals such as Fig. and 8. Instead write Figure and Eight.

Do not write ‘by this way’. Instead write ‘by doing this’, or ‘using this method’.

Never write ‘How to…’ at the beginning of a sentence. (Don’t say it either.)

Do write ‘the results are shown in Figure 2’. Do not write ‘the results are showed as Figure 2’.

Respectively is inserted to express that there is a certain order in which something was done.

However, the order is already implied elsewhere in the sentence or does not need to be expressed because it does not add value to meaning of the sentence.

References

【1】William Strunk Jr., E. B. White, Roger Angell, “The Elements of Style”, Longman, 1999.

【2】Felicia Brittman, “The Most Common Habits from more than 200 English Papers written by Graduate Chinese Engineering Students ”.