Writing up research in english: choice or necessity?

Abstract

In 2002, an editorial of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery 1 stated that English was "a heavy burden" for a large number of researchers from non-native-English speaking (NNES) countries.This issue has recently been discussed in a Nature' Special Report entitled "Lost in Translation" 2 .The report addresses the difficulty NNES scientists have in mastering the English language.According to this report, a feeling of "frustration" permeates the career of some European scientists when it comes to doing and writing up research in English.The same appears to be true for Japanese and South Korean scientists.In fact, for NNES authors, good command of English does not appear to be a minor issue in their doing of science.Also, although they are expected to master the four skills, there is no dispute that the writing skill has a unique place in their academic life.Particularly today, it can be argued that written English proficiency is a form of cultural capital in the scientific community.Accumulating it, or rather, the capital associated with it, confers power (and prestige) on its members 3 .Accordingly, the literature has reported that native-Englishspeaking (NES) researchers are at an advantage over NNES ones when it comes to getting published, especially in highimpact journals 4 .Concerning the writing of manuscripts, a study on the acceptance rate of cardiovascular research articles indicated that badly-written manuscripts (mostly from NNES authors) were more likely to be rejected than well-written ones 5 .In fact, we could assume that common sense alone would tell us that writing well can boost the authors' chances of getting published.Even so, attention to language among scientists is still scant, which would account for the number of unreadable articles published even in top-tier journals.In a Letter published in the British Medical Journal 6 , the author reports that "over the past 20 years…" many articles have shown "that medical information (such as journal articles, informed consent forms) is written in an 'unreadable' writing style."Among the authors of such texts are NES researchers, as even those writing in their mother tongue can be poor writers.However, improving writing skills in the native language is not that difficult.As for a foreign language, a great deal of effort should be put into improving such skills.With respect to English, sharpening communication skills to submit well-written manuscripts to international journals may be associated with academic survival.This is

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