Writing essays in a second language

The room’s signs are in English, but writers here publish in whichever language they write in, and plenty of people write essays in a language they learned rather than the one they grew up with. If you are one of them, you will know the particular feeling of it: thoughts that arrive fully formed in one language and come out stiff in another, a vocabulary that is wide in some rooms and bare in others, and a nagging sense that a native reader would phrase every sentence slightly differently.

That feeling is worth taking seriously, but not too seriously. Writing in a second language is a real constraint, and constraints can be useful. What follows are some habits we would suggest, offered as advice from one desk to another rather than as rules.

Plainness is an advantage

When you write in your first language, you have access to every register, every idiom, every half-joke. That freedom is also a temptation: it is easy to reach for a clever phrase when a clear one would serve better. In a second language you often cannot reach that far, and so you write more plainly. Readers tend to forgive plain prose much more readily than prose that is straining to sound fluent.

So do not try to sound like a native writer. Try to sound like a clear one. Short sentences, concrete nouns and one idea at a time will carry an essay a long way. The writers you admire in your second language probably did not win you over with idioms; they won you over with thinking you could follow.

Think in one language, draft in the other

People ask whether they should draft in their first language and translate, or write directly in the second. In our experience, each has a cost. Translating a finished draft tends to produce sentences that are correct but oddly shaped, because they keep the rhythm of the original. Writing directly can feel slow and can make you avoid ideas you do not have the words for yet.

A middle path works well for many people: do your thinking in whichever language comes most easily, and do your drafting in the language you will publish in. Notes, outlines and margin scribbles can be in your first language, or a mixture of both. The slip-box described in Keeping a slip-box: one idea to a card does not care what language a card is in. Then, when you sit down to draft, write in the target language from those notes, so the sentences grow in their own grammar from the start.

When you get stuck on a sentence, write it quickly in your first language in square brackets and keep going. Coming back to a bracketed sentence later, with the rest of the paragraph written around it, is usually easier than solving it in the moment.

Keep a phrase bank

The gaps that slow second-language writers down are often not about vocabulary in the usual sense. You know the words for your subject. What is missing is the small connective tissue of argument: the phrases a native writer uses without thinking to concede a point, to change direction, to return to something said earlier.

Collect them. When you read an essay in your second language and a writer makes a move you would like to be able to make, copy the phrase onto a slip with a note on what it does:

• “That is not quite the whole story.” Concedes, then turns.
• “To put it another way…” Restates more simply.
• “This matters because…” Moves from description to argument.
• “Which brings us back to…” Returns to the opening question.

File these by what they do, not alphabetically. When you are drafting and need to turn a corner, you can go to the right drawer and find a few ways of doing it. Over time, the phrases you use most will stop being borrowed and start being yours.

Check collocations, not just words

A word can be correct and still sound wrong. In English, you make a decision rather than do one, and rain is heavy rather than strong. These pairings, called collocations, are where second-language writing most often gives itself away, and an ordinary dictionary does not always help.

When a phrase feels uncertain, look it up as a phrase. A good learner’s dictionary gives example sentences showing which words a term usually keeps company with. Reading widely in the language you write in is the slower, surer remedy: collocations are absorbed far more than they are memorised. The slow, pencil-in-hand reading described in Reading slowly, on purpose is a good way to notice them.

Reading your draft aloud helps here too. Your ear for the language is often ahead of your conscious knowledge of it, and a phrase that is wrong will frequently sound wrong before you can say why.

Names, accents and your own language on the page

Writing in a second language does not mean leaving your first one behind. Essays are often richer for the occasional word that has no good equivalent, a name spelled properly, a short quotation in the original with a translation beside it. When you do this, give the reader what they need: a brief gloss the first time a word appears, and the original spelling with all its marks.

That last part matters more than it might seem. A name with its diacritics stripped is a slightly different name. SlipRoom sets Vietnamese and other accented scripts in typefaces that carry every diacritic properly, and writers publish here in whichever language they write in, as the help desk explains. So there is no need to simplify a name for the page.

Finding a second reader

Finally, if you can, find one reader whose first language is the one you are writing in, and ask them to mark only the sentences that stop them. Not every awkward sentence, and not matters of taste: just the places where they had to read twice. That is a much smaller request than “please correct my English”, and the answers are more useful.

Then revise, using the passes in Revising a draft in three passes, and publish. A piece written carefully in a second language often has a quality that fluent writing lacks: every word in it was chosen on purpose.