People love accents! When my friend was taking a class at our university, she confessed that her professor’s posh British accent was so attractive to her that she’d close her eyes in lecture and pretend that the professor was Prince William. Several other friends specifically enrolled in classes with a particular Italian professor new to the music faculty just so they could enjoy hearing him lecture—not because they cared about the course topic. Maybe you’ve found that people admire your own accent in this way, as well, if you have one. More likely, people are just admiring your accent without telling you!
So, then, why would you want to reduce your accent in English? And how can accent reduction coaching help your writing, anyway? Accent coaching will be the most helpful for your writing if you are what some people call an auditory learner. That just means that you take in information most easily by listening to it. You might enjoy live lectures, audiobooks, or listening to the radio if you are a primarily auditory learner. You also probably use sound (heard or imagined) to figure out spellings and tenses when you write. If you’re sounding out words during the writing process, this is where your own accent can cause spelling errors. For example, if your regional accent doesn’t distinguish the short A and short E vowels, you might write “gethering” instead of “gathering.” (I saw this error in a colleague’s writing recently.) Another common issue is mixing up the pure I vowel (like in the word “see”) with the short I vowel (as in the word “it”). Certain varieties of Mandarin Chinese only use the short I, for example. Not having experience with the pure I vowel can cause writers to mix up “this” and “these”—particularly if the “Z” consonant in “these” is also not in their first language’s sound bank (as in Korean). I also recently edited a document whose author’s first language does not use the “ST” and “TS” consonant clusters, which caused that author to miss the endings on English words like “suggests” and “Tufts.” So what does this all mean? Well, if you undergo accent training (sometimes called diction training or coaching), and you learn to produce these new sounds physically and then hear them accurately, this can help you remember those sounds (and their spellings) when you write certain words whose sounds and spellings match. When I taught the aforementioned Mandarin-L1 author how to produce the pure I vowel, her ability to distinguish words like “this” and “these” immediately improved because she could now hear and produce the different “I” vowels herself while writing. This also tapped into her kinesthetic learning (learning by doing) ability because I had taught her how to move her mouth and tongue to produce the sounds. If accent coaching sounds like a helpful addition to your English studies, just get in touch with me through the Contact page to set up some sessions! As a piano accompanist who frequently coaches opera singers on pronunciation in Italian, French, and German-language repertoire, I am very experienced in coaching accent development in nonnative speakers.
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Frequently, when I edit multiple papers for the same client and see a consistent issue in that client's writing, I'll recommend that the client seek one-on-one, advanced English instruction with someone who teaches English professionally (ideally, with an ESL focus).
What if you're no longer a university student, though? What if you're a faculty member who's not eligible to enroll in classes at your home institution? What if you're not in academia at all? What if finances or consistent scheduling are issues? Where do you start when looking for an English teacher? My first tip, which will address most of the above concerns, is to post advertisements seeking a lesson trade or barter arrangement. Obviously, this might be easier to arrange if you're in a large city or college town with many people who enjoy learning new things. If your first language is (for example) French, you may find that an English teacher in town would really love to take French lessons with you to prepare for a trip to Paris. You may trade one English lesson for one French lesson or come to some other arrangement that suits you both. As a pianist who frequently performs with opera singers, I decided to start voice lessons one summer; knowing that many singers need help preparing for piano exams at IU, I advertised that I would trade voice lessons for piano lessons. The arrangement was successful for the time that scheduling allowed us to do it, and because neither of us spent any money, it was a great financial decision too! To address the location issue that potential English students may face when they don't live in a populated area (or live outside an English-speaking country), I'll talk a bit about remote instruction and what to look for in a great English teacher. Remote instruction (via Skype, FaceTime, or Zoom) is an excellent choice if you currently live in a country whose primary language is not English, which makes it more difficult to find great English instructors locally. As a music instructor who's taught a few hybrid and fully online courses for IU, I highly recommend Zoom software for both Mac and PC users. (As a bonus, IU network members automatically have pro accounts!) Many teachers have started reaching out to online students; thus, you have to know what you're seeking in a teacher. Firstly, when you search for and visit a potential teacher's website, make sure that the text on the website is grammatically and mechanically perfect. (You might have an English-L1 friend check the website for you if you're not confident in your own English yet.) If the teacher cannot lead by example with perfect English, how will he or she teach it to you? Perhaps one or two typos on the website might be forgivable (particularly if the teacher hired someone to create the website on his or her behalf), but someone who has fully mastered English and English instruction needs to demonstrate through his or her advertisements that he or she can effectively model what will be taught. This should be the case for any teacher you're looking to hire: music teachers should also be able to demonstrate exemplary playing on their instruments! (Voice is a little different because advanced age will affect a person's ability to sing opera.) Another consideration is that, if you're interested in undertaking speech and pronunciation instruction from this teacher, you may be looking for a teacher with a specific accent or one who is from a specific place, like England or Australia, so you may develop the same type of accent yourself. Conversely, if you begin lessons with a teacher whose accent is really unfamiliar to you (I have difficulty with the Scottish accent myself!), you may struggle more in the early instructional stages than you would with a teacher whose accent is more neutral. A related consideration is that some rules and spelling conventions vary between British English and American English (for example). If you're planning on studying at Oxford, you may prefer to practice English with someone from a country that uses British spellings and mechanics rules. If you're not sure of your prospective teacher's English background, just ask! He or she should be happy to tell you. Finally, after you've looked at teachers' websites, inspected their credentials (whether they have an English teaching certificate of some kind or have taught in other countries for years, etc.), and narrowed down a list of people to contact, ask your friends! If you have many friends who are also nonnative speakers and have recommendations, they can tell you a lot more (and in much more detail) about a specific teacher than a website can. Word-of-mouth referrals are vital to my editing business, too, and many of my most loyal clients first came to me with referrals from friends. Teachers work the same way! Lately I've had the privilege to work with several clients who are bilingual from birth; that is, they were born and/or raised in the United States (or somewhere else where English is dominant) but their parents spoke another language with them at home. This is a gift for someone born in that environment (and I really wish I had been raised bilingual, but alas, my mixed ancestry did not allow for that!), but it can pose its own challenges when such a person starts writing academic work in one of those two first languages!
One challenge bilingual authors may face is that the syntax structures from the two languages (let's say English and Spanish for simplicity's sake) may mix with each other when the author is writing in one of those languages. Thus, their English may have Spanish-flavored syntax or their Spanish might use some unidiomatic, English-flavored syntax. As someone who learned Spanish as a teenager and has some bilingual-like characteristics (though I'm not truly bilingual from birth), I've noticed that when I have been speaking/writing in English for long periods, I often have difficulty code-switching and my written Spanish won't be completely fluent/free from English bleedthrough until I've been working in Spanish for awhile (maybe a couple hours). During my cruise ship performing tours, when I was trying to draft Spanish-language program notes for a new musical composition, I figured out that it was easiest for me to do so if I worked on them right after chatting with my Spanish-speaking friends on the ship for awhile (this wasn't hard to do, since my best friends on that ship were from Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico!). If you notice this in your own writing experience, then, you might try spacing out your writing schedule accordingly: rather than having a phone chat with a relative in your other first language and then immediately sitting down to write your latest dissertation chapter, try writing the chapter first (but also after you've been engaged with English for awhile, like by answering emails from your professors or watching an English-language TV show) and then calling your relative. You might see a real difference in what you produce! While this language mixing may never completely go away, depending on you and your brain wiring, you may want to try this experiment and see if it works for you. About a year into my graduate music theory studies at Indiana University, I took a Teaching Music Theory class with one of my favorite professors, a professor known for his excellent teaching. While I don't remember the context in which he offered it, he once told us a funny story about the way he best learns information. He mentioned that sometimes, when he needs to remember something, he will write it down—but then he'll throw the paper away! His wife always teases him about this. However, there's some truth to what my professor said: writing something out by hand is a great way to lock it in your brain!
As long as you don't have something like a Disorder of Written Expression or motor dysgraphia, you might also find that (re)writing necessary information on paper, by hand, is a great way to commit it to memory! This is why I always recommend that clients new to studying English (or any client interested in improving his/her grammar skills!) review the comments I've left in each paper's margins and rewrite them by hand in a notebook. I think you'll find that if you do this, your grammar and usage skills in English will improve much more quickly! This might be especially helpful if your first language doesn't use the Latin alphabet, because it will provide writing practice using the Latin alphabet too. Have you tried rewriting my paper comments by hand to retain the information in them more accurately? If so, let me know how it worked for you! They say that immersion is one of the best ways to learn a language. You were probably told that as you were preparing to begin your academic experience in the US (or wherever you are studying). And one would think that, if you're studying in an English-speaking country, you're getting the full immersion experience, right?
Well, not necessarily. When you're not in classes with American (or otherwise English-L1) professors, how are you spending your time? Are you joining clubs and other extracurricular activities through which you're making English-speaking friends? Or—let's be real—are you watching movies in your first language or hanging out with friends who speak your first language, because it's more comfortable and you're just so tired from all your classes that thinking in/speaking English feels like more work for you? Trust me, I've been there too! While I didn't formally study in another country, I briefly toured as a pianist on the ms Zaandam, a cruise ship that spent most of its time in Spanish-speaking countries (Spanish is my 2nd language). Knowing that I wouldn't have many other Spanish-language immersion experiences in Indiana, I made a decision to seek out as many opportunities to speak, listen, read, and write in Spanish as I could possibly find! As a result, I immediately and dramatically improved my skills during my 4 months on the Zaandam. In fact, when my Mexican art dealer friend would give me a wake-up call to ask if I'd help with his next art auction in a few hours, I'd sometimes find myself thinking in Spanish first, even before my English would kick in! (This amused and somewhat annoyed my violinist, who had taken 4 years of high school Spanish but hadn't kept up with it!) Additionally, because I intentionally spent more time with the native Spanish speakers also working on the ship, I formed great friendships with some people I never would have met otherwise. Four years after we met on the Zaandam, one such friend and I are creating a performing group and another friend has supplied me with Spanish-language poems to use in composing art songs! Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "I'm a shy person and I don't think I can just start making English-speaking friends the way you befriended all those Spanish speakers!" And that's no problem! There are other ways to start the immersion process if you're more introverted or don't feel ready to join clubs with English speakers in them. One simple way to begin the immersion process—one that will also help you as you write papers and have me edit them—is changing your laptop's settings so that everything displays in English. I actually require all Arabic-L1 clients to do this (at least in Microsoft Word, if not on their entire operating system) because Arabic's right-to-left writing system makes it impossible for me to type comments in English within their Word documents. Also, as students, we spend so much time on our computers that if you set your computer's default language to English, you'll be giving yourself hours and hours of additional reading/writing practice without even thinking about it! Understandably, not everyone can do this (maybe you are sharing a computer or you don't have administrative privileges on yours, so you can't go in and change these settings), but if you can, it's a very easy and valuable way to get yourself more comfortable with English. Some other ways you can immerse yourself in English (if you are not ready to introduce yourself to new people on the street!) include:
When meeting with a client, I often make a joke that if all my clients somehow hosted a party together, and at this party they decided to subject me to a "roast" (a good-natured insult session directed at me and meant to be funny), the first thing everyone might do is imitate me saying something like "stop using so many 'of constructions'!"
Well, they wouldn't be wrong! This is among my signature writing tips, particularly when I work with a client whose first language is Korean, Arabic, or any Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese are the most common Romance languages, and they share origins in Latin). These languages frequently construct phrases using the preposition "of" or something equivalent to it. Thus, when clients with these L1s (first languages) turn to English writing, they transfer these phrase constructions as well...and it doesn't always work. "What's wrong with of constructions?" you may ask. But first, you might also ask, "What is an of construction?" To put it simply, an of construction is any phrase that contains "___ of ___" or "___ of [the/a/insert another article here] ____." Such a construction is not inherently incorrect in English. It is a bit like salt on your food: sometimes you even want to add some or a phrase (like a particular recipe) specifically demands it. However, many writers will overuse the of construction to the point that the writing becomes difficult to understand, because of constructions place greater demands on the reader's working memory capacity by asking them to store more information in their head as they read the phrase. Just like when you use too much salt on your food, when you use too many of constructions, the phrase becomes difficult to digest! Even more problematic is the of chain; that is, two or more of constructions in a row. Here is such an of chain: "Garlic mustard is a member of the group of plants of the genus Alliaria." Now, even if you know exactly what garlic mustard is (it's an invasive plant in the United States), you may feel a little lost reading this phrase! It would be more concise to say "Garlic mustard is in the Alliaria plant genus" (and perhaps you could explain elsewhere exactly what a genus is). Here, I deleted all the ofs from the sentence, but you don't even need to delete them all. Just try to leave only one, at most, per sentence! Whenever you find that you've written an of construction and it's not part of an established "phrase chunk" in English (See what I did there? "Part of" is just such an established "phrase chunk" for which it's totally OK to keep that "of"!), see if you can take the word after the of and make it a possessive (or, in grammar-speak, genitive) instead. This is what I mean here: let's say you had written "the wings of the monarch butterfly" somewhere in your paper. If you take the noun after the of and make it possessive, then place it before the first noun, you would have "the monarch butterfly's wings." And that conveys the exact same meaning in fewer words! Now that I've said all this, I should clarify that you don't need to delete every single "of" from your paper every time, but trying to limit your of constructions will make your writing far clearer and more concise. In fact, when I am just beginning to work with a new client who appears to be overusing the of constructions, I will usually recommend that they try a specific exercise: write a paragraph in academic prose without using any of constructions! While this is not something you may ever have to do in your real-life papers, it's a great brain-stretching exercise that will help you write more clearly in the future. Did you try the exercise I just described? If so, let me know how it worked for you! In my 5+ years as a freelance editor on the IU campus, I've worked with hundreds of clients whose first languages have ranged from Arabic to Thai (and everything in between!). Depending on each client's educational background—and especially if the first language uses a writing system other than the Latin alphabet—I have found that most English-L2 academic editing clients' speaking skills in English tend to be much stronger than their writing skills, at least when they haven't worked with an editor regularly. Native speakers with dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other disorders of written expression may also be much more comfortable speaking than writing in English.
If you speak more easily and fluently than you write in English, this tip is for you! Even if you are not an especially auditory (ear-based) learner, this tip may still be helpful. This tip is as easy as downloading a free audio recording app onto your iPhone or other smartphone. (I have an Android device and use one simply called Audio Recorder.) Next time you want to write a paragraph or even a sentence in your next paper, just think through what you want to say and say it out loud into the audio recording app on your phone. Then replay the recording and type the words you just spoke! More often than not, you'll find a simpler and clearer way to say something when you are just speaking it into the recording device, because you're not attempting to impress your professors with your big vocabulary. Remember, though: well-constructed ideas, spoken or written clearly and simply, are going to be much more convincing to the reader (your professor) than a bunch of unnecessarily long and unclear sentences that you stuffed with big words to impress your reader. Those of you whose first language uses another writing system (not the Latin alphabet) may see the most immediate benefit from this speech-to-audio-recorder technique, since it takes more brainpower (specifically working memory) to hold your idea in your head as you translate that idea into a written alphabet with which you may not be entirely comfortable yet. If you record your speech first and type what you said later, your working memory doesn't have to hold that idea for several minutes as you pick out the letters and words. That way, your idea is less likely to be "lost in translation" as it's being transferred from your brain to the computer screen. Try speaking your ideas into the recorder app as you write your next paper and let me know how it worked for you! For those of you whose first language is not English, you may be tempted to try writing papers in your first language and then translating them into English after you're done.
Here's a story to illustrate why this is a really bad idea. Early in my editing career, a native Arabic speaker (I'll call him Mike) contacted me to assist him with his master's thesis. He had written the entire thing in Arabic and had then translated it into English himself. He had two issues, though:
When I was pursuing my undergraduate minor in Spanish at the University of Michigan, our professors always warned us not to write our papers in English first, and they did so for the exact reasons I showed above in my story about Mike. Those who wrote in English first had to undertake much more work to prepare a draft in Spanish, and when they did, the final product was not nearly as good. The professors could always tell who had written their papers in English first, because those papers received lower grades! If you need to translate a primary source article in your first language for your own academic papers, this is a different matter; however, I still recommend getting a professional translator or a fully bilingual friend (like someone born in the US, but raised by parents who speak your first language) to do the translation for you. Translating from your L1 to your L2 is always more difficult than translating from your L2 (for me, Spanish) into your L1 (for me, English). That's why I offer Spanish to English translation services, but not English to Spanish translation services! Welcome to my Writing Tips page! Here, I'll share some of the most popular and helpful advice I've shared with clients all over the English learning spectrum—from those spending their first year in an English-speaking environment to native speakers who just want to refine their writing even more. These posts are not meant to replace an individual editing session, of course! They will simply outline some important things to keep in mind whenever you're writing a paper.
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