Writing coherently in a foreign language is always a
difficult skill to master. I remember standing up in front of the class whilst studying languages at school, reading out my essays in the most horrendous broken
French. Safe to say the only lasting lesson I learnt was that chocolate
croissants are delicious and should be eaten at any and every opportunity.
It seems that many people also have the same problems with
English as I had with French, so much so that YouTube user ‘Venus Crest’ has a
whole channel just made up of her reading bad English essays aloud! Some of the
English in these essays is so bad that many sentences make no sense at all,
with hilarious results! Check out one of her videos below, which is reading out
an essay entitled ‘Is ICT the root of all evil?’
Jokes aside, being able to write coherent essays in a
foreign language, especially English, can be a major issue for non-native
speakers. And although sometimes we might laugh at people’s bad English, I’m
sure most British people are a little bit jealous of how well other people can
speak it – I definitely can’t speak French or Spanish (the languages I studied
at school) as well as most non-native English speakers speak English.
That said; it’s always good to look back on those pieces of
work with ‘bad English’ to see where you went wrong so you don’t make the same
mistakes in the future. But after talking to a number of international students
in Sheffield, understanding what it is they’re doing wrong requires feedback,
and in a world where everyone is busy and everything costs money, finding
feedback is easier said than done.
Luckily, we have Scholarly to sort all that out for you! It’s
not quite ready yet but we’re aiming to have a style and structure tool which
will help you to structure your sentences better and to use the correct
terminology which is appropriate to academic writing – a format which is almost
exclusive to the English speaking world. It’ll also give you feedback on what
you’ve done wrong and what mistakes are common throughout your essay. With this
tool in your arsenal, hopefully you won’t agree that ‘ICT is the root of all
evil’!
Follow us on Twitter @bescholarly for updates on when the
software will be ready to be tested for free!
No comments:
Post a Comment