English

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English Workshops

The only way to improve a skill is by practicing it. Here we practice writing and correcting formal academic English.


Writing Assignment

Due each Friday at 2pm.

Write (or revise) a 1-page beginning of an academic paper about anything you want. It could be the beginning of your next academic paper, a report about a previous research project, or even something completely unrelated to computer science.

Skip over the literature survey and implementation details -- the paper should only contain:

  • Introduction: why is the problem (the topic of this research) important?
  • Framework / proposed solution: how will you investigate or solve the problem?

There are two reasons to restrict the length of this paper: first, this is a reasonable goal for 1 week without unduly impacting our real work, and second, it forces you to write effectively and avoid fluff.

Peer editing

On each Friday, we will have a "peer editing" session: everybody will exchange papers. Each member of the group will look for mistakes in another person's paper". In addition to helping each other improve the short paper, this is a powerful technique to realize problems in your own writing.

After these corrections, everybody will modify their paper to include the suggestions. Then you can either give your paper to another person to edit, or hand it in to me to get my comments. If you hand it in to me, write a new 1-page paper for the peer editing session.

Graham's editing

Before you hand something in to me, get at least one round of peer editing. If you want, you could get two or three rounds of editing! But make sure that there are no obvious mistakes -- I will not be happy if I see spelling or grammatical mistakes. I want to work on issues of organization and style, not telling you that you forgot the word "the" or "an" in a sentence.

I will accept papers on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning / lunch. I won't leave NUS before 1pm on Saturday, but I make no guarantees after that! You can pick them up from me on Monday. If you have any difficulty reading my hand-writing, feel free to ask me -- I know that I have extremely messy hand-writing.

Please PRINT the papers; do not email them to me. I need to have paper to scribble my comments on.


Mistakes

  1. Spelling: look for typos or spelling mistakes that would be caught by a spellchecker. If you find any, you should feel insulted -- the author does not care about his or her work, and is wasting your time by asking you to proofread it.
    When writing a paper, treat the spellchecker like a compiler. If your program does not compile, you don't try to run it! Similarly, if a spellchecker finds an error in your paper, don't ask somebody to proofread it (unless you really have no clue how the word should be spelled).
  2. Grammar: look for grammatical mistakes or spelling mistakes that would not be caught by a spellchecker (their vs. there vs. they're, etc).
  3. Organization: are the ideas in the paper presented in a logical fashion? Can you follow the author's arguments?
  4. Style: do the sentences "flow" nicely? Are there any awkward phrases?

In each round of proofreading, I would recommend focusing on two of these levels. If the paper has typos, then don't bother checking the organization or style -- the author needs to do more "basic" work before you can help him or her with the more interesting issues of organization and style.


Reading practice

Another good way to improve your English -- in fact, some English teachers would even say the only way -- is to read. Since we are focusing on academic English, this means that you should read published papers. Reading more papers also gets you more familiar with your field, after all!

If you would like any suggestions for good papers to read, or tips on doing a literature search, ask me.


Graham's papers

I will be writing one paper each week. But to make life interesting, after I finish each paper, I will deliberately add some mistakes. Your job is to look for as many mistakes as possible in my paper. If you find fewer mistakes than I added, then you know that you need to practice your editing skills!  :)

On each Friday, I will reveal the mistakes in the previous week's paper. I will post these papers here.

  1. 06 Feb 2009: Tip o' the Tongue
  2. 13 Feb 2009: Ideas are a dime a dozen: informal rant, not a formal academic paper
  3. 20 Feb 2009: ...

How much time should you spend?

As with most skills, the amount that you improve depends on the amount of practice you do. I recommend spending 1 hour on English every day. Perhaps in this schedule:

  1. Saturday: write or edit your current 1-page paper, or look for mistakes in mine
  2. Sunday: read papers
  3. Monday: read papers
  4. Tuesday: finish writing paper, or start editing your own paper
  5. Wednesday: read papers
  6. Thursday: edit your paper or finish looking for mistakes in mine
  7. Friday: peer editing session