Poor English

[shermarama]

Today isn't going well, in certain ways. My car's back from being serviced and now runs better and has new oil and stuff, but it took several goes of ringing the garage to get them to admit it. I said I'd drop in and collect it just before 5 but when I put the phone down, about half two, I tried to get back to doing work and found I just couldn't deal with it all. So I went then and picked the car up and drove home and here I am.

Looking back I think I remember wondering if it was a good idea to go and study with a supervisor whose written English is so crap. I think I meant it as a joke, more or less, but I should perhaps have taken the little wriggle of doubt that prompted it more seriously. I've got to do a whole bunch of writing and I'm just banging my head against a brick wall, trying to get my head round how to structure it, for the sake of later use in the thesis write up and for what the boss-man wants. I went to see him this afternoon and tried to get it clearer but I left practically crying after 20 minutes because he doesn't even understand the question. At the same time it's not down to him, I don't really care if he thinks it's good or not because any rating of it is meaningless coming from him, it's frustrating that I can't get it done to my *own* satisfaction. But it would really help if the person who's supposed to be giving me guidance on these things had a clue.

*sighs* Time to go to band practice over in Acton. Drumming usually helps but I seem to have the doom on today; I have a nasty feeling that I'm going to get hung up on all the things that are wrong with this band today.

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

You need to find another collaborator, not your supervisor, who can mentor you through the learning-paper-writing thing. For me, my supervisor did it, but you basically just need to find someone else to write with. Once I'd written the first few papers, I could pretty much do all of it solo anyway, and I'd suspect you'd have a similar experience. Ask around other people in your department.

[shermarama]

Hmm. Thing is I'm at Queen Mary, which is a very international sort of university. Of the eleven people in my research group, only three of us are native English speakers (five Chinese, two Pakistani, one Albanian) and of those, one is enthusiastic but disorganised (turns in hundred-page reports that are mostly irrelevant) and the other rather too laconic to be much use. There are very few people in the department as a whole whose main problem is not having to write in their second language, basically. That doesn't mean some of them can't write reasonably well but it makes it hard to have a conversation about such abstract things. And since my supervisor is careless about English and doesn't value care with English in others, it's definitely not the group's strong point, as it were; I'm the odd one out who worries about it.

I'm getting a few more ideas off my bloke Jon but he did medieval history, which works differently. Ach, thanks for the suggestions, it'll come together eventually but this afternoon it was really getting on my wick. (Meanwhile at band practice we have done something excitingly sick by way of splicing a cover into the middle of an existing song of ours, and I feel rather better now.)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to attack stuff with a red pen, but bear in mind that my background is theoretical computer science/electrical&electronic engineering, so you pays your money (or not) and you takes your choice (or not). If you see what I mean. (Or not).

Sorry, the power is out in my apartment, so I'm sitting in Starbucks downstairs, so the caffeine is probably making me excessively tautological. :-)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, our group at NASA is similarly international, so it's very common for people to wander into my office asking, 'er, how do you say...' or, 'does this sound right?' questions. You're not alone with that issue.

Having a supervisor who doesn't value good English must be pretty irritating. My own writing was once described by an author friend as, 'engaging, but not necessarily in English,' so I found it very useful to have Alan's help during my PhD.

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

i think covers spliced into things sounds rather like fun...
if you still want help and can't find it, i'll ask my boy (yes i am hereby volunteering his services on his behalf without him knowing...) - his thesis was in biomedical stuff, so again... not the most relevant. but he is better than average with written english, i believe.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Some people are just not good at writing or explanations of it. One of my bosses carefully amended all punctuation, spacing and spelling but never gave a single comment on the meaning or the structure of what I have written. I agree with compilerbitch, one supervior is very rarely capable of helping with everything, different poeple for different things good. The fact that you are so critical of your own writing makes me think it cant be as bad as you make out.

Where is that gig on the 2nd again? fluffymark and I are planning an appearance.

[shermarama]

It's not that I think my writing is bad, in fact I'm confident that it's pretty good, for academic purposes. I need to know *what* to write, though, what sort of report this actually is, whether personal opinion should be in this or somewhere else, what to include and exclude, and since he can't tell me I was having trouble writing anything at all. I've ended up deciding on a strategy based on bits of input from several people and just going ahead and writing. No doubt when it gets marked my supervisor will take a pen to it and cross out all the bits he doesn't think are relevant, change arbitrary bits of sentences around and probably *un*correct some of my grammar, and then next time when I've incorporated the changes he'll wonder where all the bits he told me to leave out have got to. Drives me nuts.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Oh dear! Has this guy supervised any PhD students before?
I have had the same boss change a sentence one way and than reverse their own change at a later date, having forgotten it was their change - that's annoying but fairly standard. Knowing what it is that you are writing is essential though.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

*sigh* tell me about it. Mine does that too. He waits until a poster is printed out expensively in A0 size before he tells me that actually there were corrections to the text, when he's had two edit-cycles in which to tell me before I got it printed. Most of the group develop selective listening, because he has selective advising.

I am trying to think of a way I can help, because I know lots of nanomaterials people and it should be right up my street. A lot of people I talk to, I end up drawing at least one thing because we don't have enough common language to explain it in words, not just locally but at international conferences. So he is probably good practice for dealing with materials scientists, but not so much for submitting PhDs that pass. Going to a conference might be a good way of finding contacts who are slightly more clued-up than him and can be asked to read over chapters and things. I'd also be willing to look at stuff if you ever want, too, though of course I'm at non-Dr status too so can be of limited use.