Improve your English

(Under construction)

Communicating clearly in English is a key skill for making your science impactful.

Vocabulary:

• • Take the economist online quiz to estimate your vocabulary level (blog).

  • Are you better than an 8-th grade native-English speaker?

  • Try vocabulary.com online. They also have an app.

  • Common pitfalls. Can you tell the difference in meaning and pronunciation:

  • defer/differ, principle/principal, various/different, ability/capability, standard/common/regular

Pronunciation

Add here words that you find hard to pronounce:

module , inference, ...

Common grammar mistakes

Can you spot the mistakes in the following sentences?

• • The images distribution is highly variable.

  • In an ideal world everyone writes perfectly.

  • Our car model is faster, better, stronger.

  • We used a well controlled model to study the data

  • The application of gramophones to feline art, is creative but nonproductive.

  • We used a highly-controlled model to study the data

  • Several recent works showed that English spelling is confusing.

  • This fact allows to simplify the algorithm.

  • All the classes descriptions were used in our study.

  • We denote the matrix as W. (hint)

See also here

Common style issues (Common with Israeli writers)

• • Our method has better performance.

  • Too vague. What performance measure has improved? accuracy? runtime? precision?

  • We tried different approaches.

  • Different is always compared to a specific baseline (different than X). use "various approaches"

  • Use verbs, not nouns:

    • The production of gramophones is ..." ==> "Producing gramophones is ... "

    • "The construction of models ..." ==> "Constructing models"

    • making progress ==> progressing

    • They introduced an extension ==> they extended

    • We provide a proof ==> We prove

  • Avoid compounding compound adjectives

  • "representing the target box prediction" ==>

  • "representing the prediction of the target box" ==>

  • "X and Y are different in ..."

  • Prefer: "X and Y differ in...",

  • Several recent works showed that ...

  • Prefer: 'Several studies" (works is not a countable noun)

  • In order to ...

  • prefer "To ..."

  • Dashes reflect the syntax, not the meaning: (hyphens)

    • "This is the ground truth" but: "These are ground-truth labels".

    • "We predict the scene graph" but "We study scene-graph prediction".

How would you fix the following sentences?

• • We use ResNet-18 and SegNet based architectures for the33CUB and NYUv2 experiments respectively.

  • This trick allows comparing method A with B

  • We provided several insights, such as the need for monotonic networks.

  • The learning of W is slow.

Scientific writing:

• • Coursera has some decent courses.