Multilingual researchers are frequently told their English "needs work" without being told which part. The assumption is grammar. In practice, grammar is rarely the issue — the manuscripts we edit are usually grammatically sound and stylistically mismatched.
The gap is register: the specific conventions of academic English, which are learned by immersion rather than taught, and which differ from academic conventions in other languages.
Hedging is a convention, not a weakness
English academic writing hedges claims heavily. The results suggest. This may indicate. One possible explanation is.
To a writer trained in a tradition that values assertive scholarly statement, this reads as a lack of confidence, and the instinct is to strengthen it. But in English-language journals, an unhedged claim reads as overreach, and reviewers respond to it as a failure of scholarly caution rather than as conviction.
Calibrate the hedge to the evidence. Strong evidence: demonstrates. Correlational evidence: is associated with. A plausible interpretation: may reflect. The precision of the hedge is itself a signal of methodological awareness.
Metadiscourse carries the structure
English academic prose signposts constantly. This section examines. Having established X, we turn to Y. Three factors are considered below; the first is.
Some traditions consider this redundant, since a well-organised text should not need to announce its own organisation. English readers do not experience it as redundancy — they use it to navigate, and its absence makes an argument feel harder to follow than it is.
Adding explicit signposting is often the single highest-impact edit to a manuscript that reviewers described as "difficult to follow".
Sentence length is doing work
Long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses are standard in German, Arabic, and Urdu academic prose, and carry sophistication in those traditions. In English they are read as unclear.
The convention is one main idea per sentence, with the subject early and the verb close behind it. This is not a simplification of thought — the complexity moves into how sentences relate rather than into how each is built.
The article system is genuinely hard, and matters less
If your first language has no articles, a/an/the will remain the most persistent surface difficulty, and it is worth knowing that it barely affects how your argument is received. Reviewers notice article errors and read past them.
Spend your editing effort on register and structure, which affect whether the argument lands, and leave the articles to a final proofreading pass.
What good editing preserves
The purpose of editing is not to make your writing sound as though a native speaker wrote it. It is to remove the friction between your argument and the reader, so the argument is assessed on its merits.
Your framing, your emphasis, the way you construct a case — these are yours, and they are frequently the more interesting for having been formed in another intellectual tradition. An editor who flattens those has done damage, not work.
A practical habit
Choose three recent papers in your target journal and read them for structure rather than content. Mark how they open a section, how they signal a transition, how they hedge a finding.
That is the register you are writing into, and it is learnable by direct observation far faster than by general instruction.
We do this work every week — for MPhil and PhD candidates, faculty, and whole departments.
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