General Advice for Non-Native Writers
Never translate. Of course you can use your own language to take notes and write outlines. But
word-for-word translation into English means that anyone’s mother tongue causes interference.
This will damage the grammar of your English and your vocabulary, punctuation, and everything
else. Some Finns can rapidly write letters and stories in correct, charming English, but when they
write a text first in Finnish and then translate it, the result will be awkward, unclear, and full of
errors.
Accept total responsibility for being clear. If an intelligent reader has to re-read any sentence to
understand it, the Anglo-American attitude is not to blame the reader, but to blame the writer. This
may contrast with the direction of blame in your own culture, but think: Who has the time to reread
sentences? Bad idea!
The worst sin is ambiguity. Being ambiguous means accidentally expressing more than one
meaning at one time, as in: “Women like chocolate more than men.” Does this mean that, given
the choice between a nice Fazer chocolate bar and a man, a woman will prefer the chocolate? Or do
you mean that “Women like chocolate more than men do”? Let’s hope, for the survival of
humanity, that it’s the latter!