Brute force English

I reviewed a paper typesetted using M$ Word written by a non-native speaker, and I found a very good word called “brute force English” to describe a large category of mistakes people make in English writing with “audacity”.

As you might know, Word is notorious in breaking paragraph into lines because it (a) uses a greedy algorithm instead of a dynamic programming algorithm to break the lines, (b) and never break the words to make nicer looking. For instance, if you have a long word, say, enterprise, in TeX, if this word makes the width of the line overflow and it’s also ugly to move the entire word to the next line because then you will have too much blank on this line, TeX will break the word to something like enter-prise with a hyphen in between them. However, Word doesn’t support this.

OK, go back to the previous topic. In the paper I reviewed, the author has paragraphs like this:

My fellow citizens: I stand here today hum

bled by the task before us, grateful for t

he trust you have bestowed, mindful of the

sacrifices borne by our ancestors.

Yes, he uses “line break within the word”!

This aroused my curiosity: why is he brave enough to write this down? An alternative question is, why we, ESL writers, usually violate the rules in English writing and still feel confident?

My answer to the above question is that, the ESL writers, when facing some confusing in writing, usually use the “brute force” way to write. For example, we will choose the word that means A in English to the blank where it really needs A’. Perhaps in their native language, A and A’ are similar,  but not the case in English. They will probably also use sentence patterns that resemble the patterns in the their native language, but not in English; they will “invent/borrow rules” that they wish or think to be correct; they will put words and grammatical structures down bravely, without consulting a book or a dictionary.

I have the same problem. I am confident about my writing skill and style in Chinese, thus I will stick to the direct translation in writing. When I meet some phrases in Chinese that can not be translated to English directly, I will use brute force–inventing the almost-always-not-correct rules to reconstruct my sentence in Chinese to English.

I think a good writing is definitely a mixture of style and language, and actually language is always one of the most the limitations in writing for ESL writer. We usually find that there are some rules, some patterns we want to use that are not in English but only exist in our native language. The right way is to overcome this limit is to use English in the English way, by more reading and practicing, instead of inventing rules to pass around it.

If we use the set language, the point I want to make is as follows. English and our Native language are two different sets with some possible intersections,  but they are not the subset of each other. Therefore, we should not expect to find a one-to-one onto mapping from our native language to English, expecting that the results by using the mapping to the native language pattern (or some pattern in our brain which is a mixture of English and the native language, e.g. Chingish) is the correct English. More often than not, it is not the correct English.

Note to myself: do not use brute force English, because it is not the right way to do English writing.

Some useful tools for you to write English articles on Linux

(This is a re-post from my previous Chinese blog)
http://blog.youxu.info/2007/07/11/some-useful-tools-for-you-to-write-english-articles-on-linux/

As an ESL (English as a Second language) student, I usually have a fear of writing articles. Nevertheless, I have to write about one article per week, either for learning English or for recoding my ideas. For many people in China, their killer applications are Word and Kingsoft Ciba. They simply type a Chinese phrase/word into the electronic dictionary, click the “translate” button, copy/paste the English word, do a grammar check in Word, and that’s all. After doing all of these, if Word stops reporting any spelling and grammar errors, they feel a great sense of achievement. I was one of those people before.

Meanwhile, as a Linux deadhead, I dislike M$ products emotionally. It seems to me that the only way out is to use AbiWord or Openoffice. I’ve used both for a while. Yet, I have to say that they are helpful but not perfect. To use them, I have to prepare a text file, which is inconvenient when you are working on a Tex file. For MacOSX, the other thing is I have to install X11. Don’t get me wrong, *nix is industrial-strength and designed to do everything solely with the shell. (Well, WoW is the last thing on my mind.)

After painful Googling, now I have at least four tools for helping with ESL writing.

1. GNU Aspell.

GNU Aspell is a Free and Open Source spell checker. It supports spell checking for source codes, script comments and TeX files, as well as HTML web pages and email. Aspell provides its users both interactive and batch modes. It contains several advanced features that are missing in both M$ Office and OO, such as a text-file-based user-defined dictionary and a “sound like” feature (e.g., know and no). GNU Aspell is definitely for literate programmers or PhD. students who want to write elegant code comments and academic articles.

2. GNU diction

GNU diction originates from the `diction’ on AT&T UNIX. It is actually a rule-based style checker. I’ve read the code thoroughly and found that almost every piece of the rules came from a book titled “The Elements of Style” authored by William Strunk. That is to say, you have an “Elements of Style” in your pocket now. Please note that the simple grammar checker in Word has nothing to do with style checking. GNU diction is a charming complement to Word/Openoffice if you insist on using them.

As it is rule-based, it sometimes provides redundant information even if your usage is indeed correct. As D.E. Knuth has mentioned in “Mathematical Writing”, the analysis of diction is quite superficial. “However, said Don, these programs are kind of fun. And they do provide an excuse to read the document from another point of view. Even if the analysis is wrong it does prompt you to re-read your prose, and this has to be a good thing”.

3. GNU Style

GNU style is contained in the GNU diction package. It will report the readability of your article based on several well-known linguistic indexes. For the native speaker, these are used for improving the readability of articles. Nevertheless, for ESL students, these indexes would be viewed as the writing level in terms of “what grade/school year is needed to understand your article for the average American”. In my opinion, we ESL students should prevent over-using simple words and simple sentences in technical writing. But,  definitely don’t use a million-dollar word where a one-dollar word will do. Yet for ESL students, trying to use some new and sophisticated words will eventually boost writing ability.

4. LanguageTool (GPLed)

It is an open source language checker for English and other languages based on Java. I began to use it recently. It’s better than the embedded grammar checker in Openoffice. Moreover, it does support CLI mode and web mode. This is the missing tool on the Linux platform for grammar checking.

I can remember that when I was a college student, I struggled to write English articles with M$ word or Openoffice. My personal experience with English writing and M$ Word grammar checker brought me the truth that we should never let  the quality rely on the damn grammar checker. As a rule of thumb, the best way to improve ESL writing skill is to write and to practice.

BTW: In preparing this article, I’ve employed vim, aspell, diction, style, languagetool and other tools on the Linux and Mac platform.