These lessons in Scientific English were written for the benefit of our colleagues at the Ecole Polytechic Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where we were researchers from 1994-1999. As native English speakers, we were beseiged by non-native speakers asking for help with their manuscripts, as many as five requests per week.

Each language group is susceptible to predictable mistakes in English; these lessons were written for our colleagues: French- and German-speaking scientists with a solid foundation in English. They appear in no particular order, having been prompted by typical mistakes that we observed from week to week.

Most lessons are followed by a quiz and a humorous quotation. In their original format, the lessons were emailed with blank spaces in the quizzes so that the subscribers -- the list grew from a dozen to seven hundred -- could test their knowledge before checking their answers at a website. In 2003, the web pages were migrated to http://users.wpi.edu/~nab/sci_eng/. And in 2007, Scott Cogan (Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France) kindly transformed them into a LaTeX file, to which we added a table of contents and this abstract.

Although we are now busy with physics education and research in the United States, Fred still occasionally corrects manuscripts and dissertations. You may contact him at fredricklhutson@gmail.com.

The compiled lessons in one file, thanks to Scott Cogan:

• Scientific English as a Foreign Language
  

The individual Scientific-English lessons:

• September1, 1999--Adjective or adverb?
• August 3, 1999--Long manuscripts
• July 5, 1999--Access and assess
• June 14, 1999--Accuracy and precision
• June 3, 1999--As, because, since
• May 17, 1999--Lay and lie
• May 3, 1999--Prepositions--for sale, on sale
• April 22, 1999--Utilize and use
• January 27, 1999--Some useful Latin words
• January 20, 1999--Verbosity
• January 5, 1999--Hyphenation
• December 4, 1998--Quiz question
• November 6, 1998--Conjuncts II
• November 2, 1998--Conjuncts I
• October 26, 1998--Look over, overlook, look it over
• October 16, 1998--Let and leave
• October 2, 1998--Nuances of prepositions
• September 25, 1998--Simple past and present perfect verb tenses
• September 18, 1998--Opportunity and possibility
• September 11, 1998--Premodification of nouns by participles
• September 4, 1998--Premodification of nouns by nouns
• August 7, 1998--Verb groups
• July 31, 1998--Look it up!
• July 24, 1998--Writing mathematics
• July 17, 1998--Editing equations
• July 10, 1998--The interview talk
• June 12, 1998--Logical and chronological adverbs
• June 5, 1998--Among and between
• May 29, 1998--Possessives
• May 22, 1998--Get
• May 15, 1998--Actual and eventual
• May 8, 1998--A and an
• May 1, 1998--Collective nouns
• April 9, 1998--Dashes
• April 4, 1998--Colons and semicolons
• March 27, 1998--Commas
• March 19, 1998--Submit and subject
• January 23, 1998--That and which
• January 16, 1998--Resonant and resonance
• January 9, 1998--It's & its, who's & whose
• December 12, 1997--How to write a paper II
• December 4, 1997--How to write a paper I
• November 27, 1997--Apostrophes
• November 21, 1997--Allow
• November 14, 1997--Prepositions
• November 7, 1997--Say and tell
• October 31, 1997--Verb tenses
• October 24, 1997--Remember and remind
• October 17, 1997--Improve, ameliorate, better
• October 10, 1997--Much and many
• October 3, 1997--The
• September 26, 1997--Less and fewer
• September 19, 1997--Experience and experiment
• September 12, 1997--Make and do
• September 5, 1997--Elaborate and fabricate
• August 29, 1997--Teach and learn
• August 22, 1997--Borrow and loan
• June 30, 1997--Locate and localize
• June 20, 1997--Around, about, approximately

Created 30 April 1998, last updated 29 October 2007