 Good morning everyone. It is actually a great pleasure for me to be on the other side today. I have been a teacher of English for many years and since I came back to IIT, I have been looking at a lot of technical papers. So, I thought I would share my knowledge that I have gained over these years. And I have also been looking at many of your papers which you have submitted during for this workshop. And while it has not been possible for me to look at all the papers, I will be talking about a few very common problems that occur, a few elements that recur in almost all the papers that I have seen. And I would also like to say here that most of my examples that I have taken here are from your papers. So, any resemblance to real life is deliberate as Sahana put it yesterday. So, I will start with talking about the writing style that is necessary for technical paper. There are several styles which I use for writing, but for the technical paper what one looks for immediately is clarity, very concise language and an immediate understanding of the problem that you are going to be putting across in your paper. So, that is what creates the very first impression, a clarity of statement. Now, I have here an example from one of the papers. Now, I hope it is legible from your centres. Learning languages through technology mirrors the sources behind it. The technological equipments start its teaching with listening. Now, this particular statement I am sure you will realize that it is a little difficult to understand what the writer wants to say. So, please try to state your problem with absolute clarity. You do not have to use very difficult words. Start use very, very simple language and state your problem immediately. Use concise sentences which are very short and meaningful and come to the point immediately. Please do not repeat ideas and avoid verbosity. I am going to be giving examples for all these again taken from your papers. So, I will go to the next one. This is a slide from Sahana actually and she has given examples here again. You have a certain statement here which most people have used this kind of writing. It can be ascertained from the T test that the performance etcetera, etcetera. But, on the other side you have a statement which is very clear. If you do not, most important thing is it is in the active voice as you will, I will be talking about the voice later on. But, let me bring it to your notice here that it is in the active voice which immediately creates an impression that the writer has you know done this particular research and he is not quoting somebody else. Then again we will come to clarity. I have talked about this in the very first slide also. I have a segment from a paper here and it is, it was a very difficult you know piece in terms of language, in terms of clarity, in terms of writing style, in terms of various elements that are found in a lot of, I will put it in quotes, Indian writing. I will be talking about that in a little more detail a little later on. But, I would request you all to read this piece of writing and think about it and think about what the writer has done or not done here and maybe we will come back to it a little later on. I have a yet another piece here. This piece I have tried to correct. The letters in red are my corrections. Again this is an example of a lot of verbosity. There is no clarity and this is almost I think the second paragraph of the paper. So, when I am reading this as a referee, I have to literally hunt for what the writer wants to say, what is the problem that he or she is going to tackle in the paper. And now the third one, the third example that I have, there are problems in this paragraph as well. I have highlighted the problems in red. But, I want to think, I want you to think about this paragraph in the sense that this is one paragraph with the exception of the portions marked in red. I believe that it is coming to the problem almost immediately. They are very straight, they are you know attacking the problem directly and they are presenting their statement of purpose very clearly in this. This is the abstract and this is the kind of you know statement of purpose that a referee is looking for. There are problems in the writing. For example, to enhance cooperation in learning. I will be talking about the use of apostrophe a little later on. But, I would like you to know that cooperation is an abstract noun and it is not used in the plural anywhere which I expect the writer wanted to use this word as. Now, when we come to grammatical rules, most of us have learnt English grammar in school. I am not going to give you a lesson in grammar right now. But, there are some very you know obvious things that you should know. For example, this is a very basic element that recurs in almost I think it has recurred in almost all the papers that I have read. That is the use of capital letters in the middle of sentences as it says in this example. It has given to some very unintended meaning. I have tried to make a correction here instead of saying as it is evident effective teaching is not possible without appropriate aids. As you must have realized this was a paper on teaching aids and I have tried to make a correction here and also the use of comma here. It sort of divides the sentence and focuses on what is the main purpose of the sentence. I had said I would be coming back to voice a little later on. Now, these are examples again provided by Sahana and I think she has also taken them from your papers. What you have on the left side are statements in the passive voice. It puts off the referee immediately you know when the writer you know reports his activities in the passive voice instead please use a straight forward active voice and that sort of makes it very, very straight. There is no confusion. There is absolutely no abstraction anywhere. The reader gets to the point immediately. If you can look at all the dues you will see the difference between the examples on the left. This is another very major I would say it is part of the Indian writing style I think. There is the agreement of the singular and the plural. I have given an example here. Technology helps listening to play an effective role in the lives of the pupil. Pupil, plural. Now, I am sure the writer of this piece did not mean to do this. It happens. It happens so often that it has become a habit and I am sure the live audience also realizes that people do make this mistake all the time. So, please just check whether your singular and plural match. This is another big grey area. What tense do you use when you are writing? Again I am going to point out that it is a very Indian problem using the continuous present tense. Even when we are talking we say we use ing for everything. I am having a house. I am having a class. You know that is a very common way of speaking in India, but just make sure that you are not doing it when you are writing a paper. It has a very off putting effect on the referee. I have tried to make corrections here. Now, I will go back to the first statement. The industrial development of nations in recent years. Recent years very clearly means the past, leads to global warming and other environmental issues. The writer is again confusing tenses here very clearly. The problems of global warming and energy exhaustion leads. What is the problem here of singular and plural? To the use of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, tidal etc. So, please be very careful about the tenses that you are using. Stick to one tense. Normally the work that you have already done and that you wish to present is to be referred to in the past tense and what you wish to do in the future will obviously come in the future tense. This is another problem that I have found in many papers. I would not say almost all, but many papers. I think this is a problem that comes about because of studying may be up to the tense standard in once in the local language and also the tendency to think in one's mother tongue and what happens when you think in your mother tongue and translate it into English? It is absolute chaos. That is all I can say. For example, this sentence, many researchers are breaking their brains and introducing new methods to technology, but using of technology depends upon the attitude of the users. What does this mean of breaking their brains? I am sure somebody has translated this straight from Hindi or whatever the local language is. The second sentence as well. Continuing on these researches, we could make the living standards of disabled persons go high. Raise the living standards of disabled people. Go high. I think it must be, I think this is a paper from Maharashtra. So, again a translation from the local language. So, do think about what you are writing when you are translating from your mother tongue into English because referee who does not know your mother tongue is reading it. He does not understand what you are trying to say. Now, there is a tendency to use very long sentences. I have tried to do here, break up long sentences. The reader gets bored if there is too much information in one sentence and it just goes on and on and on. And how do you break up long sentences? If there are too many ideas in a sentence, just break it up into separate sentences or if there is a primary idea in the first part and you want to continue with the idea in the second part, use a semicolon, start the next idea or you can use commas. Very few people use commas in India. I have tried to show it in my previous examples. Using a comma at very strategic places gives you, gives a separation between ideas and a sort of a process follows in the sentence. There is a process of ideas and that is missing when you are, when you do not have commas. Now, the use of apostrophe. Now, this is a problem that I mean everybody has, everybody has this problem. I gave an example of corporations earlier. This is, here the reader is trying to use it as a plural form, but a plural form will never ever take an apostrophe. And it is, when you are using it in the possessive case, it is used only for living entities. For example, the dog, stale, the girls, dress or the girls' book, but you can never say the table's leg because the table is not a living entity. Now, please be very careful when you are using these words in, you know, when you are trying to use it's for it apostrophe s or there or there because this is, this is the point where their mistakes can happen and they do happen all the time. And one way of avoiding these mistakes is use a dictionary, use a simple grammar book, you know, and try to find out where exactly these words are used. I am not going to give a lesson in grammar at this point, but please do go back to your high school grammar. These things are very clearly explained in high school grammar books and it is a very big problem that is, that happens in almost everybody's case. It can, it can happen as an oversight, it can happen as a matter of ignorance. So, please clear your doubts in these cases. Now, I am going to be in the advise mode. Please do avoid any kind of slang. We find that there is an invasion of the SMS lingo as one calls it in everyday language. There are a lot of people who even write paragraphs in that lingo. So, please refrain from using any kind of slang in your technical papers. These are serious papers. You want people to read them seriously and if you use this, if you use any kind of slang, what happens is exactly the opposite. The person, the referee will not take the matter seriously at all and always use formal language for a formal technical paper. I would request all of you to, you know, indulge in some very, very stringent proof reading. These are paragraphs from your papers. And for example, the second one appears almost at the very beginning. This is in the abstract. A fully functional hearts have been also developed. What do you want the referee to think about your paper? A fully functional, a singular, hearts, plural, have, plural. A fully functional heart has been also developed. That is the correct way to use it. Following other steps in it, in what? Contrast intensification, smoothing and image sharpening, no space, image restoration attempts to restore images. As I see it, I would probably put a colon here, following other steps in it. Contrast intensification, smoothing and image sharpening, full stop, space. And then the next sentence starts, image restoration attempts to restore images. So, please do get somebody to proof read, because very often when you have spent a long time writing a certain paper, you feel, I mean you feel that everything is okay. I have read it so many times. There are no problems. There are no mistakes. But do give it to somebody else, a friend of yours and tell him to be absolutely critical and look at it with the eyes of a totally first time reader. That will help, you know, bring out these, I would call these oversights. These are not problems in your writing style or language or anything. These are purely oversights, but these form a certain effect upon the referee. So, please do give your paper for proof reading. Again, this is another case of lack of proof reading. The sentence, the excerpt in red is incomplete. If you read it, you will find that there is no verb that gives it the reason to be. The development of a numerical model to estimate heat transfer coefficient, compare and analyze the performance of four types of segment designs of seven segment plasma torch. I assume that this is the intention of the paper writer, but he has not said anywhere that this is his intention. So, perhaps a small addition here at the beginning, the intention of the paper is the development of a numerical model to estimate heat transfer, etcetera, etcetera. That immediately makes it very clear to the reader what the writer is talking about. Again, there is another excerpt here, which is incomplete. Some argument about where image processing ends and fields such as image analysis and computer vision starts. This almost looks like a bullet point. This looks like a point, which presenter would use during his presentation. So, you do need to make some clarification at the beginning. So, you ought to say here that in this paper, there will be some argument about where image processing ends and fields such as image analysis and computer vision starts. This is a request from my side. Please, please, please use a dictionary to understand the meanings of the words that you are using. In all your papers, these are just examples from your papers and they have been, for example, confirm means something totally different from confirm. And yet, we have had a number of people asking us to confirm their registration. I request you all to please go back and look up the dictionary and look at the meaning of confirm. It is totally different from confirm, which is what you want to use in this context. Effect, effect. Again, effect is a verb, effect is a noun. There is a difference. So, you will have to go back to the dictionary and check whether you are using the word property. And it happens in the case of the third example as well. Very often, the writer wants to say W-H-E-T-H-E-R whether I will be confirmed, but he uses W-E-A-T-H-E-R, which is the climatic condition. Now, another problem that we come across is the language that the variety of English that one should use in the paper. Some papers ask for US English. Some papers ask for UK English. The word processor that you use gives you different choices. You can use any one, but please, please do not shift from one another. Stay very, very consistent because the shifting from US English to UK English and back and forth, it just irritates the referee. You are using L-I-Z-E in one case and L-I-S-E in the other case. A few sentences down the paragraph, it just sticks out. It irritates. Another piece of advice that I would give you is avoid short forms in a technical paper. It is an absolute no-no. When you are using A and D and to use this symbol as a short form, it is just a no-no. You cannot do this in a formal technical paper. Conscience department with reference to, these are things that you should avoid. Avoid short forms. Again, they give an air of casualness to your paper, which acts against the serious work that you may have done. So, please avoid that. These are very common mistakes. At least is not one word. It is two words. These are mistakes that all of us make all the time, but we have to learn not to make these mistakes by looking them up in the dictionary and trying not to use them. As I said, on two is two words, up two is two words, but in two is one word. There are several websites which have lists of the common mistakes that people make while reading and while writing. So, please do look up the internet for the common mistakes that you may have been making in the past and try to avoid these mistakes. One thing I must say here is that these days, you have almost everything available on the internet. So, please to make very good use of the internet, you have solutions to almost everything. These are some useful resources. The elements of style is almost like a Bible for any person interested in writing. It is an extremely old book and has come up with several reprints and it is a worthwhile investment to have this book by your side when you are writing and then I have a list of other manuals, the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. This style sheet is normally used by writers from the humanities. Also the Chicago Manuals of Style, this is again a Bible for writers. You have the Oxford Dictionary online. So, while you are writing, you can easily check up a word if you are stuck somewhere and then you have the IEEE.org that again is a very, very useful resource. The last one is an online writing workshop. It is run by the University of Purdue and I would say it is an extremely useful resource to anybody who wishes to improve their writing style. I would definitely urge you to look at all these and go back to what you have written and look at it very closely and come up with solutions to the problems that you think you might have made during writing. Obviously, this was not a class in grammar or language but I have tried to cover the more common mistakes that I have come across as a referee of technical papers and if you have any questions or queries, maybe we could handle them on model. Thank you very much.