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Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

"It reads like papers often do when they are written in LaTeX. Reject."

Would be hilarious if it weren't so true.

I had a student once who was 'encouraged to resubmit after having the manuscript checked for language by a native speaker'. Except that he was British and just happened to be working at a Spanish university for a local project. LOL. He's a very clear writer too, certainly top 10% in clarity of scientific writing. It just shows that it's a crap shoot to get your papers accepted.

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A friend of mine (from the US, native speaker) spent a year in Japan as a schoolteacher under the JET program. We kept in touch via message-boards and such. His written English notably deteriorated over the course of the year. It's possible your friend picked up some non-native language habits during the course of his stay.

I'm not a native speaker, but I have some US colleagues who write really poorly. I'm not saying this is the rule, nor that your friend was a bad writer, but the argument that a native speaker is de facto superior in the use of her own language is bogus. One of the very best pieces of English literature has been written by a Russian (Lolita by Nabokov) and there are many other examples. If a paper is written poorly I don't care if you're British: I'll point it out anyway.

I could guess that isn't uncommon if the critic isn't aware of the student's nationality. I have had the same issue, where having a vocabulary that exceeds the average English-as-a-2nd-language student makes your writing appear difficult to another non-native speaker. University lecturers seem to have little patience for students who are better at something than they are, even if they could easily turn it on its head and say, "but I'm better at my native Spanish!"

interestingly enough, native speakers of neo-latin languages such as spanish, french and italian tend to have far less issues with educated vocabulary an average native english speaker would find hard to read and pompous.

I'm confused. What's wrong with LaTeX?

Most people don't utilize a IDE when writing a document in LaTeX that has spell-check or grammar. So it's much, much easier to insert oddities unless you do good proofreading.

The group of people who use LaTeX and the group of people who are eloquent writers rarely overlap.

I held off commenting further because I couldn't capture the nuance I was trying for, but your comment nails it beautifully :)

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