Met with my student on Thursday afternoon as scheduled. Co-supervisor was away at a conference. We picked a different setting to meet (internal cafe).
After our meeting last week in which we had him tell us the story of his work, the student had written quite a bit about the local context of his empirical research. He reports using the notebook we provided not for his research work, but to plan an upcoming trip in November. I pointed out that he would forget even more after that trip if he didn't develop some good notes now. He said that he is more comfortable doing notes directly into the computer. The diagrams and explanatory text that he composed were good enough that I had scribbled "source?" next to them assuming he had neglected to cite them.
I'm OK with skipping the paper notebook step as long as he does it consistently. We'll find out at the next meeting if my co-supervisor has the same objection.
I expanded on the story-telling approach by asking him about what he had accomplished this week in the practical work, what were the circumstances, and what he thought about the project's progress. Having done similar IT work, I successfully spotted the dodges and poked him on those. He didn't seem to mind, and said that the questioning was helpful. I also had him think about what I or my co-supervisor would ask about at the next meeting since we still only have superficial knowledge about the details. He then thought of a few things that would be helpful to write down in the thesis, estimated the amount of space required to do so, and left the meeting excited to put in some more hours.
I found no major language issues other than some inconsistencies in terminology among different sections. One term appears repeatedly in the introduction but does not show up again. I had reservations about a couple of other terms, but he understood the implications when I asked about them.
Return of the course
Recap: In September I took a "scientific writing" course offered to graduate students. A few times during the course, I had remarked that this or that piece of writing could not have been written by a native English speaker, and was asked to explain why. I said that although technically and semantically correct (it would pass Word's grammar checker), we simply wouldn't express such ideas using such and such a form, but would use this other form instead. But it was difficult to articulate a rule for why that was the case. That was a problem for everyone who had learned to do English through strict adherence to rules.
The take-home assignment for the course was to write a four-page literature review. I submitted that assignment earlier in October. The instructor returned a copy with comments this week. Most comments were directives to apply such and such a rule strictly and always, even though they would violate prevailing scholarly and editorial practice. For example, section titles must follow the Introduction-Literature Review-Methods-Data... pattern and labels, even though editors encourage and readers appreciate more interesting signposts. And apostrophes were only to be used to indicate possessives, not as single quotes. Quotation marks should never appear except when quoting passages directly from text, never mixing the one kind of quotation marks with the other (smart quotes and straight quotes, although the instructor did not use that terminology). And series of quoted terms should be rendered in italics, rather than in quotes, despite the visual subtlety of the italicized comma. Fairly trivial changes that would take 10 minutes based on the local custom of writing English in the strict but not particularly engaging way that the locals are taught in school... OK, it was supposed to be a learning experience and I could dispose of the course forever.
And then I realized why technically correct English composed by Finns and Swedes stands out. They lack intuition about rhythm in English.
English, being a hairy language, has enough technical rules to follow without having to consider aesthetics. I do not sense that they are taught the idea that one could use punctuation to set pace beyond its immediate sentence. Or that rigidly structuring paragraphs can make them as uninteresting as rigidly de-structuring them. Or that thoughtful exceptions to rules can direct attention toward or away from particular measures.
I need to learn more from my student about how English is taught here.
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