When I accepted EASTS’s invitation to deliver an online talk on writing academic English for publishing, my main concern was how not to repeat another dogmatic preaching of writing principles—many of us in academia have learned from books and lectures as non-native English users but seldom know how to put them into actual practice. I also did not want to sound like a teacher of writers, since it would be unwise to reproduce classroom boredom in a virtual setting. After all, my goal was to free my target audience—aspiring writers of academic English based in Taiwan—from the sole focus of writing skills as it is often the case that college- or graduate-level academic writing curricula to explore the meanings and possibilities of writing scholarly content in a second language. I wanted to converse with the audience as they are “real people,” not the objects of writing pedagogy but instead people who aspire to and struggle with writing in a non-native language to communicate with a larger body of readers beyond the local environment.
