Etydhv

I am a PhD student from China. I can read papers relatively fast and get the main point. The problem is that I cannot write efficiently. I don't know how to express myself or I forget the appropriate phrases when writing. Can any other researcher help me solve this problem?

The art of academic writing is essentially the practice of re-writing the same story many times, until the result is "good enough". It takes a lot of persistence and a lot of time to prepare a single paper for publication.

If English is not your first language and you struggle with the correct phrasing, consider using an academic phrasebank to help you. I can also recommend a brief summary of academic grammar. Finally, use English-English dictionaries as much as possible, e.g. the free dictionary, and refrain from using English-YourMotherTongue dictionaries if you can.

A concrete thing to do when writing is to first express yourself in any way you can, no matter how clumsy or awkward it feels, to get something on paper. After you have written a longer text, you can take the time to fix mistakes, find better phrases, reduce unnecessary passive voice and cut up overtly long sentences, or whatever are good and useful practices for you.

If you have collaborators, do this together with them, at least a page or so worth, and discuss the changes you make. This can help you identify things to work on. Even non-native collaborators are helpful, especially if they have a different native language than you do; they tend to notice and be blind to different issues.

A good habit is that when you are checking your writing and you feel uncertainty about an issue, find out how the grammar works or how the word is spelled. You might want to use the stack exchange sites https://ell.stackexchange.com/ and https://english.stackexchange.com/ , where appropriate.

For strategies and tools for improving your English, you might also ask at http://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/ .

I would recommend to polish you English in general a little bit - language exchanges or language tandems with native speakers can help you a lot here. Maybe there are native speakers who would like to learn Chinese in your city? Check if you find platforms for such exchanges in social media or websites like meetup. I found this tremendously helpful for myself.

In a second step I would then go ahead an extract specific phrasing from existing research papers of your field. You will see that researchers use specific phrases in specific situations/sections of a paper. But in order to really do this and use the phrases appropriately I think it might be beneficial to work on your general English fluency a little bit.

Writing is a complex topic that cannot be explained fully in a short StackExchange post. Just like it took you years to learn your own discipline, it takes years to learn how to write well. Academic writing is its own specialized skill as well.

We could recommend you some books and rules of thumb. But the more logical thing to do would be to go to your university's writing center and ask them for help. You could also ask your advisor or colleagues who are good at writing. They would recommend the same books we would, but you would get much more detailed advice.