I still remember the first time I wrote an English paper, I could only suppress one or two hundred words a day. All the time is spent on finishing the first draft, and nothing can be done except simply correcting grammar and spelling mistakes. Most of the articles written in this way are incomprehensible and illogical. Before learning Chinese, although the teacher didn't emphasize logic, everyone could understand the main idea tacitly. So the concept of logic has never taken root in my mind. Although we in China have logical relations such as cause and effect, when a foreign teacher took my article and asked why it could be cause and effect. I don't think this is a matter of course, or what? But he was obviously dissatisfied with my answer, and felt that my sentence was not clearly expressed and he could not understand it. Only then did I realize that the original logic was not what I took for granted.
When preparing for IELTS and postgraduate English, the teacher taught us many ways to make the article advanced. For example, a simple word like "because" should be written as "for that reason". Still smug after going abroad, rich in vocabulary. But when the teacher deleted these burdens from my article one by one, I realized that I was very wrong, and a real academic paper should be concise. I still remember that in the English class of domestic graduate students, the teacher repeatedly stressed not to use the first person such as "I" and "we", but to bring prepositional object in the passive voice, so as to be objective and play an important role. Later, I learned from Stanford and our school's writing class that it turned out to be very blunt. And when I was in high school, my teacher always emphasized various clauses. I think clauses are the most important expressions in English, but later I found that they only make sentences very long and difficult to understand, so I tried not to use them. The analysis of long and difficult sentences in postgraduate English also makes me feel that the longer the sentence, the more difficult and advanced it is. It is precisely because teachers repeatedly emphasize these incorrect things as the focus of the exam that we mistakenly think that they are right. But I think they may not know what is good and what is not. In fact, a really good paper should at least be easy to understand.
In fact, this kind of writing misunderstanding is not only for non-native speakers, but also for many foreigners. Most of our writing classes are local students. They don't know what real academic English is like. Academic English needs to be rigorous, but they speak English without logic on weekdays, just like us. This leads to some misunderstandings in communication, but academic English does not allow these misunderstandings.
These bad habits I have developed are difficult to change when writing the first draft, which undoubtedly increases my workload of revision. Only after going abroad did I find that there were many misunderstandings in my writing. I am also constantly learning, but real English is not learned in IELTS institutions, postgraduate institutions and school classrooms, but needs to be summed up in the lessons of blood and tears again and again.