US vs. UK English--the real differences

I don't mean to sound ignorant...okay, I do mean to sound ignorant because I AM ignorant; I suppose that's why I started this thread.

Besides the occasional spelling difference (color/colour, etc.) and different idioms and slang (which shouldn't often be used in academic papers anyway), are there actually noticeable differences in US and UK writing? I've never noticed any, but I haven't exactly made a study of the subject.

Primarily it's the spelling. To a lesser degree, it is the style. Americans prefer a direct, to the point approach while we enjoy our verbiage :) The more complex the sentence and the more complicated the vocabulary, the more it is appreciated. Where British academic writing is concerned, the writer/researcher is expected to show-off his/her command of the language. American English - infinitely more straightforward and less linguistically complex.

Whenever a client asks me to write in British English, I tell them that I don't really know its differences from American English and offer to back out if it's going to be a problem. So far though, their response has always been that they can fix it themselves after I complete the work. This leads me to conclude that the differences are noticeable but can be easily corrected. However, I've never noticed the differences for myself as well when reading British journal articles.

Right you are ... more often than not, customers are referring to spelling, not style.

This just makes me sadder that I am unable to work for several apparently reputable UK-based companies. Of course, I have plenty of work during the school year anyway (more than I can handle, at times), but having some extra companies during the thin times would be nice....

Why aren't you able?! You are, quite obviously, very qualified. If they don't recognise that ... well, they aren't very intelligent, are they?

I don't take it personally. It's there way of ensuring consistency and quality. I'm still planning on buying a house next year off of my writing revenue, so I shouldn't really complain.

What companies are you working for currently?

Not allowed on this forum (it could look like self-promotion). But they're based in the US.

Good for you! :) So ... skilled academic writers can make a living?

And others are allowed to try. Maybe that's why chacha is so upset--he's tasted freedom and really enjoys it, but freedom tried him and spit him out again. It sucks when customers and companies can choose to reject crap...if you're crap, that is.

who follows the forum rules anyway? don't be shy.

Aside from spelling, UK English has a few different words for stuff too, a lot of it having to do with car parts.

lorry= truck
bonnet= hood
windscreen= windshield
flat= apartment
aluminium= aluminum
labor=labour

etc.

They also drink their beer warm; gross. generally, though, I think the customers want to focus on sources-- UK journals, books magazines, etc.-- and spelling.

Oh.. yeah. This one I can remember.


Sure we can. I also planned to buy my own place about 2 years ago. I bought it last year with money that I made from just about a year and a half of writing homework. :) This sideline is the coolest. :D

Thanks for confirming that the good writers - those who are academically qualified and fluent in the language they are writing in - can make a living out of this profession! At the end of the day, quality is valued :)

pheelyks
I think there is no many differences. For me, i can do both the two englishes. If you are qualified like me in mastering all englishes, you shall not be having many a problems. I am work on a dissertation for a PHD student and i am use america ,UK and Ukranian englishes and they are very fined and the paper is become too beautiful and handsome like done by Arlbert einestein(it is to dealing with physics and rules of laws of graviations laws). If you will want to mastered the language, reads a lot of posts of mine, or somebody like shakesphere.My language would be like can be complex some of the sometimes though

So finally the myth of native english writers and speakers has been shattered.. Our great OR is not a native english writer herself however, she claims otherwise.. One more thing is confimed that our great OR is a female unlike she was trying to give an entirely different impresion.. Please post my info too.. I am proud of who I am and never cheat members here by claiming to be a native english speaker..... Please go ahead.. post everything you and your pakistani hacker friends have gathered anything about me.......

Actually ... I am :) I speak two other languages but English is my only native language and the first one I ever spoke :) Try something else.

I don't think everyone is fake. I think that ukranianexpert is fake. Do you think that this is a real person who really thinks they can write well, Dorothy?

Desperation..... clear desperation.....


Yah right.... you don't think everyone is fake but you can decide on your own (without any proper qualification--- I am sure you must be aware of the fact that in academic research, any statement uttered not by a PHD is simply considered as rubbish) so I guess you got a PhD in deciding who is fake and who is not? What criteria you use by the way? Under what moral and legal authority you think ukranianexpert is fake? Yes you are right that Ukranianexpert is fake because in another thread, she has been identified as WB...

The authority is my own opinion. I never claimed that I knew UE to be fake, I said that I suspected it. I also suspect you are a complete moron. These are personal opinions, which I have every right/authority to hold and even to state. I don't misrepresent them as proven facts, however.

I think that one of the differences has to do with the history of the English language itself. The British version has a more archaic approach to its spelling, wording, and presentation while the American version is simply straight to the point. The Britons seem to prefer a roundabout method of discussion for some reason. Sure the everyday terms used may be as different as night and day, but that is when it comes to general English references. As far as academic writing is concerned, the spelling and presentation is where the differences come in. Aside from that, the British sources of information are a bit harder to come by for a US based writer. In my experience, the UK research papers prefer to not have American references included in the research as much as possible. I have had clients before ask me to limit the reference to US research without offering a clear explanation as to why that limitation was in place. I think it has to do with the history of the two countries as well. I believe it was Prince Charles who made a reference to America not having spoken "proper" English in centuries or since its emancipation from the British empire.

Right you are @Smiley73. The biggest differences between British and American English lie in the history and relationship of the two countries. History tells us that America, when it was still a British colony, spoke British English. Therefore, the country's language is British based. However, after the war between the two countries, America decided to declare its independence by changing their mother tongue to American English. Why?

It was all about erasing the traces of being a former colony. While the ancestors of modern day Americans could not change the language as they were already used to speaking British English, they also knew that they could change several language references in English owing the to migrants to the country who, having come from various British colonies, had their own languages aside from English to speak of. From there, it was simply a matter of adapting certain words to form a new language, American English, as the language that the country would be speaking from then on. That is why the English language is so similar yet so different between the two countries.

In my experience, the most obvious different is in the spelling of some words. However, as others noted in the respective posts above, it is also about how words are crafted. There is a silent elegance one expects from British English that is simply not present in American English. Further, a person whose native tongue is British would word sentences differently--something that could be easily detected by a native British professor. In some ways, it not that different from an ESL writer writing American English, other than the fact that many ESL writers do not take the time to check and correct inconsistencies to make the end paper fit the language for which it was intended.

I'm not quite sure I agree with you there. Proofreading a paper is a matter more of discipline and professionalism than of country of origin. Every country, including the US and the UK, has some writers who are too lazy to check and correct for these inconsistencies you mention. Laziness and/or lack of discipline are not attributes to easily assign geographically. It is true that most ESL writers can't deliver papers of required standards. The reason for this, however, is a different one

I think I respectfully disagree with both of you. Obviously, taking the time to proofread is (also) largely a matter of discipline and professionalism; but IMO, that's not the main problem with (most) ESL writing. The main problem is that all the proofreading time in the world won't help a writer "catch" anything that's attributable to ESL-level-related mistakes, because you can't catch mistakes that you don't know not to make in the first place. The same goes for ordinary bad grammar that many NES-writers just don't know is bad grammar: if you don't know it, you can't "catch" it in proofreading even if you do put the time into proofreading.

One of the most common tip-offs to ESL authorship when the rest of the writing isn't necessarily so atrocious that it's patently obvious in every sentence is extraneous and missing articles (usually "the" and "a/an") that both Middle-Eastern and Far-Eastern ESL writers just can't seem to get right consistently. More importantly (to professors, that is), this isn't a mistake that (even pretty bad) NES-students (or writers) tend to make at all. To a client who doesn't write all that well and farms out his writing projects, they may not be very noticeable; but professors will recognize them as a pretty reliable sign of ESL writing, especially if the rest of the writing and the substantive content of the essay are fairly good. If they care, they will then start looking much more carefully for other indications that a project wasn't really written by the student; and, usually, there will be plenty of other clues that will be apparent to any professor looking for them, specifically.

Where has "the main problem with (most) ESL writing" come from? The issue was regarding the need to proofread and why some writers ignore it. ESL writers (and not all of them) just happen to be a subset of some of the writers who don't proofread. Whether or not their efforts at proofreading would be effective is also not the point. I was addressing discipline to take time to proofread, and @writer4life's fault of assigning lack of this discipline to ESL writers.

The main problem with ESL writing is simply that it's nearly impossible for most people who speak English as a second language to write English without any detectable signs that the writer's language of origin is not English. There are exceptions, especially among people who learned English as children and/or whose primary language has been English for decades, irrespective of whether or not English was their language of origin. I've mentioned before that the three people who contributed the most to my writing development, were my father and his brother and a high school English teacher, whose languages of origin were German and Chinese, respectively. [The latter was Tek Young Lin, a literary genius who, shockingly, was implicated (and admitted his involvement) in the infamous Horace Mann sexual abuse scandal detailed in the New York Times and many other national publications, beginning in 2012.] nytimes.com/2012/06/24/nyregion/tek-young-lin-ex-horace-mann-teacher-says-he-had-sex-with-students.html


That might not have been your main point in your tangential thoughts on proofreading as a function of professionalism; however, it's precisely my point, and the reason that I'm suggesting that proofreading is probably not even related to the issue of why ESL-writing tends not to be very good and why it's almost always easily-recognizable by NES readers. I have no idea what factual or evidentiary basis there is for Writer4Life even to suggest that "many ESL writers do not take the time to check and correct inconsistencies to make the end paper fit the language for which it was intended." Frankly, I'd imagine that ESL writers probably spend more time proofing their English writing than NSL writers, because it would seem reasonable to me that ESL writers realize that their drafts probably contain more language-related mistakes than anything written in their own language of origin and that they need more proofreading for mistakes that are identifiable through proofreading. The problem, as I've suggested, is that the types of language-related mistakes that are typical in ESL writing aren't identifiable through proofing by ESL writers, because they don't know that they're mistakes in the first place.

Let me demonstrate what I'm talking about: This first link is to a peer-reviewed article that appeared in 2016 in the Asian Spine Journal. The authors are Middle Eastern and the Journal itself is owned and (presumably) editorially-controlled by the Korean Society of Spine Surgery: asianspinejournal.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4184/asj.2016.10.5.955

You don't have to read beyond the second sentence of the Abstract to find this very obvious sign of ESL-writing; and one thing you can probably assume quite safely is that articles submitted to professional peer-reviewed medical journals are proofread many times, both by their authors and by editors at the journal. That sentence reads "In a small percentage of the patients, surgical decompression is necessary." Only an ESL-writer would insert "the" there and only ESL editors would fail to recognize that it doesn't belong there, which illustrates my point that ESL-related mistakes won't be caught by ESL-writers or editors. The rest of that Abstract illustrates another common ESL-indicator: namely, awkward overreliance on phrases like "constitute"; that's something that tends to happen when ESL-speakers encounter a new phrase (or term) and then start using it too much and/or where it's probably not even the fifth-best choice for what they're trying to say. The last sentence of that abstract doesn't make any sense linguistically, which I suspect was also left that way because whoever edited this lacks the English fluency necessary to recognize and fix it.

There is also evidence that the journal itself probably doesn't have anybody on staff with NES-skills: This sentence is from their About: Aims and Scopes section: "Manuscripts regarding disease and treatment which shows more characteristic features in Asian people would be preferable." asianspinejournal.org/about/

Technically, the only outright mistakes are that it should say that show and not "which shows"; but to be fair, most Americans (including most Americans who write for a living) don't know why "that" is correct there instead of "which." Aside from those two outright mistakes, the entire sentence is awkward AF and could be rewritten a half-dozen better ways, especially if it's intended for a peer-reviewed professional medical journal. The rest of that journal's website and the article to which I linked are replete with other obvious signs of ESL-authorship (including but hardly limited to outright technical mistakes that don't belong in high-level English writing); and most of them would never be caught in proofreading on their end, for precisely the reason I explained.

I don't mean this as an insult and I'm not asking this rhetorically, but may I also ask where you were born and raised, Malcolm?

There really isn't any point to trying to figure out the differences between the 2 English versions (completely forgetting about the Australian and Canadian, and Singaporean versions of the language). The professors these days have been allowing UK based students to use American English presentations in their papers. I guess they finally figured out that aside from spelling, the word usage remains the same so there was no sense in enforcing a UK spelling rule. As long as the point gets across, nobody really cares which type of English language they use. That also makes it easier for the students who are mostly exposed to the American English version through film and multimedia anyway.

I've never encountered a single UK student who didn't care whether I used UK or US English in his project. They always make it a point to specify, and on the rare occasion that I accidentally used US English for a UK client, I always received an immediate request for a revision, which I provided quickly, along with my apology. In my experience, US students don't want their projects written in UK English, either.

Any seasoned human writer will be able to easily switch between UK and US English writing upon the request of a client. I once had a client who even requested that a mix of UK and US English be used in his paper because he was an American studying in the UK and he was on his 3rd year of study in the UK. So he had a hybrid sort of English represented the papers that he wrote. His professors found it pleasing to read so he kept it up and requested that I do the same.