: Re: As a writer, how can I avoid exposing myself as a non-native English speaker in my texts? I am a Japanese student learning English, and one of my current goals is to learn to write texts

@Gretchen741

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The writing in your question already sounds like a native speaker to me, so you're well on your way. Some areas to practice:

Find out what weaknesses people with your native language tend to have. In addition to prepositions, Mandarin speakers tend to struggle with verb tenses. Hindi speakers tend to use "reach" to mean "arrive". I don't know what mistakes are common for Japanese speakers, but English speakers in Japan probably do.
Read the style guide. You mentioned in the comments that you are interested in writing jobs. Almost every organization that employs writers has a style guide. The rules aren't always intuitive, even to native speakers. US newspapers have variations, but most are based off the AP Stylebook. It contains everything from the proper American spelling of words to when to use "black" instead of "African-American" to the proper term for a Mormon church. Newspapers also have their own paragraph style called the inverted pyramid. Academics, board-game publishers, scriptwriters, etc will all have different style guides.
If you use a thesaurus or translator, look up the definition of the word you choose. Young native English speakers also go through a phase where they choose random words to replace with fancier words from a thesaurus. They don't yet realize that every word has a slightly different meaning. Using thesauri and Japanese-English dictionaries when you think a more precise word would be useful is great, you simply need to check the resulting word means what you want it to.
Practice writing five-paragraph essays. You mention that native speakers tend to have strong topic sentences. A student in the US will probably write 50+ five-paragraph essays over the course of their education. College teachers complain about the five-paragraph essay all the time, but I would think of it like having a basis in Newtonian physics before learning relativity.
Read memes, puns, and authors known for word-play. The Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket is a children's series that makes great use of word-play. Poets may be a good resource as well. These authors will show you how far you can stretch the English language.
Take risks. You'll learn faster if you're willing to make mistakes. Find a trusted native speaker or an anonymous online forum and try writing jokes or puns. Experiment with more convuluted sentence structure. Ask for feedback and explanations if something confuses you. This will allow you to make the leap from copying English writers to being a great English writer yourself.

Honestly, I find that non-native speakers tend to structure their writing more precisely than native speakers. Most of us native speakers are lazy. Most of us also aren't professional writers, and there are also professional writers of English for whom English is known to be a second language. There are poets who sprinkle their writing with native Spanish and novelists who write about their life growing up in the Middle East. Bilingual journalist is even its own job category on hiring sites.

In any case, best of luck.

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