: Re: Do academic papers have to be necessarily grammatically correct? I notice that a lot of beautiful literature contains sentences that are not grammatically correct. Here are some examples:

@Ann1701686

This topic may overlap with academia and writing.

The idea of scientific publication is to comunicate your results so the other researchers may:

a) use your work as inspiration for their work,
b) use your work not to do same mistakes and dead routes as you did.

The reality is that researchers are paid according to their article cadence...

Grammar is actually standard of printed/spoken comunication. It is something like IEEE to electronics. Some languages have simple grammar and subtle nuances are distinguished by different words etc. Some languages have rather complicated grammar and the nuances are sometimes hidden in word orders, word mutations etc.

Even though English is The Language of Science, very few researchers are native English speakers. All the others had to learn English as their second, third, whateverth language. Reviewers, Editors and publishers also doesn't need to be native speakers as well.

There is no hard rule that Grammar must be obeyed inscribed in heavy stone. On the other hand proper and simple grammar is mandatory to minimize risks of miscomunication caused by different understandings. For many people, whrong grammar is challenging for their attention because they slip to focusing on the grammar scratching their heads mumbling "What the heck they were trying to say?"

Recently I was helping my brother with translation of user guide for a pump from american english to czech. One sentence took one hour discussion what they tried to mean, because we had to decompose all the adjectives, many could be used as verbs as well, to realize, that the word following the sequence doesnt match, so we had to decompose it again differently...

Please, if you are to write thesis, paper or anything academical or technical, do check the grammar and ask few non-natives to check it as well.
The language does not need to be smooth or nice, it shall be exact. The paper does not need to be written in Shakesperean English, Goethe's German, Voltaire's French...

Obviously, this does not apply for popularisation works like Hawking's Brief History of Time. Here, nice language is beneficial and it is, unlike scientific articles, piece of art. When properly referenced, any misunderstanding caused by nice but complicated words, is dissolved by the article with exact and simple language.

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