I’m currently wrapping up a long review paper (>10k words) that should hopefully be published this September. As usual, as a non-native speaker, I ran into many common grammar and style mistakes. Luckily, I have next door a native speaker, and he’s patient enough to correct most of my mistake. He’s my first secret weapon. The second one is this little gem, called The Elements of Style (4th Edition), by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. This book is probably the best money I’ve ever spend on a book.

So without further ado, here are my top ten mistakes, that I’ve learned to correct thanks to my two secret weapons:

1. You should place a comma after abbreviations like i.e., e.g., etc.
2. If you enumerate several terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term. Example: “… bla bla bla  in materials science, chemistry, and life science”. Same if you enumerate with “or”.
3. Put statements in positive forms. It is much stronger.
4. Omit needless words. For some reason, we french people seem to be using a lot of these. So here you go, go and mercilessly chase expressions like “the reason why is that”, “the question as to whether”, etc.
5. “Due to” is synonym to “attributable to”. Avoid using it for “owing to” or “because of”.
6. “Interesting”. It might be interesting to you, but not to everyone else. Remove it. Just remove it.
7. “Type” is not a synonym for “kind of”. So get it straight.
8. “While”. Just stick to it if you can replace it with “during the time that”.
9. Don’t say “very unique”. “unique” is good enough.
10. Split infinitive: when you put an adverb between “to” and the verb. I used this form a lot and thought it was cool. Apparently it’s not. Don’t say: “to thoroughly investigate”, say: “to investigate thoroughly”.

This is just the top ten. The entire book is full of stuff  like this. Go and get it. And don’t lend it to anyone, you’d never get it back. Do you have another one? Share it in the comments.