Helping Chinese-American professionals to develop their technical writing skills

Three components of American English create great difficulty for Chinese-American college students and professionals trying to improve their technical writing. They are the articles ("a," "an," and "the"); prepositions; and verb tense. This paper reveals key reasons for these difficulties and explains how to ease them. It is meant to assist teachers, editors, and the Chinese-Americans who write for them. As a starting point, teachers and editors need to know how the Chinese language differs from English in its treatment of these three components. So informed, they can take appropriate actions to bring about improvement.