Academic editing for those whose first language is NOT English (or, for that matter, for anyone else)

Dear International Students, Faculty, and Scholars:

I edit documents for students, faculty, and scholars whose first language is not English. My goal is to make your document read like it was written by a native English speaker. Most of my clients have been from China, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Latin America, but I will work on documents for clients of any nationality. I edit statements you write to apply for grad school and for faculty positions, papers you intend to submit for publication to an English journal, business reports, letters, white papers, dissertation chapters, job applications, statements of purpose, and research proposals. 

I edit documents in all fields. I have edited papers in engineering, nanofabrication, statistics, plant pathology, city and regional planning, food science, history, plant genetics, biotechnology, plant breeding, wildlife biology, biomedicine, near eastern studies, theatre arts, psychology, and more. Clients simply send me their document (tag1@cornell.edu) as an email attachment, I edit it in MS Word using Track Changes, and I return the document, usually within 48 hours.

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I am currently Professor Emeritus from Cornell University.  I have published dozens of papers in refereed journals over the past 40 years, and I served as Associate Editor for the journal Ecological Applications for three years. I taught university courses for 30 years, and I conducted ecological research throughout the U.S. and in Costa Rica. I lived in Korea and Costa Rica for one year each and, recently, I have been visiting Taiwan to teach short courses on conservation biology at National Taiwan University.

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The 7-Elevens in Taiwan are a necessity - not just a convenience

(The 7-Eleven that I used nearly eveyday in Taipei)

My wife and I recently spent a month in Taiwan. I gave some lectures at the University and helped to co-teach a course titled Biodiversity, Agriculture and Culture of Taiwan. We had never been to Taiwan before, so we were not completely sure what to expect about finding the basic necessities of life: coffee, beer, Twizzlers. Within hours of arriving, we were told not to worry about any of this — just go to any 7-Eleven convenience store.

We found the 7-Eleven nearest our hotel room, and that was not difficult. With nearly 5,000 stores in this small country, we came to realize that in the capital, Taipei, there must be a 7-Eleven every couple of blocks. In fact, several times we saw 7-Elevens on opposite corners of the same intersection. That’s right, two stores immediately across the street from one another. Was my mind deceiving me, was I seeing double, had I entered some parallel universe without knowing it? Could the coffee be better in one of the stores than in the other? Were Twizzlers the same price in each? Too many stores, not enough time!

Every morning, I literally skipped to OUR 7-Eleven, bought two American-style coffees (which I learned to order in Mandarin), a couple of hard-boiled eggs that were prepared in a bath of salty tea water (delicious) and, voila, breakfast was ready. After a while, the clerks recognized me (not difficult to remember a white-haired gringo in a Taiwanese convenience store), so they began drawing my coffee before I even placed my order.

But these “convenience” stores, which are spotless, attractive, and nicely lit, offer much more than my necessities of life. You can take your dirty laundry to a 7-Eleven in Taiwan, they send it out, and you return to pick it up. You can order items from Amazon.com and have them delivered to your local 7-Eleven, where you retrieve them. This apparently saves the delivery person from trying to locate your apartment among the sea of apartments in Taipei, and from solving the problem of where to leave the item when you are not at home. You can pay traffic tickets there and, believe it or not, you can pay your federal income tax there if it is not above a certain amount. These stores are also a social gathering place in the evening; all seats are taken and it is standing room only after dark. What more they offer, I’m not sure. Maybe you can find a wife or husband through the place rather than spending time with an online matchmaking service. The possibilities are limitless.  And did I mention that 7-Elevens in Taiwan are open 24 hours a day?

Of course, this all seems in contrast to the image most of us have of 7-Elevens in the U.S. I don’t go to ours after dark, because I don’t want to interrupt a robbery in progress. Ours are not as clean as those in Taiwan. Ours don’t have tea eggs. I can’t even remember where the 7-Elevens are in my town; in Taiwan, you simply walk a block and there one is.

So my impression of this Japanese-based company has changed for the better. People in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, and Thailand have appreciated the value of 7-Elevens for some time. Asians rely on them, they use them daily, and they seem proud to have them in their country. Taiwan also has Starbucks, but it seems that visiting one is considered a luxury, while the 7-Eleven is the staff of life.

Our 7-Elevens seem not as popular as they are in Taiwan. Maybe we have too many choices in the U.S., and we can drive as far from home as we need to get to any store we want. Maybe the name “7-11” is off-putting, because it reminds us of a casino, and who wants to go up against house odds when buying something you are going to put in your mouth. There are many possible reasons why 7-Elevens are not as popular in the states. But I’m putting my money on the fact that ours don’t have tea eggs.


Article first published as The 7-Elevens in Taiwan Are a Necessity - Not a Convenience on Technorati.

Motivation: what you need to learn Korean

(Bored soldiers.  I knew that feeling so well.)

By the fall of 1969 I had completed my training in Military Intelligence in the U.S. Army at Ft. Holabird, MD and was awaiting orders for my first duty station after graduation.  We were all nervous because this was during the heaviest years of fighting in Vietnam and most soldiers were sent there, regardless of their specialty in the military.  The Tet Offensives in 1968 and 1969 were massive and bloody, and they were on the mind of every GI.  So my wife and I were on pins and needles waiting for the orders that would determine the next direction of our lives.

On the day in question in late August, I was about to play a tennis match after duty-hours for the Ft. Holabird team against another military base. One of my friends on the court yelled at me about whether I had gotten my orders today.  We had, in fact, gotten them, but I had not had a chance to talk to Robin about them.  But Robin heard the question, jumped to her feet and marched across the tennis court directly over to me, balls flying past her head in both directions, and demanded to know if I had received orders.  I told her not to worry; I was assigned to go to language school in Virginia.  How bad could that be?

So in September, I began Korean language training in Arlington, VA at a new complex of high-rise buildings called Crystal City.  That area is so developed now that I couldn't even find the building where I spent so much time when I visited a couple of years ago.  The Defense Language Institute was contracted by the military to teach languages to military personnel in this place as well as on the west coast at Monterrey; they taught over 50 languages there.  There were three Korean classes to begin that month, and I was assigned to the class of Mr. Cho.  All instructors were native speakers of the language they taught.  Each class contained 10 GIs, where we sat in a straight line in school-like chairs with a desk top in a very small room with our instructor.  Our instruction lasted 7 hours per day, 5 days per week, for 50 weeks.  I can hear the audible groans from the peanut gallery now.

The class was tedious, and we had to do some studying at night to memorize the dialogue for the next day.  We learned to speak, read, and write the language.  There was a great deal of oral work during each day's class, as we were randomly called upon by Mr. Cho to answer his questions in Korean, or to translate what he had said.  We learned about Korean culture, history, food, music, and geography.  We received a pretty good education in all things Korean.  But, the room was small and sterile, you looked at the same nine guys every day, all day, and the educational routine was just that-a monotonous routine.  In short, it was the most boring year I ever spent in my life.

But the alternative was scary and so most, but not all, of us stuck it out.  Every Friday we had an exam on that week's work.  If you failed the test three weeks in a row, you flunked out of language school and you were reassigned.  Reassignment almost certainly meant going to Vietnam.  In fact, when Mr. Cho got totally frustrated with us, which he did often, he would say in his broken English: "You study hard, or you go other place".  And that "other place" in Southeast Asia was a place none of us wanted to go.  So we plodded along, week after boring week, hating the boredom, but hating the idea of what lay ahead if we faltered even more.

Johnnie Walker, the kisaeng, and me

(A kisaeng party can be fun, but watch out for those raw sea slugs.)

When I arrived in Taegu, Korea in 1970, I was assigned liaison duty.  I was stationed with the 502nd Military Intelligence Battalion, and I was given two ROK intelligence offices located in separate locations in the city with which to communicate.  So, a couple of times per week I took one of our black jeeps, and Pusan, my interpreter, and I visited the military officers at these Korean units. 

I was never sure exactly what I was supposed to accomplish (a feeling I had for the entire three years I was in the Army), so we engaged in small talk only.  I guess I was hoping to learn any secrets they might tell me, which they would not, and they were hoping to learn some military secrets from me, of which I knew nothing.  Because we had zilch of a military nature we could or would discuss with one another, Colonel Shim always wanted to talk about American women and sex.  He was absolutely fascinated with the subject, and when he found out that I was married to a long-legged blond, his interest only increased.  On that subject, I DID have some intimate secrets, but they were not to be revealed under threat of death from my commanding officer, the blond general.

In our MI office, we were supposed to be "undercover".  I have never written about this, but enough years have passed that I can not imagine that it matters any longer.  Being undercover in this case meant that we pretended to be civilians who worked for the Army, which was a common arrangement in Korea in those days.  So, my colleagues and I wore civilian clothes, ate at the Officers' Club, and generally stayed to ourselves socially so as not to ever slip about the fact that we were just lowly enlisted men.  Our work often involved interviewing high-ranking commissioned officers about other military personnel who wanted a security clearance, and if these colonels and generals knew we were only buck sergeants, they would not give us the time of day.  I played the same game with the Korean officers I visited every week.

When a new American was assigned to a Korean unit, it was customary for the Koreans to throw a party for the newbie.  These parties are generally for men only, because each man is attended by a kisaeng girl, who are somewhat similar to the geisha of Japan.  At these parties, you are seated on pillows on the floor in front of a low table covered with a cloth that nearly reaches the floor.  Food and drink are served, with the kisaeng girls anticipating your needs, and there was a small band there to play our favorite hits.  Lady Gaga would have been an incredible success at one of these events full of horny drunken Koreans who were obsessed with American sex.  She would have been lucky to have escaped with her veil.

An essential element at this social gathering was alcohol, which I was expected to bring.  In those days, American products were not so easy to come by in Korea unless you got them from a U.S. commissary.  Our office had a supply of "gifts" that we used to grease the lines of communication between Korean agencies and our office; we had a locked cabinet that was full of coffee, cigarettes, and booze.  Pusan and I brought several bottles of Johnnie Walker Red (which only cost $2 a bottle in the Officers' Club) from the official cabinet of goodies as our offering to the festivities.

Once underway, I counted about a dozen Korean officers, 6-8 kisaeng girls, Pusan, the band, and me.  In front of each of us was a plate for food, some chopsticks, and an empty shot glass.  Uh oh.  A shot glass always means trouble.  It was then that I learned the Korean etiquette that would be employed at an occasion like this.  Each Korean wanted to honor the guest of honor, me, with a drink.  So, they filled the shot glass in front of them with JW, and passed the drink to the guest with their right hand, which was accepted with the right hand, and then watched as the guest threw back the drink.  As the guest, I did the same to them.  But can you see the ratio problem with which I was confronted?  There were about 10 of them passing me shot glasses and only one of me passing the drinks back, after I had swigged mine.  Geesh.  I didn't want to offend anyone my first month in the country and upset the balance of power, or cause an international incident that would be chronicled in Stars and Stripes, or give the North Koreans a reason to invade the South, or have kisaeng girls tell the story for generations to come of the Ugly American who came for dinner and refused a drink from his host.

Needless to say, within an hour I was blottoed, stupid, banjaxed, etched, jeremied, legless, snatered, sozzled, smashed, trashed, and wasted--probably toxicly so.  I was so ripped that I got up and sang Arirang, a famous Korean folk song, with the band.  In those days, I actually knew about three verses of that classic in Korean.  It sounded pretty good to me, or so I thought.  I was so bombed that I ate a raw sea slug, which looked for all the world like a giant liver fluke.  I was so blitzed that I got the mailing addresses of four kisaeng girls to whom I promised to write every week when I returned to the states.  Did I mention that I was crocked?

I was a wreck for the next three days.  My stomach was upset, I couldn't eat, and my head felt like a star-nosed mole was living in there.  I learned later that the trick to surviving such a party is to keep a small bowl between your legs under the low table.  After the first couple of drinks, throw the whiskey in the bowl when the Korean host is not watching.  You simply have to do something to even the odds.

That party was 40 years ago.  To this day, if someone offers me Johnnie Walker, even Johnnie Walker Blue that costs $200 a bottle, I almost gag as soon as I smell the stuff.  I would recognize the taste and smell of that swill anywhere.  It is a lifelong taste aversion that will never dissipate.  But as I often say to my closest friends and relatives, a bad memory is better than no memory at all.  And that night in Taegu was not all bad.  In fact, as I pour myself a single-malt scotch now, I think I will work on a new rendition of Arirang.  You never know.  American Idol and Simon Cowell, here I come!

The 60s, and other memories of the way it used to be

(They were radicals, but they were correct.)

Another year, another birthday.  What the heck?  I'm now 63 years old, but I don't feel a day over 62 1/2.  I attribute this amazing youthfulness to eating properly and exercise.  And, of course, a scotch and a cigar a day probably contribute as well.  I will go so far as to say that if you smoked one cigar a day and drank one scotch per day, you would also not feel a day over 62 1/2, even if you are 30 years old.  That combination of alcohol and nicotine has amazing restorative properties, and I am living proof of that.

Having lived this long, I have witnessed some interesting changes in practices and attitudes in many aspects of American life.  For example, I started school at age 5 in the first grade.  We lived in a somewhat rural area about a mile from the school.  To get to school, we walked.  But to do so, we walked along a country road, crossed a busy highway, and a set of railroad tracks.  Years later, the fathers of two of my friends were killed driving across those same tracks, so it was no joke.  After a couple of weeks of my mother walking with me, I was free to make the walk alone both to and from school.  There were some other kids making the same walk, but can you imagine parents letting any kid even twice that age do this today? 

I loved baseball when I was 9-12 years old, so I wanted to play on the local Little League team.  I tried out for 3 years and was cut from the team each year.  It was done like this.  The day finally came to announce who made the team.  The coach read the list and those of us who did not make the team, turned our backs and walked home while the coach started passing out the team shirts and caps to those who made it.  I distinctly remember the cheers of joy from those guys who had made the team, as they tried on their new gear.  I was devastated each time.  Our parents were not there.  We always faced these events on our own.  However, after the third turn down, one man started an additional team with those of us who did not make the Apaches team.  Our Sioux team then actually beat the Apaches during the regular season, which was one of the sweetest days of my life.  In those days, we always knew that success was not guaranteed, and that you had to prepare extremely well in a competitive world.

When I was in junior high school, I got paddled by the teacher in front of the class at least once each year for some infraction of some rule.  Usually this involved talking in class when we were not supposed to be doing that.  I was not alone.  Today, that kind of corporal punishment would be definite grounds for a law suit.

Then, there was the decade of the 60s, which was amazing in so many ways.  When we were first married, my wife worked full-time as a nurse and I was a student.  She could not get a credit card issued in her name in those days; it had to be issued in the husband's name.  Crazy, since she was making the money and I wasn't. Of course, now, we don't open the mailbox without there being an offer for her to accept a new card.

I mostly remember worrying about the military draft during the 60s.  It was all any male thought about.  Would I be called?  Could I escape it somehow?  If we stayed in university, we were safe until we graduated.  Maybe the Vietnam War would be over by then.  I remember a couple of guys when I was attending Ohio State whose grade point average (gpa) was right on the cusp of flunking out of school.  (In those days, universities actually flunked students out and they went home.  Seems much less common today.)  I distinctly remember these particular guys taking an exam in a course we had together.  If they got a D on the exam, their gpa would dip below the minimum needed and they would flunk out.  In the mid to late 1960s, that would almost certainly mean you would be drafted into the army within months, probably sent to Vietnam, and possibly killed or injured.  Talk about pressure when taking a math or biology final exam.

I was lucky.  I graduated Ohio State, got drafted, and ended up in Korea.  All in all, that was a valuable and interesting experience, and not dangerous.  In Korea, I was in military intelligence and lived undercover as a civilian, but I mostly spent my time playing ping pong, bridge, and third base on the softball team.  I had been sent to language school for a solid year before deploying to Korea, so I was nearly fluent in the language at that time.  My wife and young daughter joined me there, we lived with a Korean family in the village, and we learned a lot.  The army did not want my wife to come, but there was no law against a U.S. citizen going to Korea, and my wife would not take "no" for an answer.  This was pretty much SOP for my wife during our military years.

So times have changed for the better in some ways, and probably not for the better in other ways.  I often wonder, and even predict, if the last half of the 20th century may have been as good as it ever was in human history and perhaps as good as it will ever be, all things considered.  In time, I will build this argument and present it for your critical analysis.  But several centuries will have to pass before this idea can be tested fully, so you will have to let me know how it comes out.  Just send me a text message.

A brief anatomy of a 41-year marriage

(I don't think I have ever kissed my wife on the beach under a setting sun.  Real life is better than that.)

Today, my wife and I celebrate our 41st wedding anniversary.  Holy crap.  Has it been that long?  We got married young and, as the saying goes, we were so green that if you put us in the ground we would have grown.  Now, we are old enough that we can't remember half of what we have learned.  But this can work to your advantage men.  I have two anniversary cards, on which I have written a very small "e" or "o".  When my wife is finished with the card after receiving it, I collect it and hide it away.  I use the "e" card every even-numbered year, and the "o" for odd years.  No way can she remember the card from two years ago.  They are, however, getting a bit tattered, so I tell her I buy my cards at the vintage store.

My wife has endured more than most wives would tolerate.  Within two months of our wedding, I received a draft notice from Uncle Sam during the height of the Vietnam War.  The biggest argument we have had in 41 years occurred that autumn, as we tried to decide how to play out this dangerous situation.  I wanted to take the military draft, which required two years of service, and she insisted that I enlist for three years in order to get some choice in my military assignment and, hopefully, reduce the chances of going to war as an infantry grunt.  I took her advice and ended up in Korea instead, where she later joined me for a rich experience.  Within 12 years of getting married, we lived in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Oklahoma, New York, and Korea, thanks to the U.S. Army and the pursuit of my education.  A few years later, we added Costa Rica to the list.

We rented a small house in Korea (our daughter was a baby then), which would fit into the kitchen/dining room area of our current house.  It had no usable bathroom inside or out, and the only running water was a cold water spigot in the gated yard.  We relieved ourselves into a plastic pail, which our Korean mama-san emptied each day outside.  We went to bed every night hoping that the rats fighting overhead would not fall through the paper ceiling into our daughter's crib.  But we learned a lot about life, made many friends, and came away stronger than we went in.  Our daughter's first word was "sei", the Korean word for bird.  My friend and roommate from college was not so lucky, and lost his life in Vietnam after having seen his newborn daughter only once. 

After completing my Ph.D. years later, I accepted my first faculty job at Oklahoma State University.  We arrived there with two kids, an English Setter, and a cat, and had no place to live.  A friend at the university found an unoccupied trailer at the edge of campus for us to use until we found a better place.  It had not been lived in for a couple years, so it was full of dust and cobwebs and spiders about half the size of your fist.  It sat right out in the sun (it was August), and it had no air-conditioning.  That night, we went to bed and lay there with sweat rolling down our faces and I said: "Honey, we have arrived."  We laughed so hard we almost got sick.  But it was then that I realized that the following American cliche may not be as true as we are led to believe: "if you work hard, and you're honest, and you get a good education, then life will be full of tangible rewards".  It is to someone's benefit for us to believe and follow that advice, but to whose benefit exactly?

In the mid-1980s, I got my first sabbatic leave from Cornell.  We decided to spend that year in Costa Rica, so I could learn more about tropical biology.  We rented a farm in Monteverde, a remote village in the Tilaran Mountains.  Because my wife had to quit her job to go, and I had to go on half-salary, we were broke the entire year we were there.  Finding food for a family of five was a real challenge because the local pulperia only got fresh vegetables once a week, which were totally gone two hours after the doors opened that morning.  The nearest town was Santa Elena, about three miles away, but there wasn't a great selection of edibles there and we had no car.  We finally bought a horse for transportation, and that changed the mobility equation quite a bit.  Robin dealt with traumatic injuries for each of our three children that year (broken bones, horse accidents, serious infections) and kept us fed, in a house that we later learned was called The Scorpion House by the locals.  Robin was the only one stung by one of our little friends.  We returned to the U.S. after that life-changing year with $50 to our name and all our credit cards cancelled, so we drove straight through from Florida back to New York, where we lived in our Coleman camping trailer for a month until the lease ran out for the family that was renting our home.

Robin has worked every year of the 41 except for three, and always worked to within 24 hours of giving birth to each of our three children.  She invariably got a job as a nurse within a day or two in every place we lived, then sold real estate, then worked as a marketing director at a life-care facility, and now works from home as a medical abstractor.  Like most women who are mothers, she is the lioness that fiercely protects her cubs, and she has been steadfastly supportive of my goals.  She has won every major argument we have ever had about how to proceed with aspects of our lives and, in hindsight, she was right every time.

When young people ask us what is the secret of staying happily married for so long, we honestly don't know what to say.  I suppose that loving and respecting your mate as much or more than you love and respect yourself, if that is biologically possible, is a key ingredient.  In a previous post, I mentioned that my wife and I have almost nothing in common, but when it comes to the big issues (e.g., kids, politics, religion), we are on the exact same page.  And then comes humor and laughter.  As we did in that sweltering trailer in Oklahoma 30 years ago, we have laughed ourselves to sleep over some event of the day literally thousands of times.  I believe a sense of humor is absolutely essential to making it through this life.

And so now, I will give my wife a kiss on the forehead while I distract her a bit, and collect her anniversary card with the little "o" on it for use in 2011.  Then, Robin, her sister, and I will travel to the Turning Stone Casino for a day of entertainment, and to make our financial fortune.  Now that is a laughing matter.