Five Non-Native English Habits I Had to Unlearn (In Order of Embarrassment)

Learning English from textbooks before conversations leaves marks that are very hard to see in your own writing. These are the five I found most difficult to fix.

I grew up in Kolkata in a Bengali household where English was the language of school, not of home. By the time I started writing professionally, I had excellent formal English in my head and something subtly wrong in how I actually wrote. These are the five habits I needed to unlearn.

5. Unnecessary formality

Textbooks teach formal register first. I wrote emails that sounded like legal documents. "I am writing to inform you that I will be unable to attend" when I meant "I cannot make Thursday." Formal is not always better. Often it creates distance and makes simple things complicated.

4. Literal translations

Bengali has constructions that translate directly into English in ways that are technically correct but phrased strangely. "I am having trouble" instead of "I am struggling." These are obvious in retrospect but invisible when writing them.

3. Article anxiety

Bengali does not have a/an/the the way English does. Knowing when to use which article is the hardest thing in English for speakers of such languages. I over-inserted articles where not needed and omitted them where needed. Grammarly helped more than anything else here.

2. Overlong sentences

In Bengali, longer sentences can be elegant. I brought this preference into English writing where it reads differently — as complexity rather than richness. Learning to break them up was a real shift.

1. Hedging everything

Years of uncertain English produced writing full of qualifications. "Perhaps," "it could be argued," "one might say." The writing never committed to anything. Learning to write direct sentences — to say what I meant without apologising for saying it — took years and is still ongoing.

What this really means in practice

The practical question behind Five Non-Native English Habits I Had to Unlearn (In Order of Embarrassment) is not whether Writing Craft sounds impressive in theory. It is whether the advice survives contact with an ordinary draft, a busy inbox, a deadline, or a reader who is not already convinced. That is the standard I use throughout this guide: if a recommendation does not make the next draft clearer, faster, or easier to trust, it does not deserve space on the page.

Good English writing is rarely about sounding grand. It is about making the reader do less work. The strongest sentence usually has one job, one clear subject, and one clean movement from idea to consequence. When a paragraph feels heavy, the problem is often not vocabulary. It is that three different thoughts are trying to share one sentence.

A simple way to apply it today

Start with one small test. Take a real piece of writing connected to this topic, not a perfect sample made for a tutorial. Read it once for meaning, once for structure, and once for friction. On the first pass, ask whether the point is worth making. On the second, ask whether the order helps the reader. On the third, look for the exact sentence where attention drops. That sentence is usually where the improvement begins.

A practical editing habit is to mark the sentence that carries the point of each paragraph. If you cannot find that sentence, the paragraph is probably performing instead of communicating. Once the point is visible, you can cut decoration, move examples closer to the claim, and let the writing breathe.

Mistakes to avoid

• Do not optimize the wrong thing. A cleaner sentence is not always a better argument. Improve clarity without sanding away evidence, personality, or useful specificity.
• Do not compare tools or techniques in the abstract. Test them on the kind of writing you actually produce, because a student essay, a client email, a blog post, and a newsletter all punish different weaknesses.
• Do not let speed become the whole goal. Faster writing is valuable only when the final message is still accurate, considerate, and recognizably yours.

My working checklist

• Does the opening tell the reader exactly what problem is being solved?
• Can a busy reader understand the recommendation by scanning the headings?
• Is there at least one concrete example, not only general advice?
• Would I still stand behind this paragraph if a reader made a decision from it?
• Is the final version sharper without becoming colder?

Final verdict

The best version of this advice is deliberately practical: use Writing Craft to reduce uncertainty, not to hide from judgment. The page should leave you with a clearer next action, not just a stronger opinion. If you remember only one thing from this article, remember this: the winning choice is the one that improves the real writing in front of you.