An error analysis of journal papers written by Persian authors

Abstract

This research was conducted to pinpoint common errors in Iranian authors’ writings, which was done by extracting the errors in the writings of 40 scientific articles written by students, which were edited by an editing team at Sharif University of Technology, Languages and Linguistics Center. As a result of this investigation, eight types of errors were extracted as the following: errors in word usage, articles, preposition, conjunction, tense, errors in word order active-passive structure and subject-verb agreement. Among these, errors in word usage received the highest frequency (36.2%) and the least frequent common error was related to subject–verb agreement (0.7%). The reasons of these common errors are highly related to the L1 transfer. Furthermore, it can be generally concluded that the errors were due to the similarity or difference between Persian and English. The findings of the study have implications for the authors of scientific papers especially in the realm of science and engineering.