Not in Manuals: Best Current Writing Practices, Particularly for Academics Writing in a Nonnative Language

In this note, we re-examine some typical issues and very basic fallacies in writing manuscripts reporting empirical studies, with a special focus on addressing authors whose mother tongue is not English. We represent the perspectives of reviewers and editors at the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science (CJBS). We make explicit the expectations these editors and reviewers hold in terms of best practices. We then offer reminders, tips, and examples concerning the most frequent key challenges to best practices we have observed in writing: (a) Getting to the point; (b) Adopting a North American journalese; (c) Canadian relevance; (d) appropriate use and reporting of statistics; (e) Reporting validation study results when adapting measures to a new language; and (f) addressing reviewers' comments. Although the article targets writing for CJBS, it may be helpful in writing for psychological and behavioural sciences.