Aim of the book and coverage The book is aimed at postgraduate students, Ph.D. students, and researchers whose fi rst language is not English. It is assumed that you have already reached a suf fi cient level of English to write a research paper, thesis, or dissertation. The book covers all the writing skills that will help you to get a positive reaction from the reviewers of your manuscript and thus improve your chances of publication. When reviewers say that the level of the English in a manuscript is ‘poor’, they are often referring not to grammar or vocabulary issues but to readability problems (see the second section on page vii), such as poor structure, sentences being too long, redundancy, and ambiguity. All these problems, and many more, are dealt with in this book.