Views the Dutch language as analogous to the polder typical of the Netherlands, an area of low-lying land reclaimed from a body of water and protected by dikes. Phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and stylistic analyses are presented. (MSE)

Forty-eight American (L1) and 48 Dutch students (L2), half of whom had computer science backgrounds and half of whom did not, were tested for their use of either scientific text (ST) syntactic structures or the less difficult common syntax when writing technical discourse (in Appendix). Results indicate that both L1 and L2 technical writers wrote…