I'm writing my master thesis in English as a non-native speaker. I start a lot of sentences without an article and one of my lectors (a non-native speaker like myself) found this to be odd and marked every occurrence. My question to the native speakers is: which method would be considered better?
A few examples:
Identification of such failures is usually a tedious manual task.
Automatic identification of such failures would be highly beneficial.
Examination of test data reveals…
Literature review confirms that…
Application of these models shows poor results.
My lector would correct all these examples with a definite article:
The identification of such failures is usually a tedious manual task.
The automatic identification of such failures would be highly beneficial.
The examination of test data reveals…
The literature review confirms that…
The application of these models shows poor results.
Best Answer
I'm a native speaker who occasionally works professionally as a technical writer and editor, including writing scientific journal articles. In my opinion, your versions of the sentences, without the leading article, are more conventional.
Adding the article isn't wrong, but it's not the customary way to express those facts in academic writing. You're invoking the subject noun as an abstract concept, e.g. "identification of such failures" as an idea or possibility to entertain, not as a specific occurrence of identifying certain, specific failures. You can write the to indicate that you intend a noun to be taken as an abstraction rather than an instance, as is commonly done in many languages with a definite article, but in contemporary English this is usually done only with a small range of nouns. For example, it's done with species and organs, such as "the elephant" and "the stomach". With most nouns, we determine them abstractly by omitting the article entirely.
You would say "The literature review confirms that…" only if you were referring to a specific literature review already introduced. If the sentence introduces your literature review, expressing it without the article is customary. It suggests that literature review in general, or some unspecified amount of literature review, confirms your conclusion. There's really no distinction here between treating "literature review" as an abstraction or as a mass noun; either way, it takes no article. You could introduce your literature review with "A literature review confirms that…", but this leaves open the possibility that you're referring to someone else's literature review. That could be OK if the following text makes it obvious that you mean your literature review.