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In my research article, I wrote:

We now introduce few notations.

Then the referees for the paper told me that using 'notations' is grammatically incorrect. So I'm thinking about changing it to

We now introduce few notation.

To me this sounds a bit strange now without the 's' from the notations. I was wondering is this grammatically correct? Thank you.

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  • It definitely sounds weird to me. I guess it is ungrammatical as well. Your second sentence I mean. Oct 19, 2020 at 7:52

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The first sentence is non-idiomatic, but not grammatically incorrect. It's the opposite of "We now introduce many notations." and emphasizes that there's only a small number of them. That's probably not what you want; you want to say that there is more than one, so in that case you need 'a few' ('some' would work too).

We now introduce a few notations.

See e.g. page 2 of this paper where a similar construction is used.

'Few' is always followed by a plural, so the second sentence is grammatically incorrect.

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    Depending on the field and subject matter, "we now introduce some new notation" might be more idiomatic. (Specifically, mathematical notation might be introduced this way.)
    – TypeIA
    Oct 19, 2020 at 8:34

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