From English Writing to Chinese Politics

I have been writing English a lot lately, mostly for the essays in my MBA applications. It turns out, explaining my 27 years of life in a couple hundred words is extremely hard.

Writing short is harder than writing long. I’m sure anyone who had to write within word limit would somewhat agree, because every word you use is so precious. What I realized is that writing short is more than just a language skill, it goes beyond the choice of vocabulary or formation of sentence, but more of a manage of logic. We all tend to repeat things without even noticing we are repeating, for example, it sounds absolutely natural to say “I have learned such such and I will be continue learning such such”, but when you think about it, the word “continue” already indicated that I have been learning, so there’s no need to repeat it.

There are two books that I think are the holy grail for concise writing — <On Writing Well> by William Zinsser, and <How to Write Short> by Roy Peter Clark. The first one is my favorite, as Zinsser outspokenly illustrated what is good writing, and why good writing is smart writing. The book boosted my appreciation for English language, no exaggeration. I wish I had read it earlier when I was studying TOEFL and GRE five years ago, but maybe that was still too early for a Chinese student who had to rely on dictionary to finish reading <Harry Potter>.

English writing is especially challenging for native Chinese, and again, the reason goes beyond the language level. I was a decent Chinese writer — I wrote journals everyday since first grade to high school, accumulated 38 journals and published a few pieces on local newspaper and magazines. I studied Editing and Publishing in undergrad, I was the Chief Editor for my university’s online magazine. My strength lays in expressing my feelings, describing the emotions and opinions with a variety of references, in an artsy way. Critical reasoning has never been a focus in Chinese writing, but it is the soul in English writing. I started to wonder why.

I remember in elementary school, when Chinese pupils were first introduced to reading comprehension and essay writings, the topics were always either praising the beauty of our country, or showing appreciation to the party (just to clarify, there’s only one party in China), sometimes it could be reinforcing a life philosophy such as achievements only come from working hard. Those topics are often times resulted from the author saw something, or experienced some events. Even in high school, the logics implemented in writing are never that complicated. At most, as far as I recall from numerous trainings for the infamous College Entrance Examination (Gao Kao) , is to incorporate examples to support your claim in the essay. At the same time, according to what my husband told me, counterargument is an essential part in American education since elementary school, where persuasive and argumentative essays are already introduced.

That really shocked me, at the same time, made me feel sad, or unfair, that as a Chinese student, I fall so short on eloquence from the get go. No wonder why I struggle with GMAT’s critical reasoning part, and my writings.

Why Chinese education doesn’t emphasize on counterargument? My theory is that education is at service for politics. In China, where there’s only one party, citizens are expected to follow instead of to argue, while in the U.S., citizens need the argumentative skills to execute their political power facing two parties. To be frank, it was quite a cultural shock when I saw the argument section for every proposition in the voter’s guide brochure. It was just a huge contradiction to China, where all decisions are made by the government, under one party, leaving people little participation in the decision making. But it works there, and Chinese people think it works the best for the current Chinese society, they are happy, things are getting done, money are coming in. Does the compliant style Chinese writing education play a part in this?

I never expected to discover all these aha moments from my battle with English writing. Writing is a journey of exploration, it leads you to empathize your readers, plot your stories, hone your logics, brand your personal style, and find unexpected treasures to add to your wisdom collection.