Chinese language is loose, scattered and flowing wherever thoughts go. I told my students to be concise and straightforward for millions of times when I was reviewing their essays. As a learner myself, it took me so many years to give up detouring in sentence writing and intentionally written long sentences (still trying). Maybe a limited space would be a new and better way for students to rethink their syntactic structure and reshape their writing.
There is a famous metaphor about Chinese and English. Chinese is like grapes and English is like bamboo. Grapes expand to all directions in small units and bamboo goes straight from one section to another logically. Maybe twitter's linear text input space may reshape Chinese speakers' languaging process and improve their cognitive level of thinking in English.
What an interesting reflection! I remember teaching a writing class where we briefly compared essay writing formats in English and in Chinese. As I remember, the English essay format was much more straight-forward with the emphasis on making an easy path for the reader while the Chinese essay was more rambling (sophisticated?) with the emphasis more on taking the reader on a journey. Your metaphor of a bunches of grapes vs.a straight up and down stick of bamboo seems to work for essays too.
ReplyDeleteHi, Dr. Burgos, thank you so much for your comments! Your explanation is quite interesting and as far as I see, it makes sense. In Chinese, the main gist of an essay is preferred inferred from the flowing of writing, which is supposed to be the beauty of language. I guess that is what you meant by taking readers on a journey. We even have a guiding idea for writing an essay, which is: loose in form but clear in soul. It encourages writers to be rambling, only if they can convey a clear idea, even though they don't "make it clear" linguistically in their writing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reply. I especially like the idea of "loose in form but clear in soul."
ReplyDelete