Ordos Dream: English writing, Chinese writing, what's the defferences?

There are huge differences between writing in English, which is my second language and in Chinese for me; and I believe for a lot of people. Not only because what I have said in my first blog that I am more comfortable with my first language, but there is a huge gap between these two languages, even more, two cultures.

It is true that I can control my words and let them service for the feeling I would like to express or the argument I would like to support much more skilled in Chinese than in English. But still it takes intense time and much thought to develop a well-planned essay even in Chinese.

When I was in junior high school, there were various writing assignments that our teacher asked us to do, such as character analysis essays, persuasive essays, and compare and contrast essays. I have to say that most of them are not that fun, because we were just regurgitating the stuff given by our teacher to fulfill specific content requirements. While it is undeniable that all these practice makes me more skilled in language controlling and builds a firm foundation for my own creating work in the future.

I was in my senior high school when facing the challenge of “speak your mind”. No more checklists guided us anymore; only a subject given to us. Sometimes we even did not know what type of composition we should compose. Argumentation, prose, descriptive prose or even poem was acceptable only if you can convince the reader that your article satisfy the subject. In other word, we had to learn to “play the language” since normal narration was not hard for almost everyone and it was really a “hard thinking” stuff to make your essay shinning before teacher’s eyes, at the same time, we had to process a clear mind.

Making normal words in Chinese shining is hard. One of the biggest limitations to my English writing is vocabulary; “significant is always lighter than important”, told by my high school English teacher because most of us use “important” instead of “significant”. While in Chinese, shinning words are somehow limited for high school students in one class as we almost have the same vocabulary in Chinese. Thus, stylistic techniques played an important role in our compositions. Simile, Metaphor, Allusion, parallelism, repetition and rhetorical questions (Practical Argument, p78) were mentioned by our teachers again and again. Let’s say, the time I spend on looking for a substitute for “purpose” in English was what I used to compiling a sentence of repetition in Chinese.

There are a lot of templates for essays in English and I used them when I was in China. First of all…Secondly…Moreover…In addition…However…Thus…Therefore…Last but not least…Stupid but helpful. The first thing I was taught on English writing class is “always make your idea clear and never try to write an English essay with your Chinese mind.”

What? Why?

Moreover, there are no templates for these kinds of writings in Chinese. The first reason is old-school stuff, we are good at using 虽然…但是…(However…but), 尽管…但是…(Even though…but)…This is not a big deal for us, very basic conjunctions. The other one is much more complicated, that is, the differences of how people think between English and Chinese.

I learned two abbreviations from a blog, LCC (low context culture) and HCC (high context culture), which are really useful in explaining the other reason and my idea.

LCC refers to relying more on verbal communication and HCC tends to use fewer words to express a same idea. Eastern culture, specifically, China is a HCC, whereas Western culture is more like a LCC.

In respect of writing, the feature of LCC is that the idea is explicit and it is the writer’s duty to give all the facts and conclusion, specifically, causes always come before effects; by contrast, for HCC, the idea is implicit and it is the readers’ responsibility to interpret the meaning, that is, “the message is behind rather than in the language itself”. The preferred method of thinking in China is deductive and not inductive as in the West. Most Chinese students, including me, would like to place background or related evidences first and the main point later due to the belief that the latter hard to be understood without the necessary background or evidences provided. In other word, it is hard for a reader of a normal Chinese composition to catch the main idea by only skimming over the first sentence of each paragraph. Meanwhile, this technique is always used to scanning normal English essays. Therefore, meaning hidden behind words and no statements given first make the Western readers frustrated.

According to the features of Chinese compositions illustrated above, templates are not possible to use. If the writer does not want to provide a clear structure and statements in the first place, the template only restricts the writer instead of helping him/her. Thus, there are no Chinese templates for student compositions.

If an English essay is composed in the way a Chinese composition is composed, the English tutor would be really frustrated. This is the huge gap I mentioned in the first paragraph. Just like this essay, I tried to write it in a Chinese way. Readers are hard to catch my idea until now I suppose. I’m sorry for that and hope it doesn’t bother you too much. Although I made this “mistake” intentionally in this one, I do always make this kind of mistakes when writing an English essay unintentionally.

Therefore, using templates are stupid but it is definitely a good way for Chinese students who are beginners of writing English essays to avoid “the Chinese mind”. Figuring out the differences would not only benefit Chinese students like me but also English writing teachers, who can emphasis the importance of providing introductory and thesis statements to their Chinese students.

This blog is also a reminder for me. Next time I would try to formulate the introductory and thesis statements first, establish the basic structure in first paragraphs to inform my readers the points to discuss orderly and pay attention to the transitions of different paragraphs.

Hope you can tell me what do think about this issue and provide more advice for me to make progress on my English writing!

PS, here are some pictures of my former university and current university~