Please recall your experience in your writing classes, what’s the basic rule for academic writing? Direct logic, right? Navigate the readers; help them understand the logic arrangement in your essay. It seems quite natural. But have you ever thought that there is a kind of culture in which people avoid this way on purpose? Does it exist? Yes, it is Chinese culture. (It locates on the other side of earth just like its attitude towards the writing style.) Why do you talk about B if you want to illustrate A? Well, it is related to the purpose of Chinese literature and its great influence on Chinese people.
The Chinese writers always avoid stating the thesis directly because they think this kind of way deprives readers of their imagination space. Instead, we will try their best to rendering the surroundings, mentioning the objects, people, matters which only have the underneath connections with the thesis. As a reader, we should put ourselves totally into the environment the writer created for us and use our mind to ‘feel’ the articles, to imagine the scenes. Only in this way can we fully understand what the writer is talking about. It is the most character of Chinese literature.
For example, let’s look at the picture below.
An American may describe the scenery like ‘the lake is so clear that I can even distinguish the little plankton on the bottom. But a Chinese writer may prefer the sentence like this: ‘I seem like standing in the middle of the sky.’ Does he say any word related to clear\lake? The answer is obvious no. But the writer is indeed talking about the lake. The logic is like this, the lake is very clear so the reflection image of the sky is exactly looks like the real one, it means, above the writer’s head is our real sky, at the same time, a image of the sky is under the writer’s feet. That’s why the writer would say he seems like standing in the middle of the sky.
This kind of style is so ineradicable that Chinese people cannot get rid of it even in the academic writing. As I have mentioned before, China had been feudatorial country for more than 2 thousand years in which there is no academic writing at all. Cultural background like this makes the writing style mentioned above deep into every Chinese’ mind thoroughly. Because of this, many Chinese students present the common shortcomings in academic writing. Every time when I start to write something academically, I can’t help myself to modify my sentences to make them more beautiful, even I know the accuracy and precision is the most important characters in an academic writing.
All in all, switching the writing is always a hard processing but if we can understand the culture and purpose behind those rules, it will be much easier for us to master writing skills in a new environment.
