On Writing Good Chinese

Despite the great differences between English and Chinese, William Zinsser’s article “Writing English as a Second Language” http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-language/ turns out to be equally useful for improving Chinese writing. Writing good Chinese requires, in particular, the principles of simplicity and brevity. While ancient literates were following these rules of thumb for thousands of years, contemporary Chinese seem to forget them.

When I read the People’s Daily, my head often spins. The mouthpiece of the Chinese Government is full of articles with copious sentences. The editorial staff probably considers short sentences too simple to exert authority. One way to make any Chinese sentence longer (than necessary) is to use lots of nouns. Another trick is to convert verbs into nouns and write in the passive voice. This is exactly what Zinsser detests in English writing. It is no less catastrophic in Chinese writing. A reporter prefers “为了维持房价数据的稳定” (which can be directly translated as “in order to maintain the stability of the figures of the housing prices”) to “为了稳定房价” (which can be directly translated as “in order to stabilize the housing prices”). Worst of all, the journalists of the People’s Daily often squeeze all the information of who, what, when and where into one sentence. In Chinese writing, that means a long string of characters without any space. Reading a long sentence as such is like solving a puzzle.

Another problem with long sentences is that they sound neither rhythmic nor melodic. In ancient China, the most popular poetic forms contain either five or seven characters in each line. Most Chéngyǔ comes in four characters as well. Ancient Chinese literates have indeed showed us that less is better.

While Zinsser advises writers to get rid of all words not doing useful work, it is very easy to put in extra useless words in Chinese writing. Some Chinese characters do not denote any “thing” or “concept”. They are used to link words, phrase a sentence, indicate tense or simply to make a sentence sound better. The character “的” is a typically interesting example. “的” is often used to indicate possession. It can also form part of an adjective or adverb. “的” is so versatile that it is often overused. Ancient Chinese writers did not have the same problem with “的”. It is a modern Chinese character and never appears in classical texts. If ancient Chinese could produce a whole article or poem without using a single “的”, I reckon that we can all learn to be less generous in using it.

Zinsser stresses that writing is learned by imitation. I cannot agree more. We have to be careful when choosing our models though. Reading Tang poems clearly serves us better than reading the People’s Daily. 

Valeria Teo is the author of this article.