Chinese School - Writer should know where the limits are

Opinion / Raymond Zhou

Writer should know where the limits are

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-01-13 14:45

Not one month goes by without Han Han creating news of one kind or
another. This time, the 24-year-old best-selling writer-cum-race car
driver hit the headlines when one of his blog postings was used as a
negative example by a high school language test.

Han was not happy. Although he admitted they were grammatical errors, he
blamed China's educational system for "meaningless analysis that adds
dimensions unthought of by the writers themselves". He wrote of the
criticism: "To put it lightly, this has been a ludicrous incident; and to
be serious, it is a violation of a writer's rights."

After studying the flawed sentences, I have no doubt that they are indeed
grammatically incorrect, but not really serious enough in that they are
not misleading. It seems that he wrote the blog so fast as to be a
verbatim transcript of an impromptu speech. And if he had read it over
and done some editing, he would have caught them.

We all have slips in writing. Typos alone account for much of our
embarrassment. Besides, we tend to treat our blogs as semi-private
journals, often not holding them up to professional judgment. Speaking of
which, we can hardly eliminate all errors from our printed publications.

When I read a friend's blog and encounter some glaring error, I often
hesitate over whether to notify the writer. It is often caused by the
computer input method which automatically puts in the second character of
a two-character Chinese word regardless of whether it's the one you
wanted. In no way does this suggest anything about the blogger's writing
ability.

I would have excused most bloggers from the burden of editing simply
because blogging is more for fun than for publishing. But for Han, things
are somewhat different: He is a professional writer and he has a huge
following among teenagers, who may not know the way he writes those
sentences are too colloquial to pass a school test or for any formal
occasion. He has the responsibility to edit his postings before the
millions of netizens log in.

Han is undoubtedly gifted. I wouldn't even say his refusal to take
criticism is "bad attitude". That's the way he is, and we should refrain
from making him "docile or obedient", or in nicer sounding but equally
condescending words, "a good boy". But being wild is not the same as
being linguistically erroneous.

I have to say whoever chose this blog posting for correction made the
right decision. I've known publishers who would delete anything that does
not conform to standard writing. They don't know there is a whole set of
online slang popular among a large swath of the population yet totally
unknown to other segments of society.

When some government departments banned words like "pk" from newspapers
and "supergirl" from dictionaries, they often remain blissfully unaware
that they are playing, not with fire, but with flowing water, so to
speak. Language is like a river, it flows, and building a dam may not
work. New words are coined when there's a need. It is the manifestation
of a society in constant change. Like all things new, most will go out of
fashion but a few will be accepted into mainstream usage.

A linguistic purist is an oxymoron, unless the language one studies is
Latin. Even if it's not a slang word but technically wrong, it may become
an alternative if a powerful spokesperson adopts it. I've known
pronunciations that have been prohibited by dictionaries, but when used
on China Central Television, they have graduated to standard usage. Han
Han may have to couch his inadvertent blemishes in groundbreaking writing
before he has a shot at reshaping the Chinese language. He should know
his limits.

raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/13/2007 page4)

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