True Story 1.14
Good sentences don’t always make good paragraphs
The setting for this story
Jinhee, an immigrant to the U.S. from South Korea, was making steady progress in learning to write compositions in English. But she found paragraphs much more challenging than sentences.
A story of misaligned minds 16
Jinhee’s instructor moved her into his advanced class because he was amazed by how rapidly she had mastered sentence construction. But at the advanced level, Jinhee encountered a speed bump.
The instructor assigned the advanced students to write a short essay about college education. Writing in English but employing the reasoning patterns common in Korea, Jinhee wrote this:
“College is an institution of higher learning that gives degrees. We all need culture and education in life; if we get no education, our lives will go to living hell.
One of the greatest causes of this is that while the other animals have remained as they first were, only humans made such rapid progress in learning about civilization.
Improvement of the highest civilization means education is kept up to date. College education is a very important thing; we don’t need to mention it.”
The instructor’s written comment was, “More focus needed; get to the point.” Jinhee didn’t understand. After class, she asked him how to improve it. He said he’d respond via email. That evening, she received the revised essay, which consisted of the same sentences, rearranged; also, one of her sentences had been discarded:
“College education is a very important thing; we don’t need to mention it. We all need culture and education in life; if we get no education, our lives will go to living hell.
One of the greatest causes of this is that while the other animals have remained as they first were, only humans made such rapid progress in learning about civilization. Improvement of the highest civilization means education is kept up to date.”
Jinhee’s question
Why is my English instructor’s rearranged essay an improvement on the one I submitted to him?
Critique of story 1.14
Like Jinhee’s instructor, you probably experienced her original paragraph as disorganized and rambling. The instructor’s written comment is typical of an American teacher’s reaction.
The revision made by the instructor is emblematic of a central difference in how Koreans and Americans organize their thoughts. He copied her last sentence (“College education is a very …”) and pasted it into the first position in his revision. Then he discarded Jinhee’s first sentence (“College is an institution …”). Nothing else changed. All the other sentences in the instructor’s revision proceed in exactly the same order as in Jinhee’s original paragraph.
American native speakers of English usually find a paragraph comprehensible if its first sentence (or two) states the general topic to be discussed in the subsequent sentences. Then the subsequent sentences introduce various details about the paragraph’s general topic, elaborating and/or sharpening the reader’s understanding of it.
Americans: general topic statement → various details
Korean native speakers are accustomed to organizing their thoughts differently. They begin a paragraph with a series of sentences that introduce various details about a general topic. Then, at the end of the paragraph, they state the general topic of those sentences.
Koreans: various details → general topic statement
When Koreans emigrate to any other country, they continue to apply their accustomed style to whatever new language they’re learning, just as you and I would if we were to emigrate.
Sometimes the “fix” seems simple: The instructor’s main change was simply to transfer Jinhee’s last sentence into first position. What’s not simple for a learner of a second or third language is to turn upside-down a pattern of thinking that became firmly anchored in their mind during their foundational early classroom learning.
For thought
If you’re involved with students from abroad who are challenged by our ways of reasoning and writing, you will likely enjoy and benefit from reading Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing, by Helen Fox, published in 1994 by the National Council of Teachers of English, and only 136 text pages in length.
Related stories
Stories 10.01, 10.05, and 10.11 relate other instances of people who’ve come to the U.S. from abroad – in one case a teacher – having trouble adapting to American patterns of speaking and writing. All three are based on accounts in the book recommended in the previous paragraph.
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Endnotes:
16 Norton, 125.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.