True Story 10.05
Becoming accustomed to a different style of prose writing
The setting for this story
Surya had been raised by well-educated parents in Nepal and grew up learning to read and write in both Sanskrit and English. After university graduation, he held several professional positions that required him to write in both languages for a variety of audiences. But after he began graduate studies in the United States, things quickly began to go sour. Here’s how Surya recalls those days:
A story of misaligned minds8
As I had expected, there were numerous essays and papers to write and submit to my professors. Being a professional writer, I welcomed these. But when I began receiving them back, they all contained more or less distressing feedback notes. Here are excerpts from one of the notes:
Surya, your vocabulary is excellent, maybe even too excellent: “I was dying to be engulfed in their politeness” sounds so overdone as not to be plausible. Another problem here is that the point of your story is too subtle for Americans (even me) to catch. For example, I’m actually not sure what your conclusion is.
What?! I could hardly believe it. I had interrupted a successful writing career in Nepal to study here. Surely my flight halfway round the world hadn’t wrecked my well-honed skills as a writer!
Surya’s question
I had written professionally in English for years. So why can’t these English-speaking professors understand what I write?
Critique of story 10.05
Surya’s parents are to be admired for raising him to be fluent in two languages that have totally different writing systems. They preferred one of them, though. So impressed were they by the Hindu classics (e.g., the Bhagavad Gita) that they had their children read them aloud in Sanskrit in the evenings. So Surya and his siblings became deeply familiar with the elegant literary style of classic Sanskrit, widely admired by well-educated Nepalis. Surya learned to write fluently in this elegant style not only in Sanskrit but also in English, a notable achievement – and a useful one for a young professional writer whose career would be spent in Nepal.
But it’s not a useful achievement for a Nepali writer who becomes a graduate student at an American university.
Surya’s readers now were his professors, who all were deeply familiar with English as it’s commonly used in American-style academic writing. They found Surya’s style exaggerated and verbose, which to their professorial way of thinking seemed insincere. Most likely, they were irritated by his frequent use of what Americans regard as over-the-top hyperbole. Equally irritating was Surya’s cautious, roundabout, indirect style, which made it hard for his professors to follow his reasoning and understand his conclusions.
Growing up, Surya had securely internalized the Nepali norm against criticizing others – or even appearing to do so. Consequently, Nepalis often express themselves indirectly, imprecisely, even ambiguously. For example, instead of pointing out to someone a better way of getting a task done, a Nepali might tell that person about a friend who efficiently accomplishes a similar task.
If Surya is going to do well as a graduate student in the U.S., he’ll need to unlearn deeply embedded stylistic habits of expression. Some might say, “OK, but at least he’s already fluent in English.” True – in the Nepali style of expressing English. Replacing that florid, oblique style with American professors’ fact-forward, direct, objective, “academic” style will be challenging.
For thought
This isn’t only a challenging intellectual task for Surya. It’s also a challenging emotional task. Whenever Surya is trying to write, it will feel wrong, paragraph after paragraph, to do so in the assertive, tell-it-like-it-is manner that Americans praise as “straightforward.” Many discussions of cross-cultural adaptation overlook emotional, seemingly moral or ethical, hurdles such as this.
Related stories
Stories 1.14 and 10.01 also describe the writing challenges of older students from abroad. Story 10.14 specifically discusses stylistic variations in the speaking of English. And story 4.10 tells of indigenous American students who found it emotionally impossible to write a certain type of common (to you and me) document.
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Endnotes:
8 Fox, 67–69. See also Campbell & Li, 382–83, 390.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.