Chapter 3 Speech at the symposium on style of writing

Over the past few years, I have deeply felt that our articles are too long. The reason is that there is such an atmosphere that does not like to write short articles. As a result, things that can inspire you slip past gently. Another situation is the sameness. The most common thing is that after a political movement is launched, what this person writes is similar to what another person wrote. If the author's name is covered, people who read it will not know who wrote it.On the contrary, some old writers in the past have their own unique style, and it is often possible to guess who wrote it without signing it.

Another one is unrefined.Written articles that do not capture the reader's attention are inaccurate. The most important thing in writing an article is clarity, power, and beauty. Without these three things, people don't like to read it.My eyes are high and my hands are low. I criticize others here, but I may not be able to do it myself. It is precisely because I cannot do it that I feel anxious. I feel that many young writers have read less Chinese books and more translations. To be more precise, it is not that they have read too many translations, but that they have read too few Chinese books.

My child came back from school and said: Today, the teacher taught me the phrase "the branches of red apricots are full of spring", and after a few days, I learned the phrase "the south bank of the river is green again in the spring breeze", but I only know these two poems, nothing else. have no idea.The article should be written clearly and vividly, because there are many words.We have a lot of vocabulary in China, but it is a pity that the young people have not mastered it, so they write long novels of 300,000 to 40,000 characters, and "great", "glorious" and so on are all published.I heard that a student in the former Nankai Middle School scored 120 points in his composition. How could he get 120 points?He wrote in his article: "The weather is very good today, the flowers are very fragrant, the scenery is very beautiful, and I am very happy..." After using twelve "ten points" in a row, the teacher gave him 120 points.So write this, because he can use too few adjectives.

Listen to people talk more, talk to people more.Don't think that only intellectuals can speak.When I was at the National People's Congress, I liked to listen to the speeches of workers and peasants. Their speeches had a characteristic of short sentences.It is best to write articles with short sentences. Long sentences are easy to distract people's attention. Pay attention to the phonology of the language. The poems written by soldiers listed in "Liberation Army Literature and Art" sometimes have very good rhymes, much better than ours.When I go abroad, people ask me to recite new poems, but I can’t recite them. It’s not that there are no good new poems, but that I can’t remember them.Phonology is the strength of Chinese characters. We must work hard to master it, especially after the pinyin of Chinese characters, everyone must work hard to learn to read Chinese characters. I don't understand.Many young people can't distinguish initials and finals, let alone what are initials and finals.Chairman Mao likes to write lyrics, which are highly artistic. He not only pays attention to rhyme, but also pays attention to four tones (level up, down, down) and five tones (lips, teeth, mouth, tongue and nose), which is better than poetry. "Swallows come and go in the setting sun, such a country", there are three characters in the last sentence in a flat tone, so it is very loud to read.Paying attention to phonology does not mean going back to the past, but that we Chinese must be able to speak Chinese, not only be able to speak it, but also to speak it nicely.

Another phenomenon is that some articles are grammatically incomprehensible and logically confusing, and it is not easy to detect them all at once. If you translate them into foreign languages, you will see the faults.The grammar of foreign languages ​​is very strict, and our grammar is also very strict, but because some people don't know how to use it, it seems that there is no grammar when they are translated into a foreign language, and they don't know where the subject is.Most of the people who commit this kind of problem have not read Chinese books well, nor have they read translated books well.

Generally speaking, good articles are not equally good. Everyone has their own good methods, and everyone has vocabulary that everyone is familiar with.That's why we advocate that articles should have style.If you are not familiar with the vocabulary, you will inevitably use the preface and the postscript incorrectly.I advocate writing short articles. Everyone is very busy, especially those who go down, and they don’t have time to write long articles, and there are so many new things, it’s a pity to let them slip by.Second, write as shallowly as possible.Speaking of this, I think of the creation of children's literature.Despite repeated appeals from the party and the government, not many people wrote about it.When I came back from Egypt, the radio station asked me to make a broadcast to children. I wrote a draft and sent it, but the radio station returned it. They said that the children could not understand your draft. The slogan was removed, and an article was rewritten for broadcasting.If everyone writes more children's literature, the things they write will definitely be more lively, vivid, brighter, shorter and shallower than the original ones.A side statement: I am not an editor, so I don't need to avoid the suspicion of drafting for you.