Keri Ortiz
Dr. De Vries
ENGL 5001
March 2, 2009
Commentary #1
The Literary Minds and the Carving of Dragonsby Liu Hsieh
Rhetoric in Ancient China: Introduction Xing Lu
This is my first experience reading about non-western rhetoric. I am not quite sure what I expected to find but I do know that I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed my reading of the text.
In his introduction Lu seemed to repeat again and again that one cannot rely on translations to completely understand Chinese rhetoric. How else can we learn it? We have learned Ancient Greek in much the same way. Not many scholars today read ancient Greek yet we can understand their main concepts and points through translations. Lu goes on to describe some of the mistakes we (westerners) make when reading this ancient Chinese rhetoric. I found it interesting that there is no literal translation of the word rhetoric and that many of the ideas of western rhetoric exist in Chinese rhetoric but they exist in different ways that are sometimes lost in translation when a word or phrase is taken out of context.
The article from The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons very eloquently begins with a description of the composition process appropriately named by Hsieh as “casting and cutting” (Hsieh179). In the first step, “casting,” the writer is giving “form to his emotions and ideas” (Hsie 179). There is no refinement in the first step because its purpose is to get ideas onto paper. “Cutting” is the refinement of the language or the ideas so that every word is necessary and it “prevents the growth of verbal weeds” (Hsieh 179). “Casting and cutting” is a simple and elegant phrase that describes a process that is oftentimes anything but simple and elegant. I found the language used to be very appropriate and saw few “verbal weeds.”
This section also contains an answer to every student’s question about the appropriate length of a paper. The gist of the discussion of length is that there is no appropriate length. An appropriate length can only be reached when there is not “a sentence that can be deleted …and not a word can be removed” (Hsieh 180). If a sentence or two could easily be deleted, then the writing is said to be, “loose” (Hsieh 180). When every word is vital then, according to Hsieh, the writing is “well-knit” (Hsieh 180). Hsieh goes on to give an example where one writer’s work is long but complete and another where the writer’s work is short but complete. The language in both pieces, even though different in length, was appropriate to the topic at hand, and so both papers were complete. I truly enjoyed this section.
This is an idea that has a place in today’s composition classroom. Even in graduate courses, when given a writing assignment students always ask, “How long should our paper be?” In an ideal world students would be capable of knowing when all their words and sentences are necessary. However, in the next chapter, it is noted that the reason students have difficulty with this step in the revision process is that they cannot get past the white noise and mental static in their minds so that they can see their own mistakes. This is true even of writing today because it sometimes takes several passes of reading my work aloud to myself before I catch certain errors. This is the reason that writing instructors almost always ask student to read their papers aloud to themselves, although I have never before heard someone liken the process to tuning a mental instrument.