War on Chinglish (12)

According to statistics....     This aggravating tic in Chinese writers of English is, I suppose, just one of the more common examples of the general tendency to inappropriately transfer over into English the Chinese language's predilection for beginning every sentence with an utterly redundant but context highlighting phrase or clause, sometimes called a 'topic clause'.  I assume this is deemed necessary in Chinese because the language is so replete with homophones that one's meaning often slides into ambiguity without such frequent heavy-handed 'signposting'.  In English, however, it's just clunky, inelegant, unnecessary.   Our example today typically manifests itself in academic or technical writing where the author wants to introduce objective data to support his argument, and will invariably say something like...   "According to statistics, 88.8% of Chinglishisms make Froog tear his hair out."   or...   "According to statistics, only 11.7% of central government spending this year has been applied to major infrastructure projects."     You see, those figures are statistics.  That is immediately obvious.  So, to introduce them with the word 'statistics' is entirely redundant.   One might also object that there is a rupture of logic here, since the statistic quoted is not "according to statistics": it is not derived from itself, but from some kind of survey or official report.  One might use this phrase to give the origin of the statistics (e.g. "According to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization, malaria infections increased by 8% worldwide last year."), but to say "According to statistics..." on its own is just ridiculous.   PLEASE stop doing it.     At least I got a new variation on this in the latest article I've been editing (much better than yesterday's):   "According to relevant statistics...."   Well, that's nice.  So much better than using the irrelevant ones, as so often happens with my Chinese authors.  Or the ones that are just completely made up.