I have been labouring for much of today over a particularly obtuse, garbled, and cliché-ridden "academic" article.
Towards the end, my author started to crow about the advances China has supposedly made in the last decade or so, not least in the advancement of its 'soft power' agenda and the increasing acceptance of the innate virtues of 'the Chinese way' in much of the rest of the world.
He asserted:
"Not a few people began to acknowledge the rationality, legitimacy and progressiveness of the Chinese political/economic system."
How I laughed! I giggled, I howled, I wept - I began to fear the teardrops falling on to my keyboard might short-circuit something.
With my usual editorial economy, I decided that deleting the initial 'Not' would be the easiest fix. Oh, and that 'rationality' had to go!
2 comments:
I think I might have worked out why you get fired- you rub people up the wrong way! If someone has the attitude that this sort of writing is what's expected and then some "old foreigner" comes along and puts the kibosh on all of that nonsense and you keep on doing that I can see a lot of "Heavenly Kingdom" advocates getting annoyed!
They should really learn to appreciate the value of someone who has achieved a western education at a high level but then I guess the majority in China get treated like shit anyway. Silly China!
I always do my best to rub people up the wrong way at interview, just so that no-one is under misapprehensions about what I'm going to be like in the job.
Unfortunately, so many Chinese employers just give you the job without even having met you.
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