The topic of the college entrance examination Chinese composition should not be the wonderful associations produced when a poet chants poems under the moon or the content of a scholar’s drunken ramblings. The topics for the college entrance examination composition should comply with the requirements of a calm and strict outline. Considering that composition is a required topic for all high school students taking the college entrance examination, the expression of the topic must be understandable to the vast majority of students taking the college entrance examination, and a topic that they can all potentially write about. In short, the topic of the college entrance examination composition should be a topic that high school students can write about, and the topic domain should be the topic world of high school students.
This year’s Shanghai composition topic seriously violates the basic principles, and even common sense, of the college entrance examination composition topics. To put it bluntly: the topic is off, and perhaps it’s still polite to say it’s off. Irresponsibly messing it up should be a more accurate description.
The Shanghai composition topic is as follows:
“A scholar uses ‘special’, ‘transfer’, and ‘transmit’ to summarize the three types of articles: ‘special’ refers to professional articles; ‘transfer’ refers to popular articles that are forwarded; ‘transmit’ refers to excellent works that have gained widespread dissemination, even articles that have been passed down through generations. He proposes that professional articles can be turned into popular articles that are forwarded, and facing a large number of ‘transfer’ articles, readers inevitably look forward to articles that can be passed down through generations.
From ‘special’ to ‘transmit’, must it necessarily go through ‘transfer’? Please connect with social life and write an article to discuss your understanding and thinking.”
According to the topic’s prompt, this topic has a source. First of all, let’s not talk about whether the topic setter’s summary of the source article is accurate, the topic setter’s description of the relationship between the core words of the topic has problems.
Firstly, what is ‘special’? The topic setter says it’s ‘professional articles’. What are ‘professional articles’? The topic setter doesn’t say. As the name suggests, professional articles are articles based on a certain profession and highly technical. Professional articles are aimed at relevant professional groups. Professional articles require specialized knowledge to understand. Popular articles usually refer to articles that are not entirely based on professional knowledge and are less technical. They are aimed at the public, meaning articles that readers without specialized knowledge can understand. Accordingly, professional articles and popular articles are not only different in style, but they belong to two completely different types of discourse activities.
The topic setter says in the topic that ‘professional articles can be turned into popular articles that are forwarded’ (not to mention whether this is the original author’s intention), which completely violates the basic common sense of discourse activities. Even if a professional article is forwarded hundreds of millions of times, it is still a professional article. Reading it still requires relevant professional knowledge, and it cannot become a ‘popular’ article. I really want to know if the topic setter can give an example of a professional article that has become a popular article due to forwarding. Therefore, the causal relationship of the topic setter’s so-called article changing ‘special’ through ‘transfer’ is not established.
The topic setter’s understanding of ‘forwarding’ is worth discussing. There is no quantitative meaning in the semantic structure of ‘forwarding’. A few people forwarding is also forwarding, and tens of thousands of people forwarding is also forwarding. Forwarding does not necessarily have a scale effect or the ‘popular’ transfer that the topic setter mentions. The forwarding of professional articles usually takes place within relevant professional groups. Although the number of professional readers is naturally not comparable to that of general non-professional readers, there is no logical relationship between the number of people forwarding and the article becoming popular.
The original meaning of ‘articles passed down through generations’ should refer to articles that ‘are passed down to future generations’. In terms of the semantics of passing down through generations, longitudinal transmission is a necessary meaning, and the time span is a necessary meaning, but horizontal transmission and synchronous dissemination range are not necessary meanings of its semantics. Even if professional articles are not popular and have a narrow readership, but if they have a high degree of professional value, as long as future scholars read it, or even cite it, it will inevitably become an article passed down through generations. The continuation of academic concepts is all completed through articles passed down through generations.
The basic semantic core element of the word ‘passed down through generations’ is cross-generational ‘transfer’. Without ‘transfer’, no matter how good the article is, it cannot be ‘transmitted’ across generations. Based on this, the topic setter’s question: From ‘special’ to ‘transmit’, must it necessarily go through ‘transfer’? This question is not valid because it violates the basic meaning of ‘transmit’. If there is no ‘transfer’, where does ‘transmit’ come from?
The statement in the topic ‘and facing a large number of ‘transfer’ articles, readers inevitably look forward to articles that can be passed down through generations’ is also problematic. A large number of online ‘transfer’ articles, although mixed, have become part of big data, and it is inevitable that they will be passed down through generations. Of course, the topic setter’s ‘passed down through generations’ should refer to ‘superior’ works. The reason why there are transfer articles online is because readers think that some articles are well-written, and they actually participate in the discourse operation process of the article being passed down through generations through forwarding. The so-called ‘readers inevitably look forward to articles that can be passed down through generations’ is difficult to establish. If there is no recognition of what is being transferred, no ‘expectation’, how can a large number of forwards occur? More importantly, online resources are extremely rich, and readers can naturally distinguish and know where to find ‘works passed down through generations’.
The topic setter did not specify the original source of the topic, and used the word ‘a scholar’. However, netizens are too powerful, and immediately found out that this was an article written by Professor Hu Xiaoming in ‘Wenhui Bi Hui’ in 2019, titled ‘The ancients said ‘the nine lives of an article’, it’s too pessimistic, I summarize it into three words: special, transfer, transmit’.
The article is a casual essay, and most casual essays have a certain idea or feeling, and the randomness of writing while thinking. The nature of the casual essay’s perception determines that when writing a casual essay, what is considered is the elaboration of an idea, rather than strict logic or meticulous argumentation.
Think about it, the topic setter should have read Professor Hu Xiaoming’s article in its entirety. As far as the casual essay is concerned, this article is still quite wonderful, but this article does not seem to be focused on discussing the relationship between ‘special’, ‘transfer’, and ‘transmit’. The article seems to be trying to convey a certain reality criticism through the discussion of ‘special’ and ‘transfer’:
“However, after reading too many articles by experts, I have another opinion, no patterns, no literary talent, no personal temperament and emotions. We need experts, but if all the articles in the world are only expert articles, only academic journal papers, and all readers, except for gossip, are eight-part essays, all entering the ‘China National Knowledge Infrastructure database’, that is also definitely not the true meaning of Chinese article studies.”
“Things have two sides, under the banner of ‘articles are the great cause of governing the country’, there must be people who regard articles as stepping stones to achieve various goals. Expert articles will deteriorate into ‘brick’ articles. That is, the article of ‘stepping stones’ has now also become a kind of ‘specialized learning’.”
The author seems not to have addressed the issue of ‘special’ and ‘transfer’ when discussing ‘transfer’:
“The authors always hope that their articles can be read by more people and get a rapid thumbs-up, and the reputation returns of the present world, but specializing in this kind of thing, in order to move the world for a while, and to be surprised and listened to, will quickly turn into the dust in the wind-swept, era vacuum cleaner. The more popular online articles are, the more likely they are to be short-lived.”
I guess the topic setter inferred the topic based on these few sentences:
“My three words here are also a dialectical relationship. Expert articles, which are too small-scale and too closed, will naturally transform into ‘transfer’ expert articles, and ‘transfer’ expert articles, which are too superficial, too vulgar, and too accommodating to human feelings and fashion, will naturally give rise to a demand, a truly passed-down article.”
This is a casual essay, so there is no need to over-discuss the logical relationship of these words with the previous ones. However, if you think about it carefully, the author is not without a logical relationship here. It is worth noting and emphasizing that what the author should discuss here is not the issue of expert articles being transferred into popular articles, that is, it is not the same article that has changed the nature of professional articles through ‘transfer’. The author cleverly used ‘transform’, and then the word ‘transfer’ was put in quotation marks, and it was ‘transfer expert articles’. Since it is ‘articles’, this shows that the articles being transferred are no longer expert articles.
This seems to be saying that the expert’s rationale is naturally boring when spoken by experts and cannot be disseminated, but the articles rewritten by ‘transfer’ experts will naturally not become articles passed down through generations. Those who study should naturally not be opportunistic in how to plagiarize the concepts of their predecessors. Of course, this is just my interpretation.
However, this meaning seems to be clearly expressed in the story that the author finally cited:
“In ‘A New Account of the Tales of the World’, there is also a story of ‘not failing the Tathagata’. The monk Zhi Mindu was preparing to cross the river and go south to preach Buddhism. There was a vulgar monk among his companions, and the two of them came up with a set of ‘mindless’ theories, preparing to use this set to cater to the psychology of the southerners. Years later, the vulgar monk regretted it, feeling that this kind of ‘transfer’ article that caters to the world was too unworthy of the Tathagata. He asked the monks going south: ‘Please tell old Zhi that the set of ‘mindless’ things is all nonsense, it was just to get a hot meal in the first place, so don’t talk about it anymore, otherwise it would be too unworthy of the Buddha!'”
Obviously, the reason why the vulgar monk regretted it was not because he was transferring articles, but because he was plagiarizing other people’s ideas and making up articles to get by. Where is this expressing the relationship between ‘special’, ‘transfer’, and ‘transmit’ in this year’s composition topic?
Although I don’t know Professor Hu Xiaoming, I believe that this topic is definitely not set by Hu Xiaoming. People who can participate in the college entrance examination topic setting should have a certain Chinese reading ability, right? If such an article is misinterpreted, and the concepts are confused, self-indulgent and pretentious, it is inevitable that the feeling that reality is always much thinner than our imagination will be triggered again.
Writing this, I couldn’t help but think of what a friend of mine said to me on WeChat yesterday: “I feel speechless when the children have studied hard for 12 years and finally encounter such a topic.” I really feel sorry for this mother and the children taking the Shanghai college entrance examination.
Seeing that some scholars are actually defending such a topic, I couldn’t help but be angry. The college entrance examination composition is not a composition competition, it does not need to be mysterious and have “deep thinking space”. This mystery is a nonsensical elegant cover-up, it’s mysterious to you, what about the candidates? What kind of depth does this nonsensical “special”, “transfer”, and “transmit” expand? A topic without a logical relationship, how can “deep thinking” be carried out? What is the basis for “depth” judgment? The college entrance examination is not specifically held for “elite” children, it is the basic right of ordinary students. The topics of the college entrance examination must have basic respect for the students’ learning, and must strictly abide by the Chinese teaching syllabus.
In fact, at my age, I shouldn’t be surprised anymore. This doesn’t seem to be the first time that a nonsensical topic has appeared in the college entrance examination, and it seems that the relevant departments have never pursued the responsibility of these people. But I still foolishly want to ask: Is there no review for the college entrance examination topics that affect thousands of families? No responsibility system? If the topic is messed up, does no one need to take responsibility?
If there is really no system to pursue responsibility, then the Shanghai Examination Institute must take responsibility this time! If the Shanghai Examination Institute is not responsible, then the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission must be responsible. If the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission is not responsible, the Shanghai Municipal Government must be responsible. I won’t go on.
Finally, a suggestion, in view of the fact that this topic was messed up this time, as compensation, the basic score of this Chinese composition should be given to each candidate during the grading.
Discover more from 自由档案馆
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.