Brute force English

I reviewed a paper typesetted using M$ Word written by a non-native speaker, and I found a very good word called “brute force English” to describe a large category of mistakes people make in English writing with “audacity”.

As you might know, Word is notorious in breaking paragraph into lines because it (a) uses a greedy algorithm instead of a dynamic programming algorithm to break the lines, (b) and never break the words to make nicer looking. For instance, if you have a long word, say, enterprise, in TeX, if this word makes the width of the line overflow and it’s also ugly to move the entire word to the next line because then you will have too much blank on this line, TeX will break the word to something like enter-prise with a hyphen in between them. However, Word doesn’t support this.

OK, go back to the previous topic. In the paper I reviewed, the author has paragraphs like this:

My fellow citizens: I stand here today hum

bled by the task before us, grateful for t

he trust you have bestowed, mindful of the

sacrifices borne by our ancestors.

Yes, he uses “line break within the word”!

This aroused my curiosity: why is he brave enough to write this down? An alternative question is, why we, ESL writers, usually violate the rules in English writing and still feel confident?

My answer to the above question is that, the ESL writers, when facing some confusing in writing, usually use the “brute force” way to write. For example, we will choose the word that means A in English to the blank where it really needs A’. Perhaps in their native language, A and A’ are similar,  but not the case in English. They will probably also use sentence patterns that resemble the patterns in the their native language, but not in English; they will “invent/borrow rules” that they wish or think to be correct; they will put words and grammatical structures down bravely, without consulting a book or a dictionary.

I have the same problem. I am confident about my writing skill and style in Chinese, thus I will stick to the direct translation in writing. When I meet some phrases in Chinese that can not be translated to English directly, I will use brute force–inventing the almost-always-not-correct rules to reconstruct my sentence in Chinese to English.

I think a good writing is definitely a mixture of style and language, and actually language is always one of the most the limitations in writing for ESL writer. We usually find that there are some rules, some patterns we want to use that are not in English but only exist in our native language. The right way is to overcome this limit is to use English in the English way, by more reading and practicing, instead of inventing rules to pass around it.

If we use the set language, the point I want to make is as follows. English and our Native language are two different sets with some possible intersections,  but they are not the subset of each other. Therefore, we should not expect to find a one-to-one onto mapping from our native language to English, expecting that the results by using the mapping to the native language pattern (or some pattern in our brain which is a mixture of English and the native language, e.g. Chingish) is the correct English. More often than not, it is not the correct English.

Note to myself: do not use brute force English, because it is not the right way to do English writing.