tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post7584998836424004866..comments2024-02-04T10:42:07.020-05:00Comments on Light reading: The interior lives of young peopleJenny Davidsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02295436498255927522noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-61963810640147106122007-03-09T04:53:00.000-05:002007-03-09T04:53:00.000-05:00Dear JennyOne more thing: do you feel that the "ge...Dear Jenny<BR/><BR/>One more thing: do you feel that the "general, educated" reader is an empirically empty label. On side I have a part of myself that is sympathetic with abstraction, openness, speculativeness, and theoretical complexities; another side is altogether almost mathethically rigorous which expects absolute precision and formulaic definition. With respect to the "general, educated reader," unless one can define unambiguously, unequivocally, concretely, explicitly, exactly who on earth the "general, educated reader" is, I'm not sure is a helpful prescription for those who must write at the university level. Secondly, when dealing this kind of aggregate-identity or the public collectivity who might consume what I have to say, if they're so picky, who cares about them?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-55013266930134948892007-03-09T03:50:00.000-05:002007-03-09T03:50:00.000-05:00Dear JennyRegarding the writing workshop I am taki...Dear Jenny<BR/><BR/>Regarding the writing workshop I am taking, I would like to reproduce for you the opening sentence of an essay I brought to the workshop since my professor referred me. Reading it, I can see how it could be made shorter, or split in two, but overall, I don't see what the major objection is to it, other than it's brimming maybe some extraneous detail, detail which is not directly supporting my central claim, but which I feel as an opening sentence, imparts a sense of historical context and breadth to something that literally could be reduced to merely: "Civil service examines determined the placement of officials in Qing dynasty China. They could be at the county, provincial, or capital level."<BR/><BR/>"Supplanting the Nine-Rank system of the Three Kingdoms which was largely hereditary-based, in pre-modern China, during the Imperial bureaucracy of the Qing Dynasty as well as during those of the Han and Ming, civil service examinations determined the appointment and placement of government officials in counties, provinces, and within the capital city itself, Beijing, with the exams for each level of service becoming progressively more difficult, and by rough rule of thumb as mentioned in the textbook, the degrees granted - namely the Shengyuan, the Juren, and the Jinshi - correlated with the B.A., M.A., and Ph. D. at modern Western universities1. "Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com