《中式英语之鉴》阅读笔记 p3-p25

玉米。

Reader: 赵一铭
Reading time: 3h
Reading task: p3-p25
After reading this part I realized that trimming linguistic fat is really about decoding cultural fingerprints. The book's examples struck a personal chord—my emails unconsciously replicated Chinese syntactic cadences, like saying "make improvements to" instead of "improve." Those "category nouns" ("the work of planning") I'd mindlessly carried over became visible shackles.

First, hunt cultural ghosts. Phrases like "accelerate the pace of economic reform" shrink to "accelerate economic reform" by shedding what I call "syntactic padding"—redundancies born from translation habits. My notebook now lists dozens: "promoting reunification" punches harder than "promoting the cause of reunification."

Second, trust your reader's intelligence. Academic writing often drowns ideas in "protective verbiage," but as my professor once scrawled in red ink: "Clarity bleeds through brevity."

Third, know when to bend. While most "category nouns" are dead weight, context matters. Diplomatic statements sometimes need the ceremonial heft of "follow a policy of..."

Tools like LLMLingua-2 show AI can compress text to 20% length through token-level analysis, but human discernment remains key. When E.B. White warned that unnecessary words "do positive harm," he might as well have been addressing cross-cultural writers. Our trimmed sentences become bridges, not losses.