Full Thread: China under Mao
View Single Post
Old March 16th, 2012 #12
Alex Linder
Administrator
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
Blog Entries: 34
Default

- more notes on this book. start by saying it irritates me that emotional subject matter like this is treated dispassionately by the author. this is a professional deformation of the phd class. something about going thru that process makes them all write looking side to side and over their shoulder. all they can think about is maintaining the correct prose pose in front of their peers. look, guys, it is perfectly fine to wax emotional where the material warrants it. all that matters from the 'objective' point of view, so to speak, is that when you make a factual claim, your fact actually is in fact a fact. if you have that squared away, the rest is up to you, and you should use whatever literary arts you have, not hide your paints under a bushel out of the need to be seemly. dramatize - to make vivid is to make memorable is to get your lesson across is to fulfill your task - right? god forbid your stuff, whatever it is, be entertaining as well as instructive, like those two categories are mutually exclusive or even opposed, rather than reinforcing, if handled correctly.