Sex without Foreplay writing style seems to be a thing in Taiwan for advice to write an SoP, that is crazy....

Dear All,

If you are reading this on our Medium account, posts in English have reached absolutely no one; so I won’t bother further posts there, apologies. Thankfully our translation into Chinese has indeed reached a number of readers, so I will endeavor to post occasionally on timely topics. (Actually I have given up on the Chinese posts as well. Time to find a new platform. This is my last post to Medium; a copy is to be found on Linkedin.)

Today, I want to discuss a curious trend among my Taiwanese clients in regard to their SoP draft submissions that add another additional layer of difficulty piled on top of the sometimes obscuring use of ChatGPT as an ad hoc editor. Before exploring the problematic composition style which I call the sex without foreplay style – which is equally unsatisfying to the recipients – a quick comparison of typical Chinese and English essay writing narrative styles is in order.

Given that the art of essay writing seems in decline among both language communities this may also offer some readers some basic guidance in regard to what makes for a good essay, particularly in English. Moreover for the skeptics that doubt that SoP submissions are even read by a live human being, I can argue that if even it is automated now (yet very unlikely) or in the future (quite possibly) – the essays that comprise the training data will definitely be proper narrative essays that are widely available from past SoP submissions in every university’s database. The criteria for automated assessment will undoubtedly follow the long-standing standards of Western narrative practice, not some new fangled idea of non-chronological or non-topical placement. Thus, you all are stuck with producing a convincing and totally informative draft that magnifies all the key points and criteria being sought by these educational and cultural institutions of the Western world.

Whereas the typical writer in Chinese history was a highly respected and educated nobleman whose words at length must necessarily be patiently awaited even if the most important statements come at the very end, in the West originally scribes were a special class of hired servants that if unskilled, boring or insulting could end up decapitated by the warrior elites of Europe who barely tolerated them as a necessity but rewarded the skilled and entertaining scribes with praise and minor wealth. This meant that scribes writing in European languages especially in English or other languages in the earlier history of the British Isles needed to craft an engaging story to please and keep the attention of the kings and elites who employed them. Their job like mine was to take the facts and render them interesting and memorable literally on pain of death.

So, English essays took on key elements of good story-telling and cultural norms that are expected among listeners and readers. ?Where Chinese essay structure reflects a well planted field with tended rows of characters like seed all laid out in good order awaiting sun (intelligence) and rain (attention) leading to a flowering of meaning at the end, English essays must possess like all good stories a beginning, middle, and an end; a chronology of past, present and future. The English essay is arranged in battle order like a hunting campaign: a sudden intent search for the prey, identifying the prey, a firing of your best shot (which is the thesis statement that traditionally appears at the end of the opening paragraph), then a circling around firing at least three more shots (the middle of the essay presenting supporting arguments or evidence of qualifications), then as the beast weakens and the reader convinced you close upon the subject (the sharpest of close arguments explaining why the target school is best for you) and then the final kill (when you convince the reader of the inevitability of the success of your will and the future outcome that must result). This is the structure of a well-crafted persuasive essay be it implicit or explicit. It is a variation on the telling of a hunter’s tale that conveys both “negatives” of suspense and challenge, and “positives” of strength and skill, but one in which you involve your reader indicating that the hero’s success can be facilitated by the reader – in this case the selection committee and professors who might likely be joining you in your hunt or you in theirs.

You can see from this explanation if you are a native speaker of Chinese that this is not what is expected traditionally - an exposition of whom you know, that you are a good seed with good characteristics and an eagerness to grow under the guidance of a master farmer. Nor is it this new trend of “sex without foreplay” that shoots all the shots in the first sentence and then loses our attention entirely thereafter. It seems to me that someone took a sentence of my standard advice: ‘don’t leave the importance of your purpose to the end, but tell the reader in the introduction what you mean to do.” – Then they applied this advice in extreme, putting the most important sentence in the first line of the essay. Neither are convincing to a Western reader.

There are only two circumstances in which this boring, foreplay-less strategy could be successful: one is at a school with very low application rates such that they ended up ignoring assessment of documents and took anybody willing to pay to fill seats; and the other is in the circumstance that some school left selection of students to a scientist that actually is entirely overburdened by the extra work and could not be bothered to do anything but scan quickly documents to assess whom they would choose. Both circumstances make one wonder if the many thousands of dollars being paid are worth the education one might receive therefrom if a) anyone is fine to be their student or b) they are so bankrupt that professors are now tasked with all the work of an admissions department.

As an editor I insist on my client’s success, thus I use the style that has worked for countless past clients and likely will work even when an AI has cloned my skills a century hence and the assessment is automated as well but “trained” upon the extant database.