Let Your Child Travel If You Love Him.
There is a Chinese proverb, “Let your child travel if you love him.” It means traveling can be a good lesson to a person. Traveling to new places could be dangerous and difficult, but it can be a great opportunity to learn that you cannot do in classroom. Of course, you can visit a lot of beatiful and historic tourist attractions, but it can give you more than that. If you are completely used to get everything from your parents, it is not easy to do all by yourself. In this respect, traveling teaches you how to lead a real life. During traveling, if a certain problem happens, you have to get the best solution by yourself or with your party. There might not be an advisor, or might be an obstructor. Plus, you need to plan on spending money because your budget is limited. Sometimes you would not be able to eat what you want, and you should put up with some inconveniences. While you go through the hardship, you would reach the limitation of controlling yourself several times. Through these process, you become a real adult, and that’s why traveling is worth it.
Bo In:
I really like how you quoted an old Chinese proverb! that’s a great way to start a piece of writing. I would probably reverse the two parts of the sentence, starting with “if”, to make the sentence smoother: “If you love your child, let him travel.”
There’s also the problem that this saying uses a male pronoun. In most academic writing, we try to avoid this, but it’s hard with a sentence like this. One possibility is “Loving parents should let their children travel.”
However, my main concern with this is that first you’re discussing this in terms of someone’s children, but then suddenly you’re writing about me! (Which is what’s happening when you write “you”). In conversation, sometimes “You can learn a lot” means the more general “someone”, but in academic writing, instead of “you”, we try to more carefully explain the person we’re referring to. How you do this depends on who you are writing for: if it’s for parents, you might write, “Your child”, while if it’s for young people, you might use the very general pronoun, “one”. For example: “Through these processes, your child can become a real adult.”
Try rewriting the paragraph without the word “you” — that is, without directly addressing the reader.
mistergord on April 4th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Gord:
Thank you very much for your comment. Actually, I was not sure which pronoun I should use when I wrote this. I like the sentence that you suggested. “Loving parents should let their children travel”is better than my title.
However, I wrote this paragraph for not only parents but also many other people. I quoted the proverb just to show that traveling is considered such a good experience, and it is recommanded through a proverb. That’s why I worte so many “you”s in the paragraph. I think it would be better to change the last sentence to “Through these processes, one can become a real adult.” Then, what should I do with the other sentences in the middle of the paragraph? Is it alright if I let them as they are because I targeted a wide range of audience?
boin on April 4th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Bo In,
In that case, I think it’s better if you speak in general terms. It’s usually better to speak in the hypothetical (“a person”) than to directly address the reader (“you”).
The thing is, in academic writing, we avoid gendered pronouns, too. It used to be that any pronoun could just be male [he, him, his], but now we don’t write that way. Instead, we often try to structure sentences so that gendered pronouns aren’t necessary. We don’t say “he” or “she”, but instead use words like “a person”, “someone”, “that person”, and so on.
I’ll give you an example from your paragraph:
“Of course, travel means a chance to visit a lot of beatiful and historic tourist attractions, but it can give a person more than that.”
In one case, I changed the verb from “gives you” to “means a chance to…” and avoided the pronoun; in the second case, I replaced “you” with a person. Both of these are good ways of avoiding gendered pronouns — either we change the verb so the pronoun’s not needed, or we use another word instead of a gendered pronoun.
Try rewriting it without “you” or other gendered pronouns, but be warned: it’s difficult to do! Native speakers sometimes struggle with it, so it won’t be easy for you, either. That’s okay, though: it’s worth it to try.
mistergord on April 5th, 2006 at 9:24 pm