Analysis of Bengali Essay Books2005-12-11
Introduction...... 1
Impact of Essay Books...... 1
Tackling ‘Essay Book Style’...... 2
Introductions...... 3
Reasoning...... 4
Conclusions...... 3
Overcoming Bad Essay Writing Habits...... 4
Inaccuracy...... 5
Grandiloquence/bombast (long words)...... 6
Exaggeration...... 7
Repetition...... 8
Oversimplification /Over-Generalisation...... 9
Obscurity/Obsolescence ...... 10
Pointlessness...... 11
In Praise of Banglish Essays...... 12
Appendix: Some Essays...... 13
Introduction
Books of rochona (model essays) are a staple tool of English teaching in Bangladesh and have been for decades. These essays are formulaic compositions of about 250 words on a fairly narrow range of stock topics. The majority of these are perennial favourites with wide applicability, such as My School, A Tea Stall, My Daily life, Blessings of Modern Science, The Necessity of Discipline, the autobiography of a river. Bangladesh specific topics are also popular, such as Rural Development of Bangladesh, Arsenic Pollution, The International Mother Language Day, Care taker Government, The War Liberation of Bangladesh. Some variety is brought to the mix by a range of more modern topics of popular interest: The world cup football –98, Internet, Women’s Contribution to our Country, Dish-Anteena. These essays have a flavour all of their own, so if you are not yet familiar with Bangladeshi Essay books, try reading a couple.
Impact Of Essay Books
Mass production of fixed length essays on a narrow set of topics may seem logical to the command hierarchy of business, but undermines the essay as a means of creative self-expression by the individual. The low quality, mass produced nature of the books at warns the reader of the devalues and deadens the material they contain. Similarly, their routine use as teaching tools and use in examinations,in preparation for which students are actively encouraged to memorise them verbatim (as they are for Bengali essays). Another means of directing essay writing is the requirement that it contains certain words.
Write a paragraph about “your best friend in the class.” In your paragraph you must include the following key words:
Kamal / neglect / Sit / listen / politehelpful / understand / Try / turn / Model
The quality of language and spelling of essays is very variable (and the prescribed words are sometimes misspelled).However, even the most accurate are never completely free of such careless errors as misspelled words, missing articles or incorrect pronouns. Although most essay books have a nominal indication of the level, precious little difference is obvious aside from progression in vocabulary.
Books often include techniques for easy memorization of essays, while teachers actively encourage students to learn them verbatim. Typically, an English exam will ask students for an essay of at least 200 words on astandard title from an essay book. Most Bangladeshi learners of English have little access to writing produced by native speakers, or even to alternate material by competent essay writers. ‘Essay book style’ is almost universal amongst Bangladeshi students’ written English. It has a host of interrelated aspects including:
- Inaccuracy
- Grandiloquence (big words)
- Exaggeration
- Repetition
- Oversimplification/Overgeneralisation
- Obscurity/Obsolescence
- Waffle
- Pointlessness (stating the obvious)
[Personalising Essays]
Tackling ‘Essay Book Style’
A good first step is to awakening students aware of the shortcomings of essay books. Flawed though they are, the level of English in essay books frequently exceeds that of the teachers who rely on them, so while most students are aware of the occasional grammatical error, few haveany idea just how riddled with mistakesmost Bangladeshi essay books actually are. Even more seriously, stylistic points are almost never picked up on.
There is some awareness of the problems of learning by heart, but few have the courage to think outside the framework of established learning systems of exams based on these essays. Students who have spent a lot of effort to memorise essays may feel a commitment to them, so sensitivity is required when first raising the issue. Ironically, you may find the traditional Bengali notion that ‘[today’s] teacher is always right’ gives you authority to challenge this sacred cow. However, do not underestimate the difficulty of awakening the scepticism and critical thinking which your students will need if they are to begin to see essay books in a new light.
An adept choice of topics should lead students away from old habits of relying on half-remembered essays. The range of essays is not that broad, so familiarising yourself with them should help you avoid inadvertently setting a trap for your students by giving them a topic reminiscent of one they have learnt off by heart. In general, personal topics are more likely to lead them away from regurgitation of old material and towards creative thinking and construction of their own thoughts.
Introductions
The general approach of Bengali essay books separates the form of English essays from their function. The essential pointlessness of the essays is reflected in the stilted nature of their introductions.Without a target audience, there is no one to whom the topic should be introduced. A standard approach for topics which consist of more than one word is to fall back on a simple syntactic discussion.
often coveredby an exaggerated veneer of self-important grandiloquence.
“A reading room plays a vital role in the life of an educated person. Specifically, it is mostly essential for the students. Without a reading room, a student cannot go on studying in a planned manner.
Now, what is a reading room? A reading room is a specially separate room for a learner where he can persue his studies to meet his thirst of knowledge.
The importance of a reading room cannot be denied. Reading makes a man perfect. And it is the reading room that parves the way for studies, studies instill in human being the quality of humanity. Without humanity a man is not a man in the reaj sense of the term. So, a reading room for every human being is a must.”
The grandiloquence and cliché so commonly used here to cover over waffle is alas, all too commonly an accurate introduction to the ensuing essay.
The vacuity of
“The world is a global village. It has an environment with many disasters. Human beings are members of this globe. They want to have their suitable, natural and happy existence here in the global world. The threat is prodigious that a singl country cannot tackle it. The world is well aware of it and various measures are under way to cope up with any unforeseen disaster.
Reasoning
The general approach of Bengali essay books separates the form of English essays from their
Although almost all essays obey the convention of writing in paragraphs, writing habits often extend little further. One Bangladeshi commentator[1] writes of students in his native country: ‘When they write any composition, they simply heap up their sentences in a jumbled way. As a result, their composition always lacks in coherence. In fact, a composition is not a haphazard string of unrelated sentences’.
“AIDS is spreading like jungle fire all over the world and is taking its toll. The youngsters of today are getting themselves addicted to drugs and pre-marital sex. Women are also falling victims to this fatal and deadly disease for illegal sexual intercourse with others. Lack of sexual knowledge is also responsible for AIDS. It is hard to cure AIDS.[2]”
Sometimes the essayists craft is so debased that it is hard to tell whether or not a logical argument is actually being put forward.
“Trees have a great impact on climate. A country needs trees to ensure a cool and healthy climate for her people. They induce rains and prevent air pollution. An area devoid of forests and trees will go barren and turn into a desert in course of time.”[3]
Conclusions
Wishful thinking and – sometimes charmingly naïve – oversimplifaction abound in the concluding sections of Bangladeshi essay books.
“Only a few steps can save the country from the curse of traffic jam. By appointing more but sufficient traffic police, applying strict traffic rules, allowing licenced vehicles and expart drivers, making sufficient road, traffic jam can be solved.”
Echoing the essays themselves, conclusions display an optimistic mood. Open questions in concluding paragraphs are almost unknown; the preferred content is a summary of opinions to be held and actions to be performed. The traditional style is so bombastic as to be more reminiscent of political rhetoric, as if the writer were concluding a rousing speech by exhorting listeners to selfless furtherance of the greater good.
“To conclude the roles of women in child development are crying needs. So they should be allowed to develop themselves and their posterity will take over the reigns of the land and the nation. We can under no circumstances neglect or deny the role of a woman in child development.”
Such admonishments are rarely found at the end of simple personal accounts, wheregeneralisationgeneralisationprovides an alternative to such opinionated rhetoric. The idea of summarising the main body of the essay is less prominent than the use of climactic language. The ‘Journey By Bus’ essay starts by claiming that “Bus is a wonderful invention of science and technology[4]”but provides no further reference to this until the conclusion:
“A journey by bus is both interesting and pleasing. It is not so costly. It is the speedy vehicle on land. People can go to their goals so easily by bus. It is a blessing of science. However, the impact of the journey will remain ever fresh in my mind.[5]”
The concluding sentence is by no means random. Bangladeshi English letters use a range of highly formal (and often archaic) structures, and are often in the same books as English essays. It is therefore a natural, if wrong, assumption that essays must be concluded in a similarly formulaic fashion.
“This visit to the moon will remain refresh in my memory for ever.[6]”
The most common concluding sentence for personal narrative is about how fresh the memory will stay in the narrators mind.
“The journey in my heart I bore. It gave me much pleasure. It was one of the most memorable days in my life indeed.[7]”
The next essay features a token attempt at variation.
“The journey in my heart I bore. It gave me much pleasure. It gave me much pleasure. Indeed it was one of the most memorable days in my life.[8]”
Overcoming Bad Essay Writing Habits
Rote learning of incorrect essays means that inaccuracy is one of the hardest of the bad habits to break. Learners will need a lot of effort and exposure to authentic language if they are to overcome ingrained inaccuracy stemming from years of childhood exposure to inaccurate English.
One positive side effect of emphasising accuracy is that this may naturally stem writers’ grandiloquence. This, together with exaggeration stems in part from frustration with the pointlessness of writing. Escaping somewhat from the academic framework is absolutely necessary here; if the work done has no function external to the student teacher relationship, its artificiality will inevitably blunten any efforts to imbue it with meaning. The phrase ‘target audience’ is almost unknown, but will occur naturally once work done is enlivened with any purpose other than mere training and grading of students. Since this requires relationships with life outside of the educational institution, systematic advice on this would be unhelpful. Instead, I offer an example: I encouraged my students to develop material of practical benefit for foreigners, so that I could post it on WWW.
When writing from personal experience, students rarely use obsolete language, whilst obscurity too is not a great problem if they maintain an awareness of writing for a particular purpose, rather than writing for its own sake. If motivated to do so, such as by imposing a maximum word limit, repetition is one of the easiest problems for students to detect and tackle. Questions of how to combine sentences can also provide a good motivation for grammatical teaching. Waffle is another obvious consequence of the minimum word limit, so giving students a maximum rather than a minimum length (provided, of course, that the problem of pointlessness has been tackled) should help reverse this bad habit.
Careful, critical reading expose the oversimplification and overgeneralisation with which so many Bengali essays are riddled. Use of crass examples should clarify the dishonesty of many of the essay books and simultaneously to highlight students’ need to correct such problems in their own writing. The language of qualification is an important tool to go alongside such critical thinking. If they can begin to say ‘one reason’ instead of ‘the reason’, and to insert warning phrases such as ‘mostly’, ‘generally’ etc. they are a long way towards tackling problems of oversimplification andsweeping generalisation in their essays.
Inaccuracy
The language of some of the essays suggests that they were originally written prior to the 20th century. Hence, if they are re-copied only every few years, this amounts to dozens of copyings, not necessarily even my English speakers. The prevalence of errors, particularly spelling errors and the omission of small words, is therefore natural.
Mistakes in transcription and correction form a pair of processes that gradually devolve essays to a lowest common denominator, explaingin the prevalence
Grammatical errors can also occur, such as commas changing into full stops:
“The practice of writing a thing is a good way of knowing a subject and a language. Because writing makes a man perfect.”[9]
(See the section on repetition for a more spectacular demonstration of this process). Perhaps the commonest errors in Bengali English are omitted articles or prepositions and incorrect sentence formation (e.g. sentences starting with ‘And’, ‘But’ or ‘Because’). Another cause of inaccuracy is the requirement to write a minimum number of words, since this naturally favours more complex forms of expression, such as unnecessarily use of the passive.
Inaccurate transcription mutates words, as spelling errors are ‘corrected’ incorrectly, working in unholy alliance with unusual grammar and grandiloquent expression to degenerate the original authors’ sentiment into a bizarre and tragic linguistic wreck.
“Seize the day”, cried Horace about two thousand years ago. But time and tide wait for none. Time passes and passes. Nobody can stop time’s ever-busty frigate for even a second. It passes away throwing everything into the dark mysterious cavern of the past. Yet, it can be made full use of.”[10]
Mutation of words or sentences, like oversimplification, can lead to the obvious contradictions.
“Unemployment is a great social evil. It is imperative for the peace and prosperity of social life.”[11]
“In our boring television is our most favourite friend.”[12]
The ‘unenjoyed’ was presumably ‘unalloyed’ in the original.
Language learnt from essay books is used by subsequent generations of essay writers who have grasped either looked up the denotation or grasped it intuitively, but who have no sense of its connotations.
"[Science] has given man various death-weapons like missiles, atomb bombs, various types of fire-arms, modern fighter-planes and what not.[13]"
Facile topics in which the essayist is not really conveying any information, promote sloppiness in thinking and self-expression, while an overemphasis on grammar and vocabulary inevitably mean that less attention is paid to the meaning of what is written:
“Atom and hydrogen bombs are invented with the use of nuclear energy.”[14]
Grandiloquence/bombast (long words)
Advanced vocabulary is particularly common in the essay books for higher classes, but almost all Bangladeshi essay books feature gratuitous multi-syllabic words.
“[The teacher] dispels (@@@) the darkness of ignorance from the minds of his students and enkindles(@@@) the light of education in them.”
These words are important if the illusion of progression is to be maintained, ensuring that class VI students feel that they have moved on from class V when in fact there is little or no improvement in other aspects of the essays.
“We are living in a fast changing environment. Everything old is being removed by the mighty gust of remorceless change. If we, for relevant reasons, want to survive and advance, we must keep up with the gorgeous procession of change toward ameleoration and development.[15]”
In one sense, of course, expanding the students’ vocabularies does represent progress – and essay book users who lack even simple fluency in speaking often have surprising abilities at comprehension. However, long words in Bangladeshi Essay Books are often incorrectly spelled, of inappropriately high register, or have other unwanted connotations, problems of collocation. The net effect of their inclusion, whilst it expands students’ powers of English comprehension actually damages their fluency of self-expression to most native speakers of English. What is more, their use frequently conceals other problems, such as the shallowness or partisan nature of arguments.
“The path of success and victory is not only steep but also difficult and thorny. It is the crushed flower that gives forth the richests, sweetest, and rarest fragrance. pangs, sufferings, misfortunes and adversities sublimate our soul and ripen our judgement.”
Perhaps more dissonant to the foreign ear than incorrectly used words is the inaccurate figure of speech. Whether as a result of centuries of colonial rule or some combination of other factors, Bangladeshis have a marked preference for use of (often incorrect) English phrases.
@@@
Exaggeration
Exaggeration is frequently employed together with over-generalisation in an effort to add interest to the bland essays on uninspiring topics.
“If we use [radio] properly, it can bring infinite good for us.[16]”
Whilst obvious out of context, wild exaggeration is a natural property of the oversimplification and bombast that are such common features of Bangladeshi essays.
“Leisure is perhaps the essence of life.[17]”
Exaggeration is most common either in concluding statements of an essay, where it is hard to separate from bombast, or at the end of paragraphs, as if the writer used a few preceding sentences to work himself up into a fervour.
“With the help of computer we can solve any complex problem within a minute or two. In our modern life we canno’t think of a day without it. It is not a fashion but a necessity.[18]”