Comment by eloisant
3 months ago
Maybe in US, if you learn to write in a simple and straightforward way.
In France essays are all about writing in a complex way to show how smart you are. Which not only is not a useful skill to have, it's detrimental because we learn to write in obscure and hard to understand ways.
This is painfully true. I went to a US university after high school in France and had a really hard time adjusting to the American style of essays. So many paragraphs with sentences crossed off for being too long, in particular. Hitting word limits when, in a French dissertation, you'd just be getting started (an exaggeration, yes, but still).
It wasn't a "language" problem because I was already a fluent American English speaker. It was all style-related.
I've recently started reading 19th century French literature again and sometimes I have to reread sentences multiple times because they're so long I come to the wrong conclusion too early.
This reminds me a bit of my Korean professor from college. Perhaps the most memorable thing from his class was when he explained the Korean style of writing essays was to not explain up front what you are going to cover but to "beat around the bush" until the end. He accompanied the bit in quotes with a mime of him swinging a stick at various parts of a really big bush.
For some reason, that image will forever accompany that phrase in my mind.
I watch a lot of k-dramas and all I can say is: that tracks.
I've tried a few time to read le Journal du Hacker, the french-speaking clone of Hacker News and each time I've found that the writing level is so low it's basically unreadable.
They still want you to write in an academic style, even if that style is fairly different.
I was once asked to write to then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to sway him on some political issue. That's certainly a practical assignment, but I chatted with some classmates about it, and none of us thought the professor would give a good grade to something that might genuinely sway the man.