虽不能至, 心向往之 – 我教英文寫作的心得
書法大師沈尹默(1883-1971)總是勸友人不要學他的字，”如果真要學，就找我的娘家去學”，沈的意思是，如果友人直接模仿他所景仰的書法家，他們得益將更多。沈的建議雖然有道理，但他一個學生卻認爲行不通： “老師，你的娘家家族可大呢，叫人一時如何學得了。”
Hitting the high notes
At one point in her operatic career, Maria Callas became so portly that in a performance where she sang next to live elephants on stage – they were there as props – a critic joked he couldn’t distinguish her legs from those of the gigantic beasts’. Stung by these harsh words, Callas announced – to…
Teach writing by dancing up a storm
Among the things I revisit to maintain my sense of wonder is this one-minute video clip dating back to the1970s showing the choreographer Balanchine teaching the great dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov the role of The Prodigal Son: we see Balanchine demonstrating the steps in the last scene of the biblical tale, when Baryshnikov’s character, now broken…
A beauty who aged like fine wine
It was the mother of a primary school classmate – a woman of uncommon good looks – who gave me my first inkling of the kind of power female beauty can command: every time she came to school; a sea of heads would turn towards her as she glided through the corridors as though on…
Setting the scene
The scene is to be filmed in a diner in Los Angeles, but the story is set in Manhattan. Solution? Place neon signs outside the eatery and drizzle down artificial rain, so that the illusion of being in the Big Apple is created by bright shop logos glimpsed through wet windows. This is the kind…
Writing conclusions that work
“A rope is made up of a huge number of fibres, but not a single fibre goes through its entire length. It’s the way the fibres overlap that creates the rope’s strength,” the 20th century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once reflected. Conclusions are usually so difficult to write that even producing one that’s half-decent can…
Writer as acrobat
“A writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him,’ The New Yorker editorial writer E. B. White once counseled. I lack the nerve to knowingly throw myself at writing situations that are beyond my abilities, but still, often, I end up passively going along with White’s exhortation: I’ll…
To write well, sweat the small stuff
It was only after My Fair Lady was showing in the cinemas that its set designer Cecil Beaton noticed a mistake he had overlooked: towards the end of the film, in the scene where Eliza Doolittle sang “Without You” while watering plants, the jug she was holding was too modern-looking to be from the Edwardian…
It’s the DSE English Language paper that deserves a bad grade
Recently, a Hong Kong parent reached out to me. My child has to sit for her DSE in a few weeks, she said. Can you help her tackle the writing section of her English Language paper on short notice? Even though I’m a writing coach, I’m probably the worst person to turn to if it’s…
Learning the ABCs of persuasive writing from 陳茂波’s WSJ letter
Many people in Hong Kong cheered when the Wall Street Journal branded Paul Chan Mo-po (陳茂波) an “illusionist” for bothering to write to the paper to persuade its readers that Hong Kong should have been included in the Heritage Foundation’s Freedom Index. A sense of vindication, however, is far from the only positive thing…
What’s buzzing?
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that anyone who has watched Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” (1967) – a film about a bored housewife moonlighting as a prostitute – will remember this scene from the movie. An Asian client with a special request pays the housewife character (played by the luminous Catherine…
The power of the passive voice
“Rules are made to be broken.” This phrase sprang to mind after I read Buckingham Palace’s response to the interview Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had with Oprah. In our school days, all too often our teachers would exhort us to write in the active voice. While it is true that we should usually heed…
“A huge, bleeding effort”
When I came across this piece on writer’s block written by the New Yorker cultural critic Joan Acocella – I’ve long been in awe of her uncanny ability to narrate complex content in a deceptively simple manner – I finally received confirmation from good authority that it takes a lot of effort to produce effortless…
“An infinite capacity for taking pains”
“Didn’t you know there’s a difference between ‘indicate’ and ‘point out’?” my tutor at Oxford University fired this question at me after noting I’d been using both words interchangeably. The class was supposed to be on philosophy, but back then, my sensitivity towards English was so wanting that my tutor would often opt to teach…
A room of her own
At the height of her fame in the 1960s, Pauline de Rothschild (1908-1976) was frequently photographed by Vogue and admired by the public as an interior designer of singular taste. She was, however, in possession of another talent that didn’t come across in those glossy pictures: she was a very fine writer too. So awed…
The trouble with transitions
“Why do my Hong Kong employees have such a fondness for words like ‘moreover’ and ‘furthermore’?” I once heard a British executive who oversaw one of the largest conglomerates in the city complain. As a survivor of Hong Kong’s education system, I have a ready answer for him: the overriding preoccupation of Hong Kong teachers…
Copy that
In the days of her youth, when Zhang Chonghe (张充和) honed her art at the feet of the master calligrapher Shen Yinmo (沈尹默), she was captivated by his unconventional teaching method. “To curb my habit of leaving character construction to chance, Master Shen prescribed Sui and Tang Dynasty fonts – known for their precise structure…
Writing as an observational science
Even though I sat through my compulsory physics and chemistry classes in secondary school not understanding a word, oddly enough, it was a book I read at university on how scientists make discoveries -The Art of Scientific Investigation by William Beveridge – that played a part in developing in me an eye for detail that…
The power of an entrance
The one thing that doesn’t get easier with time even for experienced writers is the art of striking the right note in the opening paragraph. The British-Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel has to look to unconventional sources for instruction as she labours to conjure up imaginative beginnings for her pieces. In addition to drawing on her…
A picture is worth a thousand words
The detective was told the murder victim found in Brooklyn had worked as a sex worker, but when he arrived at the crime scene, he noticed a detail that was at odds with her presumed identity: her hands and feet were beautifully-manicured; in his dealings with streetwalkers, he rarely found them immaculately groomed. Before long…
“晉人風度”和當下的香港
文革時期，在北大教授哲學的宗白華，自然成為整頓對象。他被掃地出門，被命令去掃樹葉。那當時宗白華心里是怎麽想？跟他同樣遭難的北大教授馮友蘭文革後談到宗白華，說“那年夏天我和白華同在南閣‘學習’，有一次看見他身穿白褲褂，一手打傘，一手搖著紙扇，從北閣後面的山坡上走來，悠哉悠哉。我突然覺得這不就是一種‘晉人風度’嗎？”
一舞動四方
我中學時期愛上了舞蹈，等到我讀大學了我對舞蹈的愛就延申到對舞蹈評論的愛，紐約時報的resident dance critic Alastair Macaulay 的文章我尤其喜歡，凡是他筆下的我認為有啟發性的文字，我都會存下來；閑來拿出來反覆玩味，是一種精神享受。
“Either you have it or you don’t”
A delicately-built woman with chiseled cheekbones clad in the simplest of clothes (a straw hat, a polo shirt and a pair of capri pants) perched next to a lake – it must have been at least 15 years since I first came across this photo. It immediately became my favourite. Over the years, as I…
No License to be imprecise
Curiously enough, among the people who have managed to make the art of writing less mysterious to me is Pietro Yantorny, an illiterate shoemaker who took pride in crafting custom-made shoes in Paris for high society at the turn of the last century. Dismissing factory-made footwear as “little boxes for feet that one calls shoes,”…
Matthew Cheung is also an incompetent in another area: English writing
I know we have long given up on expecting members of our puppet government to walk their talk, but they aren’t exactly of zero value either, because when they face an international audience and can’t talk their talk in English properly, they can at least provide practical demonstrations of how not to use the language. Take for…
Some Like it Hot
This video on Douyin gave me a much-needed laugh as I waited with trepidation for the human cost of the Wuhan virus to come to light: a stern voice on a loudspeaker warns the inhabitants of a village against engaging in extramarital sex while the country is in the grip of the epidemic -“別個傳染給你，晚上你傳染給你婆娘，你婆娘傳染給隔壁老王，老王傳染給老王婆娘，那全村不都遭洗白了啊!” The bluntness of…
Take a cup of kindness yet
Among the notes of condolence British author Claire Tomalin received when her 22 year-old daughter Susanna killed herself, the one written by New Statesman editor Anthony Howard struck me in particular. It was formal in tone, yet so intimate in substance: “I shall always remember Susanna as the marvellous, cheerful, sparkling girl who came to…
“The jerks, the breaks, and the harshness of prose”
“The jerks, the breaks, and the harshness of prose” To help the audience picture the difficulty of playing the title role in the Peking opera “The Inebriated Consort” (貴妃醉酒), the producers invited an opera apprentice and a little girl to learn the part from Zhang Jing, a venerated artist who could trace her lineage back…
餘音嘹亮尚飄空—— 理想教育的特質
民國美學大師宗白華（1897-1986）的傳記作者鄒士方，80年代初撰寫宗白華的傳記期間，曾到北京圖書館報庫讀宗抗戰時期的舊作。鄒這樣形容當時看書情景：「時值酷暑，汗流浹背，但我抄錄著宗先生在《星期學燈》上的詩意怏然的『編輯後語』，只感到渾身爽快，如置身於清涼世界，我再一次被宗老那深邃的思想和優美的語言所折服。」
“I know how their wicked little minds operate”
“I know how their wicked little minds operate” When a cat owner posted a photo of her cluttered, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on Twitter and challenged her followers to find her cat among her books and knick-knacks, an interesting pattern emerged: those who had never lived with cats found it hard to locate the animal, while cat…
Come Write Like Michelle 