Genres and Styles: Power of Discourse 言文行远

by Jennifer Li-chia Liu and Panpan Gao

This is the seventh volume of the Harvard Chinese Language Series. It is designed to bring students with advanced-low language proficiency to advanced-mid proficiency. The volume introduces students to four major styles of writing—argumentative, narrative, lyrical, and practical—under a broad array of themes such as education, modernization, journalism, arts, trust/ethics, music, catastrophe, regional differences/locality, and nostalgia. Selections include essays and speeches, commercials, and letters of various sorts. Polemical, expository, expressive, and persuasive language is introduced throughout, and the volume offers students a taste of the styles and rhetoric which have been practiced and appreciated by generations of Chinese writers and are readily recognized by all educated Chinese today.