Monthly exams are coming up, so it feels like the right time to talk about what has happened to high school essay writing.
In theory, a high school argumentative essay should be a contest of logic over real issues: you take a position, explain why it stands, and support it with evidence that actually works.
But in many classrooms, it has quietly become a modern version of the old eight-legged essay.
The template can be traced back to middle school. Back then, our Chinese teacher handed us a structure that felt almost constitutional: the opening paragraph had to introduce the topic, the second paragraph had to quote or summarize the given material, then came three cycles of “sub-argument — main body — discussion,” and finally a closing paragraph connecting the topic to young people. Thirteen paragraphs in total. No more, no less.
The arguments had to rise step by step: what it is, why it matters, what we should do. The examples had to rise in the same way: the individual, the nation, the state.
The language had to sound “literary.” The closer it seemed to ancient prose, the better. It even had a pleasant-sounding label: half-classical, half-vernacular.
I admit that in middle school, this was an efficient scoring machine. But it also wasted three years in which we might have learned to write. We did not dare to write freely, because any real attempt might break the rules of the machine. So all we could do was practice the format, memorize phrases, and keep ourselves inside the frame. It was not until the midterm exam in my first year of high school that I felt, for the first time, that I had truly written an essay by myself.
After entering high school, the old structure seems dead in name but alive in reality. Nobody openly orders students to follow it anymore, but its bones remain almost unchanged. What has changed is the language: the preference for affected, antique-sounding prose has been pushed even further.
The New Culture Movement once promoted the use of vernacular Chinese and helped drive social progress. Yet now some high school teachers ask students to imitate classical prose in modern essays. Is this supposed to be a literary renaissance?
I have seen model essays circulating in the best classes of the best local schools. There is barely a single plain modern sentence in them. Reading them feels as if the writer swallowed an entire dictionary of classical Chinese.
But if you have the patience to read to the end, you discover that the dense layer of archaic wording is often just a cover for broken, jumping logic. Under the ornate shell, the argument is hollow. To be fair, some of these essays are still more logical than what many of us can write, but the flawed reasoning is still there.
And yet essays like that receive extremely high scores.
So more and more people imitate them. Most cannot go all the way, so they settle for a weaker version: a few ancient-sounding lines at the beginning and end to decorate the doorway, while the body remains plain, empty, and under-argued.
For a while, this kind of pseudo-classical writing has become the dominant taste in essay classes.
But an argumentative essay has never been a competition of decorative language. What it is supposed to test is whether a person can make a point clearly and whether that point can be supported by effective evidence.
My own logic is far from rigorous, and my writing may not be especially smooth. Still, I am willing to write in my own way and to break away from this set of rules. I am grateful that the teachers at my school are clear-sighted enough not to like this rigid pattern either.
It is genuinely sad. I dislike this so-called return to classical style, this strange “renaissance” in composition teaching. I really want to see essay writing in those schools return to the right track.
A note on improving logic
Improving logic matters a lot. It is not only useful for Chinese essays; even in daily life, if you argue with someone, you still need logic—unless the other person is completely unreasonable.
The most efficient way to improve logical thinking is probably debate. But most of us rarely get proper exposure to debating. One possible substitute is to choose debate topics and argue them with AI. AI sometimes feels as if its logic does not quite match human logic, but in terms of formal accuracy, it is still quite strong.
A note on my own essays
Although I enjoy writing informal essays, my exam compositions have always been stuck at 50 points and have never broken through. The reason is probably that under short, high-pressure exam conditions, my logical thinking often disappears, and I fall back on instinctive writing instead.
I hope my essay score can break 50 at least once. It may not mean that much, but it would make me happy for a long time.