Today wasn't a very productive day, I must admit, despite having a new direction with my introduction. I worked a bit on that, but the problem with introductory anecdotes or "opening vignettes" (besides the fact that Jonathan Dresner seems to hate them) is that there's this battle between making the anecdote complete, making it concise, and and making it relevant. Sometimes some of these are easier to achieve than the other, but right now, the anecdote I thought would be good is turning out to require a lot of work to make it all three. For instance, here's my opening paragraph so far.
In late 2015, Chou Tzu-yu, a 16-year-old Taiwanese member of the K-pop group Twice, was accused of being an advocate for Taiwan independence for holding a flag of the Republic of China (Taiwan) during a television program. After expressions of outrage from Chinese netizens, her management company released a video of a contrite Chou apologizing for her “improper behavior” (Denyer and Xu). One of the ironies of this incident is that the flag she was shown with was for years associated with the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Republic of China, and has only recently been embraced as a symbol of Taiwan. That is, for most of its history, the flag has represented the Republic of China, even when the actual territory controlled by the Republic of China shrank to eventually include only Taiwan and its outlying islands. In that sense, the flag Chou held was a Chinese flag rather than a Taiwanese flag, and the real controversy was over which version of Chinese identification (PRC vs. ROC) was legitimate.
Ignoring the fact that I'm not sure I even believe that last sentence, my problem is how well this will introduce my real topic. Can you guess what my paper is going to be about from that introductory anecdote? Maybe I should go back to my original introduction, which, while a bit duller, is at least more relevant.
No comments:
Post a Comment