To cut the long story short ...

was sorting out worksheets to pass on to the new coordinator tomorrow, and I came across these two primary school comprehension passages.

one was about UK Shyam (an athlete who broke the C. Kunalan's (a retired sprinter) 100M record), the passage mentioned the problems he had faced and the obstacles he overcame, as well as the support and help he had gotten from other sportsmen (like swimmer Ang Peng Siong). And at the end of the passage, the last paragraph, it was stated that "The story shows that within the sporting arena, there is encouragement and support between older sportsmen and the new ones. This fact alone should make any Singaporean proud."

The other passage was talking about bees - the queen bee, the worker bee and the (laziest bee) drone, whose only purpose is to mate with the queen bee. Also mentioned was the process of making honey and how honey and pollen is "bee bread". Coming to the last sentence, the author wrote, "The challenge to individuals like us is to protect these amazing animals by making our gardens bee-friendly."

and ... ta-da!! the L. L. Lim authored the book, or rather, the assessment book; its safe to assume the Lim is a Chinese writer according to the name as well as the way two of the passages were written. I think its interesting to compare the different writing styles of English and Chinese writers. I haven not really given much thought to this comparison before but after Wednesday's class, I found it to be quite true when I think back of books/novels written by English authors. Especially the part regarding giving background information and details. I recalled this book, To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper, a wonderful book but when the first few chapters were quite hard to get through because of the immense details and background given by Harper for the main characters in the story, I almost gave up on the book because the background details made the first few chapters so dry =P. I have not read a lot English books written by Chinese authors, but it will be interesting to see how Catherine Lim writes her books and even Goh Sin Tub's narrative style. I guess their books will be on my radar when the next holiday comes round? =) 

This is just my view, but I think Asian authors generally do not give as much details as their English counterparts, remembering Kahled Hossein's The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, sometimes certain details are not given which leaves questions hanging and this drives me nuts, haha, I guess I think too much. I don't know if this has been done but it will be interesting to compare and contast Asian and English writers, wouldn't it? 

I'm such an advance nerd, getting excited over books =S, but I have a good friend who had been calling me a nerd ever since I got to know her, grrr.... haha