ENG2020: Varieties of English
Assignment 1
Instructor: Prof. Preet HIRADHAR
Student: CHEUK Chak Fu
Student no.: 4056576
Text type, Purpose and Targeted audience
This text is an expositive newspaper article written by Albert Cheng, an affairs commentator
on South China Morning Post. It begins with several criticisms to the existing measures and
opinions by the senior government’s officials, followed by the main viewpoint which is to
introduce the importance of having “good environmental, social and corporate governance”,
and related suggestions made by the author. As the stance of the author is strong and certain,
such as “It must also take this pandemic as an opportunity to ride on the ESG trend, steering
local business towards good corporate governance” in the closing paragraph, the nature of
this article is closer to exposition rather than discussion.
The aim of this article is to urge the government to adopt the idea of “good environmental,
social and corporate governance” (ESG) in the coming budget as a reform to the current
economic policies under recession. This article is to attract the government, policy institutes
and people who were seeking solutions to the poor economic downturn.
Formality - formal
This article is formal despite several informal linguistic features. First, it is formal because no
contraction was used. Second, slangs, abbreviations, phrasal verbs and offensive words were
also absent. However, the use of first-person pronouns made it slightly less formal, such as
“All of the above suggestions are meant to last for six months as we expect the pandemic to
ease in the second half of the year with the roll-out of mass vaccination.” This problem is
minor as the author did not use it continuously and no other similar pronouns were used, such
as you or I think. A more formal way to rewrite this sentence could be: “as the pandemic is
expected to ease…” as using passive voice could increase the formality.
Moreover, although most of the paragraphs are short, the author sometimes constructed
complex sentences. For instance, “First, it could hire more staff for the office of the
Employment Support Scheme to follow up on employee complaints and conduct more
rigorous checks on companies that have received the wage subsidies.”. In this sentence, the
use of “and”, a conjunction and “that”, a relative clause enabled the author to include several
messages in a one sentence in which the logical linkage is obvious. In the opposite, informal
writing consists of more short sentences which is not favourable to constructing a logically
clear argument.
Distance - Distanced
As for the distance, it is closer to impersonal language. As mentioned above, personal
pronouns were uncommon, the author also did not use questions to interact with the audience.
Nevertheless, using several emotive words led to a less objective feeling as people may think
that they were on the same side in this issue and felt closer to the author. For example, “More
outrageously”, “Such a cold-hearted response”, and “the government is reluctant to help
Hongkongers through the difficult times”.
Spoken or Written? -Written
It is a written text and its features also fit the features of writing more than speaking. First,
this article is linear, including current issues, his viewpoints and suggestions, it was also
organised in paragraphs and complete sentences rather than numerous short sentences.
Second, there is no meaningless words and pauses, such as “um” and “er” which are more
likely to exist in a recorded speech. Third, sentences are long and complex, these features
seldom exist in a spoken text because it is uneasy to catch up the speaker if the content is too
condensed. Fourth, there is no repetition in this article because readers can read it again.
Word count: 493 words
URL: https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3122162/hong-kong-budget-handouts-
vital-tide-over-workers-without-income