林雷约我为他的《创业邦》写一篇稿子，并且推荐我学习《华尔街日报》中文版专栏与特写的风格。这一看不要紧，整整三个小时眼睛没有离开这个网页。我被专栏作家Alan Paul深深地吸引住了，我所惊讶的不是他的观点与机巧，而是他字里行间坦露的真诚。
不知从何时开始，我们的写作越来越油滑了。像电视台追逐收视率一样，文章也开始追求卖点与看点。透过这些母语写就的文字，你会看到一个个作者在向你挤眉弄眼。“文”与“笑”的汉字虽然还写成两个，但卖起来实质上是一样的。包括我的一些文章也是这样，里面丧失了最重要的东西：真诚。
Alan Paul是一位吉它评论家，因夫人来华任外交官，而做了家属。他用外国人的眼光写在中国的生活，里面虽然不乏老外常有的偏见（例如对中国食物的怀疑），但毫无虚构造作之处。这个，不需要考据也能看得出。而我们中国作者，太喜欢为了好看而编造情节，杜撰细节，引用一堆无稽之谈。例如，小手今天在MSN上给我讲了这样一件事。关于二战德军轰炸考文垂，有个盛传的说法，那就是德军怀疑英军破译了其电码，于是故意发出轰炸考文垂的密电。英军截获后，交给了丘吉尔。丘吉尔想，如果安排居民撤退，那么等于向德国人承认破译成功，那么德军就会换用新的密电码。从长远考虑，英军最好装作不知道。于是，考文垂听任德军轰炸，事后人们对丘吉尔的高瞻远瞩表示敬佩和理解。然后，小手搜索了英文的相关资料，发现这一说法得不到证据支持。换句话说，这段逸闻是后人杜撰出来的。
Paul没有变得世故油滑，他写的每个字都发自于内心。看了他的文章，你会了解一个外国人在中国生活有多么不容易。貌似寻常的生活却处处是陷阱，一不小心，损失的不仅仅是金钱，而是对人的信任和温情。这大概就是为什么我们写不出他那样文字的原因吧。
Tags: 语文不动
真诚、见地、文笔
反正拥有前两者的人不多，就只好看看文笔
哇，提到我了呀
However, “the secrecy surrounding the breaking of the Enigma code that could have evacuated the City” is one of the enduring myths of WW2. The story goes that the decision was left to Churchill who decided to sacrifice Coventry for the sake of keeping the Enigma code-breaking secret. The story is quite untrue.
After the war, the story was given a renewed lease of life in Chapter 2 of “Bodyguard of Lies” by Anthony Cave Brown, published in 1976, when Enigma was still wrapped in secrecy, who said “It was a tragic decision for Churchil to have to make”.
But this was completely and totally refuted in “Code Breakers – The Inside Story of Bletchley Park”, edited by F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (themselves top Bletchley Park officials), Oxford University Press, 1993, where the actual top surviving code-breakers at Bletchley Park first gave their full story. In that book, Stuart Milner-Barry says “There was a story, which can still be heard from time to time, that it was known that Coventry was to be the target for a devastating raid, and that Churchill forbade any special precautions for fear of giving away the all important secret that we were reading the Enigma. What Churchill would have done had he been confronted with this terrible dilemma I have, of course, no idea. But it so happens that we did not know the target for that night until it was too late; in fact, as I remember, we were expecting a very heavy raid on London”. And at page 253, Peter Gray Lucas records that “On the afternoon of 14 November 1940 the signal read ‘ANGRIFF [attack] KORN’, but the computers [i.e., the operatives] could not guess at the time and did not learn until later that KORN was the code-word for Coventry”.
The story is also refuted in “Battle of Wits – The complete story of codebreaking in World War II” by Stephen Budiansky (Viking, 2000) at page 181: “The false but still repeated story that Churchill knew in advance of the devastating raid on Coventry planned for the night of November 14, 1940 … credits Enigma intelligence with far more than it was providing at the time. … The intelligence that was available to Churchill on the fourteenth, particularaly beam bearings detected late in the day, convinced him that London was indeed the target, and he even canceled a planned trip out of town, explaining to an aide when he arrived back at Downing Street that he was not going to spend a peaceful evening in the country while the metropolis was under attack. Churchill was actually scanning the skies impatiently from the roof of the Air Ministry, waiting for the German bombers to appear, when the attack on Coventry began a hundred miles away”.
英国隐瞒轰炸考文垂的预警是真实的。德国人故意试探那段就是假的。
使用英語八股文寫作，還是比中文多一些邏輯，少一點隨意。
我觉得他的冷静和真诚也和鬼子的文化有关
中国人习惯了浮夸和伪装
记得我在英国交的第一份作业，我尽最大努力的做到客观和critical
可老师给我的评语还是flatter之类的成分在
然后重新读了一下有的地方是很谄媚
自己已经当成理所当然的事情了
鬼子虽然表面上礼貌客套的很，可写起东西还是一板一眼的
没有人情，只有事实