Choosing the Right Register for a Complaint
A student must write a 250-character email in Chinese to a language school complaining that a promised homestay family was changed twice in the first month and that no one replied to two earlier emails. The assessment criteria reward appropriate register, clear statement of facts, a specific request, and a polite but firm tone. The student's first draft opens with 你们怎么回事？太过分了！ and closes with 快点回复我, otherwise I'll complain online. The teacher says the facts are strong but the register will lose marks.
1. Explain what is wrong with the draft's register and what the assessment is actually rewarding.
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The draft confuses emotional force with communicative effectiveness.
- 你们怎么回事？太过分了！ is confrontational and informal. In a written complaint to an institution, this reads as loss of control and invites a defensive response rather than action.
- 快点回复我 is a direct imperative that positions the writer as superior to the recipient - a status inversion that Chinese institutional correspondence normally avoids.
- The threat to complain online escalates before giving the school a chance to respond, which undermines the 'polite but firm' criterion.
The assessment rewards politeness strategies that still assert rights: acknowledging the relationship (尊敬的/您好), stating facts neutrally with dates and specifics, expressing dissatisfaction through understatement or formal phrasing rather than exclamation, and making a clear, reasonable request with a timeframe. Firmness comes from precision and a stated expectation, not from volume.
2. Outline a structure for the revised email and justify each move.
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A four-part structure:
- Salutation and framing: formal greeting and a one-line statement of purpose (关于寄宿家庭安排的问题). Establishes register and orients the reader.
- Chronological facts: the promised arrangement, the two changes with approximate dates, and the two unanswered emails. Neutral, specific, verifiable - this is where firmness actually lives.
- Impact and request: state the effect (instability affecting study and adjustment) and ask for a specific remedy plus a reply within a stated period, phrased as a request (希望…/恳请…).
- Closing: polite sign-off that preserves the relationship and leaves escalation implicit rather than threatened.
Justification: this sequence separates facts from feeling, gives the recipient a clear action, and uses politeness to make refusal harder - which is more effective than confrontation and matches the marking criteria. The judgement tested is that register is a strategic choice, not decoration.