An essay contest with as many as 1.05 million participants saw at least 500,000 entries eliminated in the preliminary selection process for using internet slang. Yesterday, during the final evaluation meeting of the Fourth National Middle School Student Essay Contest in Hubei Province, the topic of how to regulate the use of internet language sparked heated discussions among the judges. The organizing committee introduced that, within China's educational sphere, the National Middle School Student Essay Contest is the largest in scale, highest in standard, and has the most participants. In Hubei Province, the competition covers middle and primary schools across all cities and counties. From the 1.05 million participating works, 100 special prize-winning essays will be selected to compete for 20 spots as "Literary Stars" nationwide. Surprisingly, at least 500,000 entries used internet slang such as "囧" (a character representing a sad or awkward expression) and "努力ing" (striving), but none made it into the final thousand candidate works. "It’s not that we reject internet slang; some of it can be quite interesting, but many essays written with internet slang are difficult to read," said Zhu Jiuhong, a member of the organizing committee. Clear and lively language use is an important criterion for this essay contest, but the participants' use of internet slang often shows strong randomness, frequent misspellings, verbosity, and meaningless phrases, which disrupt reading. "These works were eliminated during the preliminary selection," he said. Yang Chongguo, a senior teacher from Xiangfan No.5 Middle School and one of the judges, said that using terms like "偶" (I) and "狂顶" (strongly support) in students' daily compositions is quite common, but such language is generally not advocated in class. "Language needs to be accepted by the majority to serve its purpose of communication; it must be standardized. Internet language lacks standardization and cannot be used for communication, so what should be eliminated still needs to be eliminated," he concluded.
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