- It got to refer to an individual piece of writing. In Chinese it is not necessarily a problem, because Chinese is concise and often omits things and most often readers won't get it wrong. So Mr. Liang wasn't wrong in this case. But in English we have to say: A piece of short writing could be bad, but a bad one must be long.
Again, I wonder if Latin could be shorter, because English has rules that makes it unnecessarily long. You cannot say a short writing but have to say a short piece of writing. If Latin can omit verbs or use adjective as verb then it could be shortened by half. Who wants to give it a try?
touche wrote:
果然有个逻辑漏洞。没看仔细。“坏的文章一定长”也有问题，因为有的短文章也坏。
下面直译一下：
短的文章未必好，坏的文章一定长。
Short writing is not necessarily good; bad ones are uniformly long.
看来后半句在英语中也有问题。我想这常常是简约的代价吧。
zxd