Sample commissioned texts

Each sample text below is 400-500 words long. The reading level and intended audience are provided as a general guide to the style.

Sample text:

English language study material, reading practice

Reading level and target audience:

upper beginner to lower intermediate learners

The Unlucky Fisherman?

Brian started to fish when he was ten years old. Every summer Brian’s family went to a cottage in the country. It was a short bike ride away from a big lake. Brian loved to go to the lake. He thought that the best part of summer was going to the lake. One day his parents took him to a big store in a country town. They went to the fishing section of the store. His mother said, ‘Brian, how about learning to fish this summer?’

Of course Brian was very, very happy. Was it because he wanted to catch fish? No, it wasn’t! That day in the country store, he discovered a new love. Brian discovered fishing tackle. He looked at every rod and reel in the store. He carefully chose a fishing tackle box, and filled it with interesting lures and hooks. At the check out counter, he got a catalogue full of pictures of fishing goods. Then he and his parents went back to their cottage. Brian spent many hours arranging his new fishing supplies in his tackle box, and looking at his rod and reel.

The next day, he went down to the lake. He brought all his new fishing goods. He brought a special lunch and a thermos of orange juice. He brought a book to read. And he found a nice spot at the quiet end of an old dock. All afternoon he put hooks and lures on his line. He cast the line into the water. He waited for fish to bite. And he reeled in the line and started all over again. Brian finished his lunch, and read half his book. He was happy, but he didn’t catch any fish.

After that, Brian went fishing every summer. He went fishing every year for fifteen years. And he never caught a fish! Brian was the most unlucky fisherman by the lake. But he didn’t think so. For him, the best part of fishing was going to the fishing goods store, sitting by the lake, eating his lunch, and reading a book. When he was twenty-five years old, Brian caught a fish. He was very surprised. He wondered what to do. Then he carefully took the fish off the hook and put it back in the water. It swam away. And then he put another hook on his line, and started to fish again.

Sample text:

guide to life in Japan, ‘Shopping for Food’
and ‘Finding a Place to Live’

Reading level and target audience:

general readership, mainly non-native speakers of English

Food prices

The best fresh food in Fukuoka comes from the sea and from Kyushu farms. If you buy seasonal foods, you can enjoy good food at a reasonable price. Food in general is expensive. Rice and fresh fruit can be very expensive. You can buy cheaper rice at discount stores like Mr. Max. Most neighborhoods have a choice of one or two large supermarkets and several small specialty food stores, for example vegetable stores and meat stores. Convenience stores offer a range of prepared foods for quick meals. The quality is often good, but prices are higher than supermarket foods.

Foreign food and special diets

The cheapest way to eat is to adapt your diet to local choices. You can find imported ingredients at most supermarkets, but the price and selection are better in stores that specialize in foreign foods. Prices are often different in the different stores. It can be difficult to determine the ingredients in domestic products. If you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, or if you keep kosher, it is safer to prepare your own food from basic ingredients. Costco, in the Torius Mall (Hisayama Town), is a good source for large quantities of both imported and domestic food. The first time you shop there, you must buy a membership.

Finding a place to live

Real estate agents arrange rental housing and publish lists of available houses and apartments. There are many real estate offices in Fukuoka. They usually have advertisements on the window showing floor plans, prices, and locations of the places they represent. You can go to an agent in an area where you want to live, tell the agent what you need, and they will show you places that meet your needs. If you do not speak Japanese, it is best to go with a Japanese friend. In a floor plan or advertisement, size is indicated by a number followed by letters, for example ‘2 LDK.’ ‘L’ is for ‘living area,’ ‘D’ for ‘dining area,’ and ‘K’ for ‘kitchen area,’ and the ‘2’ shows the number of rooms apart from these. Almost all homes have a bath room, a separate toilet room, and a washing area with a sink. Some newer apartments have a ‘unit bath’ that combines bath, toilet, and washing area. Room size is expressed in units equal to the size of one tatami mat (1.8m by .9m). A ‘6 mat’ room is a little smaller than 10 square meters.

How much is rent?

Rent in Fukuoka depends on size, age, and location. If a place is big, new, or convenient, the price will be higher than somewhere small, old, or inconvenient. Rent varies according to the combination of size, age, and convenience. In general, prices fall as you move away from the centre of the city and away from train lines, subway lines, and bus routes. There are many chances for good luck, so you should look at many different places.

Sample text:

guidebook, ‘Eating and Cooking’

Reading level and target audience:

general readership,
mainly native speakers of American English

What is ‘Japanese Food’?

Japanese food is one of the world’s most rich and varied cuisines, and it's also one of the easiest to make at home. You may already have an image of ‘Japanese food’ from the many Japanese-style restaurants that have taken root in the Western world. Many Japanese dishes and ingredients are now part of everyday cooking and dining in the US – things like soy sauce, tofu, sushi, and Japanese rice. You’ll soon find that food and drink are at the heart of Japanese culture, and that Japanese people are enthusiastic and adventurous eaters and drinkers. Exploring the many different kinds and styles of food that make up the contemporary Japanese diet will be a fun and rewarding experience.

What about your favourite food from home? Especially in Tokyo, you can buy almost any kind of food in Japan – at a price. If you are seriously committed to enjoying exactly the same diet you were used to in the US, you will pay for it. But it’s really not necessary to spend a fortune on your food in Japan: if you’re willing to be a bit flexible about your basic ingredients, you’ll find that economical eating is within easy reach. Remember that you’re in Japan, and try to eat what Japanese people eat. As you’ll discover in this chapter, Japanese people eat almost everything, including food that’s a lot like what people eat in the US and other Western countries. If you can make a few concessions to local tastes, anything is possible!

Japanese people divide food into several general categories. ‘Japanese food’ refers to all the food they think of as traditionally Japanese. ‘Western food’ describes food borrowed from Western countries at different times, usually during and after the Meiji period. This category also includes more recent adaptations of Western dishes. In the last ten years or so, the category of ‘ethnic food’ has emerged to describe dishes adapted from Asian originals, usually from Southeast Asia. Japanese style Chinese food is in a class by itself. ‘Authentic’ foreign food is described using the name of the country of origin: French food, Italian food, and so on.

The basic Japanese flavorings are soy sauce, a cooking wine called ‘mirin,’ and a fish based soup stock called ‘dashi.’ Seasoning is light, and each ingredient usually maintains as much of its original character as possible. Very fresh ingredients are preferred, and the cuisine has developed many seasonal dishes to take advantage of different foods being at their best at different times. Vegetables remain crisp after cooking, and many ingredients – even meat or fish – are left raw as much as possible. Rice is the basic starch, and proteins traditionally came from fish or beans, including bean-derived tofu. Pork and chicken have long been a part of the diet, and after the influence of Buddhist vegetarian diets lessened, and after people could afford it, beef came to be an important everyday food.

Sample text:

magazine article, ‘Report from Japan’

Reading level and target audience:

native-level English speakers, reading a poetry magazine

Notes on Haiku

Before moving to Japan, I had only a passing interest in haiku, but living here compels some kind of engagement with Japan’s most popular export among verse forms. I was first attracted to an older kind of poem, the tanka: thirty-one syllables, arranged in five segments alternating five, seven, five, seven, seven. This is the form we find in the great 10th century anthologies of court poetry and the Tale of Genji, from a time when, as Ivan Morris put it, ‘life was punctuated with poetry from beginning to end, and no important event was complete without it.’ The poetry of that period still exerts a strong influence on contemporary culture, and it remains one of the main conventional forms of Japanese poetry. Its influence, both good and bad, has helped to determine who writes poetry, and in what form, for most of the past thousand years.

Indeed, it was the degeneration of tanka into a moribund convention that led to the development of haiku. In the 15th century it became fashionable for groups of dignified, academic sorts to meet and compose sequences of tanka in a hundred verses, with each verse being a thirty-one syllable tanka. One person would compose the first seventeen syllables, the next the concluding fourteen, and so on. These sequences are called renga. In the 16th century, groups of less hidebound aristocrats and merchants took up the form, and began to write parodic poems called haikai: turning the allusiveness and formal restrictions of the previous century to comic effect. Haikai treated subjects considered too vulgar for the tanka and renga, and relied on startling comparisons and wild punning. Later in the 16th and into the 17th century, the first seventeen syllable segment, initially called a hokku, broke off and came to be seen as a separate poem; later still, this poem came to be called a haiku. It had been conventional to include a seasonal reference in the opening part of a renga, and this convention carried over into haiku. Initially a kind of clever, light verse with a limited range of tone and subject matter, haiku became a serious business in the hands of its first great master, Matsuo Basho.

Basho is to haiku what Shakespeare is to English literature. Even the dictionary quotes one of his poems when it tries to gloss ‘haiku’ in English: the famous ‘frog poem.’

An ancient pond.

A frog jumps in,–

The sound of water.

This poem is famous not only because it is a marvellous little poem, but because it perfectly sums up the promises and the pitfalls of haiku. For centuries, readers have been drawn to its simplicity and elegance, but at the same time asked, ‘What pond? What frog? What sound?’ Thence came the less famous element of haiku as it appears in English: the prose head note explaining the obscurities of the poem. Without these, haiku are often like photographs of people we don’t know, posing in places we’ve never seen before.

Date posted: 2003-09-15