On August 6th, a netizen posted that there were linguistic issues in two expressions in the admission notice from Peking University, sparking discussions online.
According to a report from Hubei’s “Jingshi Live Broadcast,” the netizen pointed out that in the admission notice, the phrase “Our university has decided to admit you to study at xx college (department)” had a problem of “mixing sentence structures.” The use of multiple verbs “decided,” “admit,” “to,” “study” stacked together, and “admit” cannot be followed by a gerund structure. The suggestion was to revise it to “Our university has decided to admit you as a student of xx college (department).”
Furthermore, the netizen mentioned that the phrase “Please arrive at the school on time on August 18, 2025, with this notice for registration” had issues with “improper word order” and “inappropriate wording.” Firstly, “on time” as an adverb should be placed after the predicate “to arrive at the school for registration,” rather than before the time adverb. Second, “on time” usually corresponds to a specific time point, while “August 18” is a whole day timeframe. The recommendation was to change “on time” to “as scheduled” and modify the expression to “Please arrive at the school on time on August 18, 2025, with this notice for registration.”
In response to the criticism, on August 6th, staff from Peking University stated that they would promptly report the situation to the university’s admissions office for further consideration on improvements.
During an interview, Professor Zhang Sanxi from Central China Normal University mentioned that official documents should emphasize clarity and conciseness to avoid sounding awkward or convoluted. Although the expressions in the current controversy were not severely incorrect, there is indeed room for improvement.
Netizens also expressed their opinions on the matter, with comments like, “Besides being unclear, the rhythm is also off,” “Even normal people would find it hard to read this sentence smoothly; how could Peking University make such a basic mistake?” “Still a liberal arts university,” “There are slackers everywhere,” and “Peking University President: the ambition of the swan goose (correctly pronounced as ‘hú’)!”
On May 4, 2018, during Peking University’s 120th-anniversary celebration, President Lin Jianhua mistakenly read “the ambition of the swan goose” as “the ambition of hao,” leading to widespread mockery. The next day, Lin Jianhua publicly apologized for the reading mistake and admitted that his “textual foundation is indeed not good.”