A unified approach to the use of punctuation in English

Part II:
THE PARENTHETICALS AND THEIR USES

A. The parenthesis and its uses 

We are all familiar with the two curved marks that we know as the parenthesis ( ), but what some of us may not know is that in English grammar, the parenthesis is actually any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence or passage by some form of punctuation. That punctuation can be those two curved marks, of course, but depending on the importance of the inserted information and the writer’s intention, it can also be a pair of enclosing commas or a pair of enclosing dashes.

Let’s take a look at the following forms of the parenthesis along with examples of each

(1) Parenthesis by comma: (a) “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” (b) “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

(2) Parenthesis by dashes: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.”

(3) Parenthesis by parentheses: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.”

In each of the three examples above, the information set off by the punctuation marks—whether by commas, dashes, or parentheses—is called a parenthetical, and its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. A parenthetical is basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. In fact, the punctuation chosen for a parenthetical largely determines its optionality or importance to the statement.

So the big question about parentheticals is really this: Under what circumstances do we use commas, dashes, or parentheses to punctuate or set off a parenthetical from a sentence?

THE PARENTHESIS BY COMMA

In Example 1(a) above, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” is what’s known as a nonrestrictive relative clause. A nonrestrictive relative clause is a parenthetical that provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in other words, it is nondefining information. The sentence will thus remain grammatically and semantically intact without it: “Ferdinand Magellan was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Without the nonrestrictive relative clause, however, the sentence loses a lot of valuable information about its subject, “Ferdinand Magellan”; in fact, the intended context for the statement disappears completely.

For such type of parenthetical, the most appropriate choice of punctuation is a pair of enclosing commas, as was used in the original sentence. It won’t do to punctuate a nonrestrictive relative clause with dashes or parentheses, for either of them would render the information optional, as we can see in these two versions of that sentence:

“Ferdinand Magellan—who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521—was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

“Ferdinand Magellan (who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521) was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

Both of these sentence constructions run counter to the writer’s original intention.

We must keep in mind, though, that the same parenthetical—“who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521”—would have become a restrictive relative clause had the subject been a generic noun like, say, “the explorer,” in which case the pair of enclosing commas would have been rendered unnecessary: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The absence of the enclosing commas indicates that the nonrestrictive relative clause has become a restrictive one.

Obviously, the following questions will come to mind when that happens: Why not leave those enclosing commas alone? What difference does it make if we let those commas stay even after changing “Ferdinand Magellan” to “the explorer”?

The reason lies in the basic grammatical difference between a proper noun and a generic noun. We will recall that a proper noun is one that designates a particular being or thing, and that as a rule in English, a proper noun is capitalized to indicate this fact. A proper noun, moreover, has this important characteristic: it generally won’t accept a limiting or restrictive relative modifier to define it. By its very name, a proper noun is supposed to have already defined itself, making it one of a kind.

Now, we need to recall at this point that a relative clause or a “who”-parenthetical that comes after a proper noun—“Ferdinand Magellan” in this case—becomes a restrictive clause or limiting modifier when it’s not enclosed by a pair of commas. It is therefore grammatically incorrect for the subject “Ferdinand Magellan” to be followed by a relative clause that’s not enclosed by commas, as in this erroneous construction: “Ferdinand Magellan who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Indeed, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” will always need the pair of enclosing commas in such cases.

It’s an altogether different thing when we replace a proper noun with a generic noun in such sentence constructions. We will then have two grammatical choices. If our intention is to, say, make “the explorer” specifically refer to “Ferdinand Magellan” and to no other person, then we need to modify it with a restrictive relative clause—one without the enclosing commas, as was done previously: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

On the other hand, if by “the explorer” we mean any explorer at all who had claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown, we would need to modify that generic noun with a nonrestrictive clause or nonlimiting modifier instead: “The explorer, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was not the same Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The enclosing commas—along with the mandatory conversion of the predicate of the sentence into a negative form—indicate that the person referred to isn’t unique but one of a number who made the claim; he could not have been the same Ferdinand Magellan referred to in the sentence with the restrictive relative clause.

Now let’s evaluate the second sentence that I gave earlier as an example of parenthesis by comma: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” Here, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” is what is known as the appositive phrase. It is a statement that serves to explain or identify the noun or pronoun that comes before or after it.

The appositive phrase is an extremely useful grammatical device for giving context and texture to what otherwise might be very bland or uninformative sentences.

THE APPOSITIVE PHRASE

We will now discuss the appositive phrase found in the following sentence that I presented for evaluation earlier towards the end of Part I: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added statement that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

On closer scrutiny, we will find that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” It is, in fact, originally the relative clause “who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” but with both the relative pronoun “who” and the linking verb “was” taken out.

That grammatical streamlining process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”—that is in apposition or equivalent to the noun form it modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide more details about a subject without having to start another sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace of an unfolding exposition or narrative.

The use of appositive phrases, we now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another sentence to be folded into the sentence that precedes it. The sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the statement in the second sentence an appositive in the first, we get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interesting to read: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

Such constructions also have the added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed, with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.

The appositive phrase we have discussed above is of the nonrestrictive type, which means that it isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive phrases are parentheticals that, like nonrestrictive relative clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence.

But some appositive phrases are of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. An example of the restrictive appositive phrase is the phrase “Pliny the Elder” in this sentence: “The Roman scholar and encyclopedist Pliny the Elder distinguished himself as a cavalry commander in Germany and later served as a well-respected procurator in Gaul, Africa, and Spain.”

We must keep in mind, though, that restrictive appositive phrases rarely get much longer than the three-word example—“Pliny the Elder”—that's given above. This is because long, extended phrases generally don’t function well as restrictive appositives; without the enclosing commas that set off nonrestrictive appositive phrases from a sentence, extended phrases used as restrictive appositives tend to make sentences convoluted and difficult to grasp.

Try reading this sentence, for instance: “The 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines is about a wacky cross-channel air race that dangled £10,000 in prize money to bring flyers from all over the world.” The restrictive appositive phrase here is the seven-word movie title “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines,” which, if it weren’t italicized or placed within quotes in the sentence, would have made that sentence so difficult to grasp.    

Indeed, what we will encounter more often is the restrictive appositive, which identifies a person, place, or thing more closely by name in just, say, one to three words, like “Regina” and “Jennifer” in this sentence: “My brother-in-law’s sister Regina gave birth to a boy as their sister Jennifer was driving her to the hospital.”

Here, the appositives “Regina” and “Jennifer” aren’t set off by commas because both are restrictive—they can’t be omitted from the sentence without affecting its basic meaning. They serve to make it clear that the speaker’s brother-in-law has at least two sisters—the one who gave birth and the other who drove her to the hospital. Without those restrictive appositives, in fact, the sentence becomes incoherent: “My brother-in-law’s sister gave birth to a boy as their sister was driving her to the hospital.”

But this question will obviously linger in our minds: What if we supply the enclosing commas and make those two appositives nonrestrictive instead, as in this construction: “My brother-in-law’s sister, Regina, gave birth to a boy as their sister, Jennifer, was driving her to the hospital”? The answer, as I will now explain, is a categorical “no.”

In its nonrestrictive form (with the enclosing commas), the appositive “Regina” implies that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister whose name happens to be Regina. However, the other nonrestrictive appositive, “Jennifer,” also implies that both the speaker’s brother-in-law and his sister Regina have only one sister whose name happens to be Jennifer.

This, of course, contradicts the earlier implication that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister, Regina. Indeed, he has at least two sisters, Regina and Jennifer. This is why it isn’t advisable to put what should logically be a restrictive appositive into a nonrestrictive form, for these two forms are neither grammatically and semantically equivalent nor interchangeable.

Even if there’s no possibility of an identity mix-up, the restrictive appositive form is often preferable to the nonrestrictive form if the appositive and the word it identifies are so closely related, as in this example: “Her husband Alfredo is trying his luck as an overseas foreign worker.” Here, it can be argued that commas should set off “Alfredo” because this name isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence, thus making it a nonrestrictive appositive. However, the nouns “her husband” and “Alfredo” are so closely related that they can logically be considered a single noun phrase, “her husband Alfredo.” The commas then become superfluous, making “Alfredo” a restrictive appositive.

THE PARENTHESIS BY DASHES AND THE PARENTHESIS BY PARENTHESES

We already know that a parenthesis or parenthetical is basically added information whose distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. So far, however, we have taken up only its first two types—the nonrestrictive relative clause and the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, both of which require enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence. We have also taken up the restrictive relative clause and the restrictive appositive phrase, but we have seen that they aren’t really true parentheticals because they aren’t expendable—we don’t really have the option to drop them from the sentence.

This time we’ll take up the two other kinds of parentheticals: the parenthesis by dashes, and the parenthesis by parentheses. They differ from the parenthesis by comma in that neither of them can be punctuated properly and adequately by a pair of enclosing commas. In their case, though, the use of dashes or parentheses is generally interchangeable and is often a matter of stylistic choice. This choice largely depends on whether the parenthetical is really optional—perhaps simply an aside—or contextually necessary; in any case, however, using enclosing commas to set it off is out of the question.

Parenthesis by dashes. This kind of parenthetical normally folds another sentence into a sentence, as in this example: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” What sets off the parenthetical from the main sentence is a pair of double dashes, which indicates a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than what a pair of enclosing commas can provide.

See what happens when we use commas instead to punctuate that kind of parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill, they said they didn’t know it then, but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” The pauses provided by the two commas are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea.

If the writer so chooses, however, parentheses may also be used for that same parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill (they said they didn’t know it then) but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” Note, though, that when parentheses are used, the implication is that the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he uses double dashes instead.

Parenthesis by parentheses. This is the preferred punctuation when the writer wants to convey to the reader that the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to his exposition, as in this example: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.” However, if the writer intends to take up the dealer’s apparently false assurance in some detail later in the exposition, the parenthesis by dashes would be a good foreshadowing device: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan—the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled—busted one of its pistons.”

Parentheticals enclosed by parentheses need not be complete sentences, of course. They can be simple qualifying phrases within or at the tail end of sentences: “Many elective officials (of the dynastic kind, particularly) sometimes forget that they don’t own those positions.” “The disgruntled cashier took the day off (without even filing a leave).”

Even more commonly, parentheses are used to add a fact—maybe a name or a number—that’s subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence, as in this example: “Recent geologic research (Alvarez, Alvarez et al, 1980) indicates that the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid some 10 km in diameter smashed on present-day Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago.”

Now that I’m done discussing the parenthesis by parentheses, I would like to take this opportunity to make a clear distinction between parentheses and brackets in American English. As I’ve earlier discussed, parentheses—sometimes called “round brackets”—are meant to convey to the reader that (1) the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to the sentence, and that (2) the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he sets them off with double dashes instead.

In contrast, brackets—also known as “square brackets”—are for more specialized uses, particularly for (1) inserting information or authorial comment into direct quotations, (2) inserting translations of quoted statements said in another language, (3) citing errors within quoted statements, and (4) setting off a parenthetical that’s already set off by parentheses in the sentence.

Precisely when is bracket Usage #1 called for? Assume that we are quoting verbatim a passage from Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quijote in reference to Dulcinea, his imagined Empress of La Mancha. Let’s say that the passage uses only pronouns to refer to Dulcinea, and we know that it isn’t permissible to alter exact quotes from a literary work. We then have to use brackets to insert information identifying Dulcinea for our readers: “‘If I were to show her [Dulcinea, his imagined Empress of La Mancha] to you,’ answered Don Quijote, ‘what merit would there be in acknowledging a truth so manifest to all? The important point is that you should believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it without setting eyes on her.’”

As for bracket Usage #2, a publication in a particular language, say English, will need brackets to insert translations of quoted statements said in another language, say Tagalog, as in the following passage from a business magazine: “‘Hindi lang kulang, kapos na kapos talaga [It’s been not only short but way, way below our needs],’ she says of the family’s finances.’”

Bracket Usage #3 is called for when we have to cite errors in quoted statements, as in this example: “Our confused physics teacher said, ‘While eating an apple in a bathtub, Isaac Newton [by traditional accounts it was actually Archimedes] shouted “Eureka!” when he discovered the basic principle of hydrostatics.’”

Finally, we may need to take recourse to bracket Usage #4 to set off a parenthetical that’s already set off by parentheses, as in this example: “The life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (who wrote three major philosophical studies [On the Orator, On the Republic, and On the Laws] at a time that he still couldn’t engage in politics) coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.” Such usage isn’t a pretty sight, but there are times when scholarly exactitude demands it.

(This wraps up my blogspot’s two-part series on the parentheticals and their uses.) 

A unified approach to the use of punctuation in English

Part I: 
INTRODUCTION

As with all the alphabet-based languages, English is primarily dependent on word choices and their combinations for the successful delivery of ideas. In written form, however, English would be so clunky and insufferably confusing without the benefit of punctuation. Whether they are short or long, in fact, what makes sentences and expositions in English eminently readable and understandable is their proper use of punctuation marks—whether the comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parenthesis, or period—to clarify meaning and set off boundaries between structural units of the sentence.

Punctuation marks, of course, usually serve the basic purpose of providing desired pauses and stops within a sentence, as in this sentence from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” Here, we have the commas providing short pauses, the semicolons, longer pauses; and the period, a full stop. 

Then here’s a sentence that uses a colon to formally and emphatically introduce something: “This is what he always watched for in his business: the bottom line.” 

And finally, from a short-story by a friend of mine, the late Palanca Awards Hall of Famer Ed Maranan (he passed away on May 8, 2018 at the age of 71), here’s a sentence that uses a pair of dashes to set off a parenthetical remark from the main sentence: “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and yes, pride in his grandpa—was growing by the minute.” 

About the matter of punctuating parentheticals, let me first share with you a very enlightening e-mail conversation I had with Ed about their uses in that sentence of his. 

Retrospective: A grammar conversation on parenthetical usage

What’s the proper punctuation mark to use for parentheticals? Quite often a pair of commas will do, but there are grammatical situations where commas simply prove inadequate to the task, resulting in structurally flawed sentences with a subject-verb disagreement error or a dangling or misplaced modifier.

My conversation with Ed Maranan in the year 2010 went as follows:: 

Ed: Joe, here’s a line from one of my children’s stories:

“Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and yes, pride in his grandpa—were growing by the minute.”

Am I right in seeing more than one subject in the subordinate clause which calls for a plural form verb, or does the word “interest” subsume the rest of the clause and thus call for a singular verb?

Me: The operative subject in the subordinate clause is definitely the singular noun “interest.” The subject “pride” in the parenthetical “and yes, pride in his grandpa” doesn’t compound the operative subject (a parenthetical being an optional grammatical element), so “interest” is the only operative subject in that subordinate clause. We therefore have a subject-verb disagreement error here because the sentence uses the plural verb “were” for the singular noun “interest.”

Ed: Aha, but if I were to construct the sentence in this manner:

“Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and yes, pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute.”

...would the sentence with the plural “were” now be correct?

Me: Yes, definitely! It would greatly clarify matters, though, if the word “yes” is preceded by a comma to make it a full-fledged interruptive. Otherwise, some readers might misconstrue the whole clause “pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute” itself to be the interruptive.

Ed: Just a follow-up. Look at these two constructions:

1. “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and, yes, pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute.”

2. “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and yes, pride in his grandpa, were growing by the minute.”

The first is your suggested placement of the comma—before “yes.” What if the comma were placed after grandpa? And here’s still another possible construction:

3. “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and, yes, pride in his grandpa, were growing by the minute.”

Three commas in all. Would this not more fully solve the problem of ambiguity and observe the rule of agreement? You said that without the comma before “yes,” readers might misconstrue “(and yes,) pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute” as the interruptive, with a faulty agreement, but this would not be the case because “whose interest in his little birthday gift” would then be a lost, dangling paraphrase without a verb, would it not?

Me: I think the use of more commas to resolve the ambiguity in that construction just adds more grammatical and structural wrinkles to the sentence. In Sentence #2, in particular, putting a comma after “grandpa” detaches the interruptive “yes, pride in his grandpa” from the main sentence and makes the plural verb form “were growing” erroneous.

Sentence #3 is better than Sentence #2 in that it provides a comma before “yes,” thus making it a full-fledged interruptive separate from the parenthetical “pride in his grandpa.” However, both sentences suffer from the same subject-verb disagreement error.

We can make that error disappear by simply using a pair of dashes instead of commas to set off the parenthetical from the rest of the sentence:

“Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and, yes, pride in his grandpa—was growing by the minute.”

Here, the pair of dashes provides a much stronger break in the thought and structure of the sentence and this prevents the parenthetical from messing up the sentence grammatically.

(This ended our conversation.)

So precisely what is a parenthetical?

For those encountering the term for the first time, a parenthetical is any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence by some form of punctuation. Its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it, but it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. Whether it’s optional or necessary largely depends on the kind of punctuation chosen for it.

This brings us to the big question regarding these punctuation marks: Precisely when do we use each of them in our sentences and expositions? And in particular, which of the punctuation marks do we use to set off a parenthetical—by definition, any inserted amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence—from a main sentence?

Next:    Part II - The parenthesis and its uses       September 28, 2023

Third updated edition of “English Plain and Simple” now off the press

September 14, 2023—Now off the press this week is the third updated edition of Jose Carillo’s best-selling book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. Hailed by leading academicians, journalists, and critics upon its release in 2005 as “a charmer of a book that delights as well as instructs,” it won the National Book Award for linguistics from the Manila Critics Circle that same year.

The Manila Times Publishing Corp. announced this week that the new edition of the 500-page book is now being distributed to major bookstores nationwide, with copies also made available for direct volume deliveries to institutional and corporate buyers and interested individual distributors.

English Plain and Simple brings together the author’s first collection of grammar lessons and advice that originally appeared in his long-running Manila Times column that started coming out six days a week in 2002. Two more volumes drawing material from his Manila Times columns followed, namely The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors (2008) and Give Your English the Winning Edge (2009).

The third  revised edition of English Plain and Simple is now available this week and a new edition of Give Your English the Winning Edge is scheduled for release this coming October 

In his foreword to English Plain and Simple, Dr. Jose Y. Dalisay, Ph.D, professor emeritus of English at the University of the Philippines and Hall of Famer of the Carlos Palanca Awards for Literature, says: “There are many guides to English that the avid student can pick up, but quite a few, I think, actually do more harm than good as ponderous rulebooks meant for rote memorization. But every now and then comes a charmer of a book that delights as well as it instructs. English Plain and Simple is one such gem, for which we have the pseudonymous Mr. Carillo to thank. Whether he was walking me through the hierarchy of adjectives or discovering Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carillo never failed to show me something new and cause me to smile in recognition of a shared experience.”

In the latest edition of English Plain and Simple, the author finally reveals his identity after over 20 years of using Jose Carillo as pen name and explains why he used it. He is the veteran newspaper journalist and communications executive Carlos O. Llorin Jr., a former college newspaper editor-in-chief (the weekly Dawn, University of the East), marketing field researcher (Asia Research Inc.), national newspaper reporter (Philippines Herald), and ad agency public relations manager (J. Romero & Associates). He worked for San Miguel Corporation for 18 years as editorial services head, audio-visual group head, senior communications assistant, and product manager, then as corporate communications manager for rhe company's Magnolia Divison with the rank of assistant vice president. 

He won nine major Philippine industry awards as editor in chief of the company’s monthly magazine Kaunlaran and fortnightly newsletter. As executive director of San Miguel’s Magnolia Youth Achievement Awards, he won a Gold Quill Award from the U.S.-based International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in 1989 and the Golden World Award from the U.K.-based International Public Relations Association (IPRA) in 1990.

Llorin took optional early retirement as assistant vice president for communications of San Miguel’s Magnolia Division in 1993, later running the English-language services company Asia Herald Inc. as general manager for five years until 2007. Currently, aside from writing his weekly column in The Manila Times, he is an independent writer and book editor as well as editing and communication consultant for corporate, institutional, and individual clients.

Describing the rationale for writing his three English-usage books, Carlos Llorin Jr. says: “As with my weekly columns in the Manila Times, they aim to help nonnative English speakers improve their written English without having to go back to the classroom and, frankly, also to make Filipinos keenly aware that if their English is bad, it’s largely due to the Philippine culture’s fervid addiction to legalese. This done, his English-usage books then gently walk the reader through the basic and practical and later the finer aspects of English grammar and semantics, revisiting all of the parts of speech and their rudiments—from nouns and pronouns to adjectives and adverbs, from the comma and period to the paragraph and double-dash.” The emphasis is to train themselves to think, speak, and write in clear and simple English. (Read the related feature article below about the author's rationale for writing his English-usage books, “The problem with our English according to Jose Carillo.”)

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STRANGE, CONVOLUTED, STILTED LANGUAGE
The problem with our English according to Jose Carillo

When Jose Carillo’s English-language services company ran a want ad for editors sometime in 2003, close to 100 applicants applied by e-mail. Practically all of them had at least an AB degree in English, mass communication, or the social sciences; three were magna cum laudes and six cum laudes; and 10 even had Master’s degrees. Disconcertingly, however, most of their job application letters were worded and constructed in unbelievably strange, convoluted, stilted English like the one below that's reproduced here verbatim:

“Dear Sir/Madam:

“Greetings in Peace!

“Responding with utmost immediacy to your job opportunity ad published on January 6, ____ in the __________, I wish to  inform you of my fervor interest in applying for the position of Editor. I am an AB graduate of the University of ______ with distinct recognition as a leader and achiever in the field of debating and as editor-in-chief of the student publication, journals, and other newsletters of the academe.

[The applicant then gives a glowing three-paragraph work experience description.]

“For your evaluation, I am enclosing my résumé as an attachment as a first step in exploring the possibilities of employment in your client’s organization. I would appreciate hearing from you soon.

“Thank you for your consideration and God Bless.”

In his book English Plain and Simple whose third revised edition was released this week, Jose Carillo says the English of such job application letters is obviously not the English to use when you want to present yourself in the most favorable way to a prospective employer. 

He says: “The truth is that many of us who write in English distrust our own ability to present ourselves in a good light. No matter how educated or experienced we are, we often instinctively assume the persona and voice of someone else when we sit down to write. We take refuge in some pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo that we think will impress our reader or listener. 

“And once we get started in this legal-sounding language, we get snared and become addicted to it. Instead of writing as we would talk, we habitually grasp at these arcane words and phrases in the mistaken belief that like some mantra, they will miraculously make things happen for us.”

Jose Carillo likewise observes that the English of not a few of the country's Ph.Ds with a “publish or perish” mindset often verges on gibberish—long, pompous, confused, and empty—like this hardly comprehensible official report, published verbatim in a daily newspaper, by an education official writing on Philippine education indicators:

“Teachers’ skills, training, development and welfare with __ percent of the sample attest to their importance in validating the significant effect of teachers’ welfare on the students. Skills training, welfare and development translated into further studies, seminars and benefits are the determinants of Friday sickness (in cases of teachers posted in far-flung barrios, where teachers will usually miss Friday classes, indicative of their dedication to the learning process of their ward) and the gruesome test of dedication and commitment.”

Carillo’s bestselling book English and Simple, which won the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle upon its publication in 2005, makes every effort to address this very serious and embarrassing communication inadequacy. It provides systematic but easy-to-follow instructions in English writing that students and teachers alike need to continually develop so they can  communicate their thoughts and ideas clearly, simply, and confidently to particular audiences.

The Third Updated Edition of English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language, 500 pages, paperback cover and 40 lbs bookpaper inside pages, Php 699.00 per copy, was released in mid-September 2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. Copyright 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, author. Copyright 2008, 2023 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Printed in the Philippines.

Going Deeper Into Language - 4

 Part IV:
Watching out against the verbal fallacies – 1

We are done with our discussion of the first two broad categories of the logical fallacies, namely the material fallacies and fallacies of relevance. This time we will take up the third category: the verbal fallacies, or the false statements or conclusions that result when words are used improperly or ambiguously. They are the fallacies of ambiguity, equivocation, amphiboly, composition, division, and abstraction.

The problem with verbal fallacies is not so much faulty logical thinking as the inadvertent or deliberate lack of clarity in language. This generally results from the wrong or slippery use of words, whether spoken or written, and it sometimes happens by accident, as in a slip of the tongue, an error in penmanship, or hitting the wrong word processor key. Normally, no great harm is done in such cases. When used deliberately with malice or ill intent, however, these misuses of language can trick or mislead people into making wrong decisions or choices. 

Let’s now take up the first two kinds of verbal fallacies.

            

Fallacy of ambiguity. The use of undefined words or words with a vague meaning constitutes a fallacy of ambiguity. In retrospect, let’s take a look at this campaign slogan on radio of a presidential candidate in the 2010 Philippine national elections: “Candidate X: Pinili ng Taong Bayan” (“Chosen by the People”). These obvious questions arise: What was he chosen for and in what context and in what manner? And who were those people who chose him and how many were they? And even if they chose him, so what? The answers to these questions are perplexing and unclear, thus making such slogans fallacious.

Another case of an arresting verbal ambiguity was this slogan of another presidential candidate on radio that same year: “Panata Ko—Tapusin Ang Kahirapan!” (“My Pledge—Put an End to Poverty!”). It’s a magnificent but vague commitment—but how plausible is it? Precisely how would the candidate end such an intractable sociological problem as poverty? What if the listener happened to be enormously rich—would that promise still apply to him or her? Pledges like this, no matter how well-intentioned, constitute a verbal fallacy by looseness of language.

There was also this slogan in the TV commercial of a senatorial candidate during that campaign season: “Gusto Ko, Happy Ka!” (“I Want You to Be Happy!”). Sounds arresting and disarmingly candid, but what does it really mean? And how does the candidate’s desire to make you happy relate to his fitness for the position he’s gunning for? The problem with this slogan lies in its vague, seemingly child-like message.

On a less political note, the fallacy of ambiguity also results when the writer’s definitions of the words he uses don’t match those of the reader’s. Take this newspaper passage about a supposedly Stone Age tribe in the Philippines: “The sociologists visited the Tasadays and took photographs of their half-naked women, but they were not properly developed.” (How was that again? Which or what were not properly developed? The women’s bodily features or the exposed photographic negative?)

Equivocation. People commit this fallacy when they loosely use a word in more than one sense, yet give the impression that they mean only one. Since they sometimes can’t even differentiate the meanings, they may not even know they are equivocating. Here’s an example: “All fair things are virtuous. My fiancée is fair; therefore, my fiancée is virtuous.” 

                      

                          

Here, the word “fair” is being used in two senses: in the first, “impartial and honest,” and in the second, “lovely and pleasing.” Likewise, the word “virtuous” is also being used in two senses: in the first, “righteous and morally upright,” in the second, “chaste.” Both premise and conclusion therefore aren’t valid here, so the statement is actually a verbal fallacy.

Part IV:
Watching out against the verbal fallacies – 2

We will now discuss the last four of the six kinds of verbal fallacies, namely the fallacies of amphiboly, composition, division, and abstraction. Together with the fallacies of ambiguity and of equivocation that we took up earlier, they comprise the third broad category of logical fallacies—false statements or conclusions that result when words are used improperly or ambiguously. 

Amphiboly. This fallacy results from ambiguous or faulty grammatical structures. The error isn’t with a specific word but with how the words connect or fail to connect. English is particularly susceptible to amphiboly because its vocabulary is so rich and its sentence structures so flexible. Some examples:

 

A grimly humorous example: “Big Bargain: New highchair for toddler with a missing leg” (Without ambiguity: “Big Bargain: New toddler’s highchair with a missing leg”). Here, we have a misplaced modifying phrase that needed to be relocated to its proper place.

A classic case of amphiboly arises when the adverb “only” is variously positioned in these sentences: “She only wrote that.” “Only she wrote that.” “She wrote only that.” “She wrote that only.” When “only” is positioned such that the statement yields a meaning other than what’s intended, that statement is an amphiboly.

And newspaper headlines are often inadvertent purveyors of amphiboly: “Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant”; “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge”; “Two Convicts Evade Noose: Jury Hung.”

Composition. This is the fallacy of guilelessly assuming that a group of things or actions as a whole will have the same attributes as the individual things or actions that comprise it. Take these examples: 

“A story made up of good paragraphs is a good story.” (Not necessarily, of course!)

“If someone stands up out of his seat at a basketball game, he can see better. Therefore, if everyone stands up they can all see better.”

“An elephant eats more food than a human; therefore, elephants as a group eat more food than do all the humans in the world.” (Do your math; we humans grossly outnumber the elephants, so we consume more food than they overall.)

Division. The converse of the fallacy of composition, the fallacy of division wrongly assumes that the individuals in a group have the same qualities as the group itself. In reality, though, what is true of the whole isn’t necessarily true of its parts. Consider these fallacies of division: 

“The universe has existed for 15 billion years. The universe is made out of molecules. Therefore, each of the molecules in the universe has existed for 15 billion years.

“Female professionals in the Philippines are paid less than their male counterparts. Therefore, my Mom earns less money than my Dad.” (Not necessarily!)

Abstraction. This fallacy is the classical error of postulating or believing that everything that one comprehends through pure reasoning can actually happen in reality. Take the audacious illogic of this quote in a familiar inspirational poster: “Everything your mind can conceive, your body can achieve.” Sounds like a very desirable possibility, but saying it is actually the height of naiveté or ignorance about the ways of the world.

  

 

Another form of the abstraction fallacy is taking a quoted statement out of context. For example, a London newspaper carried this negative critique of a theatrical performance: “I couldn’t help feeling that, for all the energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry, the audience had been shortchanged.” However, the stage play promoters deviously pared down that statement to this blurb in their newspaper ads for that play: “…having ‘energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry.’” That’s a fallacy of abstraction that shamelessly distorts the intent and spirit of the original statement.

Vigilance over language—whether our own or those of others—is actually our only sure and effective line of defense against the verbal fallacies.

These two essays essay appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Education Section of the September 14, 2017 issue (print edition only) of The Manila Times, © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.