Prescriptions for Good English Writing - 2

The great importance of parallel
construction in presenting ideas

By Jose A. Carillo

Part III – Presenting ideas in parallel

We have already taken up the two basic rules for parallel construction, namely that a sentence that presents two or more serial elements should stick to the same pattern all throughout, and that a parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. We saw that we can build much clearer and more forceful sentences by consistently observing these rules.

Now we need to refamiliarize ourselves with four specific applications of these two parallelism rules: (1) that all of the elements being enumerated in a list should take the same grammatical form, (2) that elements being compared should take the same grammatical form, (3) that elements joined by a linking verb or a verb of being should take the same grammatical form, and (4) that elements joined by a correlative conjunction should take the same grammatical form.

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All elements in a list should have a parallel structure. We can make our written compositions better organized and more readable by using the same grammatical form for all the elements we are enumerating in a list. The elements should all be noun forms, verb forms, infinitive phrases, gerund phrases, or participial phrases, whichever is most appropriate. When we allow any of the elements to take a different form, the rhythm of the enumeration is broken and the reader’s train of thought is needlessly disrupted.

Consider the following not-so-well-thought-out list:

“At present, our club has: (1) no formal charter, (2) subsisting without a long-term organizational goal, (3) a seriously declining membership, (4) a large budgetary deficit, and (5) to collect a large amount of past-due membership fees.”

The list looks awfully craggy and reads very badly for an obvious reason: its elements don’t follow a consistent grammatical form. Items 1, 3, and 4 are noun phrases, but Item 2 is a verb phrase in the progressive form and Item 5 is an infinitive phrase.

Now see how smoothly and cohesively the list reads when its elements all take the same grammatical form, in this case as verb phrases:

“At present, our club: (1) lacks a formal charter, (2) subsists without a long-term organizational goal, (3) suffers from a seriously declining membership, (4) carries a large budgetary deficit, and (5) needs to collect a large amount of past-due membership fees”.

Elements being compared should use a parallel structure. In constructions that use the form “X is better than/more than Y,” we have to make sure that the elements being compared have the same grammatical structure. Unparallel (gerund/infinitive): “She enjoys jogging better than to run.” Parallel (gerund/gerund): “She enjoys jogging better than running.”

Elements joined by a linking verb or a verb of being should use a parallel structure. When we use “is” as a verb of being that links two elements, we have to make sure that the elements have the same grammatical structure. Unparallel (infinitive/gerund): “To make that impossible demand is declaring open hostilities.” Parallel (infinitive/infinitive): “To make that impossible demand is to declare open hostilities.”

Elements joined by a correlative conjunction should use a parallel structure. When we use the correlative conjunctions “either . . .  or,” “neither . . . nor,” “not only . . . but also,” “both . . . and . . .”, and “whether . . . or,” we have to make sure that the elements being correlated have the same grammatical structure.

Unparallel (gerund/infinitive): “For you to get to Manila on time, we suggest either taking the morning flight tomorrow or to drive overnight right now.” Parallel (gerund/gerund): “For you to get to Manila on time, we suggest either taking the morning flight tomorrow or driving overnight right now.”

Unparallel: “They not only demand very short installment periods but also huge down payments.” Parallel: “They demand not only very short installment periods but also huge down payments.” Also parallel: “They not only demand very short installment periods but also demand huge down payments.”

We will take up some more fine points about parallelism in Part IV of this essay.

Next: Part IV – Presenting ideas in parallel
June 29, 2023 (Thursday)

Prescriptions for Good English Writing

The great importance of parallel
construction in presenting ideas

By Jose A. Carillo

Apart from the usefulness of the information or the power of the ideas being presented, what distinguishes good writing from insipid, so-so writing is parallelism in grammar along with symmetry in sentence construction. Parallelism and symmetry are actually mutually reinforcing attributes of exposition; by emphasizing the likeness or similarity between two or more ideas at both the sentence and paragraph levels, they promote clarity of expression and make the language more forceful and readable.

But precisely how do we achieve parallelism and symmetry in our own writing?

To shed some light to this question, I wrote a four-part essay, “Presenting ideas in parallel,” for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2006. Part I took up the basic rule for parallel construction: never mix grammatical forms when presenting similar or related ideas. Part II discussed another very important parallel construction rule: a parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. Part III presented specific applications of the two parallelism rules taken up in Parts I and II. Finally, Part IV demonstrated how to achieve structural balance for sentences by using parallel structure for adjectives and adverbs as well as for two or more grammatical elements serving as complements.

That four-part essay now forms part of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge (Manila Times Publishing, © 2010, 486 pages). Having seen not just a few violations (and apparent misunderstanding) of the parallelism rule in media on several occasions, however, I decided to post all parts of the essay in full in this blogspot. I am confident that by taking to heart that essay’s prescriptions for achieving parallelism, Forum members and friends (and the occasional media writers who drop by at the Forum) will see a dramatic improvement in both their written and spoken English. 

Part I – Presenting ideas in parallel

Parallel construction is one of our most powerful tools for organizing and presenting ideas. It cannot be overemphasized that making our sentences grammatically and semantically correct is simply not enough. We should also ensure that each of their grammatical structures that are alike in function follows the same pattern. In fact, observance of this basic stylistic rule very often spells the difference between good and bad writing.

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To give us a better idea of the power of parallel construction, let us first examine the following simple sentence: “Alberto likes reading, jogging, and to play computer games.”

We will find that it is structurally disjointed and does not read well because not all of its serial elements follow the same pattern. Although the first two elements, “reading” and “jogging,” are in parallel because both are gerunds (“-ing” noun forms), the third, “to play computer games,” ruins the parallelism because it is in the infinitive form (“to” + the verb stem).

One quick way to fix this structural problem is to put the third element also in gerund form, “playing computer games,” so that the sentence reads as follows: “Alberto likes reading, jogging, and playing computer games.” It is now grammatical balanced and no longer sounds stilted.

Another way for the original sentence to achieve parallelism is to make all three of its serial elements take the infinitive form: “Alberto likes to read, to jog, and to play computer games.” This sentence, of course, can be streamlined even further by using “to” only once right before the first of the all-infinitive parallel elements: “Alberto likes to read, jog, and play computer games.”

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In actual practice, we have to put in parallel not only single words or short phrases but much more complicated grammatical structures such as extended phrases and clauses as well as long serial lists. However, the basic rule for parallel construction remains the same: never mix grammatical forms. We have to choose the most appropriate form for the similar or related ideas, then stick to the same pattern all the way.

Consider the following sentence with three extended elements that are not all in parallel:

“The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time, approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very bad.”

The first subordinate clause, “he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time,” is in parallel with the second subordinate clause, “(he) approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors,” because both of them are active verb forms using “he” (the advertising manager) as the subject. However, the third subordinate clause, “his human relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very poor,” disrupts the parallelism because it is in the passive verb form and takes for its subject not “he” but another noun form, “his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”

See how much better the sentence reads when the third element is modified so it becomes parallel with the first two:

“The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time, allowed the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and related very badly with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”

Note that the three elements are now all active-voice verb phrases—“rarely managed…”, “allowed the publication…”, and “related very badly…”—that are perfectly parallel in form.

We will go deeper into the various ways of achieving parallelism in Part II of this essay.

Part II – Presenting ideas in parallel

As emphasized in Part I of this essay, the basic rule for parallel construction is to never mix grammatical forms when presenting similar or related ideas. A sentence that presents two or more serial elements should stick to the same pattern all throughout—all noun forms, all gerund forms, all infinitive forms, or all verb forms as the case may be. When serial elements all take the same form, ideas come across much more clearly and cohesively.

At this point, we will discuss another very important parallel construction rule: A parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. Recall now that a clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a predicate (and can thus function as a sentence in its own right, as in “we should obey the law”), as opposed to a phrase, which is a group of words that doesn’t have them (and thus can’t function as a sentence by itself, as in “to obey the law” or “obeying the law”). When the sentence doesn’t sustain the clause pattern, or when any of the clauses shifts from the active to the passive voice or the other way around, the parallelism falls apart. The result is a disjointed sentence that doesn’t read well.

Take this sentence that contains three serial grammatical elements:

“The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, that they should always do their assigned homework, and to submit their term papers on time.”

The parallelism of this sentence breaks down because while the first two elements—“they should aim for perfect attendance” and “they should always do their assigned homework”—are both clauses, the third element—“to submit their term papers on time”—is not a clause but an infinitive phrase.

We need to make this third element also a clause—“they should submit their term papers on time”—so the sentence can become perfectly parallel and more readable:

“The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, that they should do their assigned homework regularly, and that they should submit their term papers on time.”

Of course, a more concise but less emphatic way to construct this serial-clause sentence is to use the imperative “that they should” only once before the first clause:

“The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, do their assigned homework regularly, and submit their term papers on time.”

(Be forewarned, though, that such streamlining can obscure the meaning in more complicated constructions.)

The parallel structure of a sentence with serial clauses can also be ruined when any of the clauses takes a different voice, say the passive from active:

“The president anticipated that majority of the lower house would welcome the planned Charter change, that most of the senators would fiercely oppose it, and that a vicious demolition job would be mounted against it by her political detractors.”

Here, the first two clauses—“majority of the lower house would welcome the planned charter change” and “most of the senators would fiercely oppose it”—are in the active voice, but the third clause—“a vicious demolition job would be mounted against it by her political detractors”—is in the passive voice, thus disrupting the pattern.

To make the construction parallel all throughout, we should make the third clause also take the active voice—“her political detractors would mount a vicious demolition job against it.” This results in a more forceful sentence:

“The president anticipated that majority of the lower house would welcome the planned charter change, that most of the senators would fiercely oppose it, and that her political detractors would mount a vicious demolition job against it.”

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 29 and June 5, 2006 © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Next: Part III – Presenting ideas in parallel

June 26, 2023 (Monday)

The Mainsprings of Human Knowledge

The Tree of Life and Wisdom
By Jose A. Carillo

I have given it a lot of thought, and now I suspect that the original Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was not a living plant but a powerful computer. The Bible was surprisingly silent about the nature of that tree, so artists and writers through the ages had felt free to variously picture it as an apple tree, a fig tree, a pear tree, a dragon’s blood tree, even a banana tree. I understand that in a 13th century cathedral somewhere in France, there was even a fresco that showed Eve finding a serpent coiled around a giant branching European mushroom, the lightly toxic and hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, drawn with Provencãl innocence to represent the tree that gave us our much-dreaded mortality. These images of the Tree of Knowledge are as charming as the Romans envisioning their messenger-god Mercury as a runner with winged feet, as frightening as the early Christians sketching the devil as a thoroughly beastly creature with serpent’s snout and bat wings, and as heavenly as the Renaissance artists conjuring archangels with majestic, blindingly white eagle’s wings.

All of this ancient imagery, however, miserably fails to capture the essence of a device or icon that is supposed to represent the most powerful source of wisdom and instruction the world has ever known. An apple tree, a banana tree, or a vine-like mushroom as the Tree of Knowledge? This seems to me to stretch the credulity of even a nine-year-old grade-schooler much too much! I would therefore rather think of the Tree of Knowledge as a Pentium 4 personal computer with a 56 kbps fax modem, hooked up by a powerful Internet server to the World Wide Web, capable of directly feeding on the 2.5 billion documents accessible to the Internet and of being able to sift through 520 billion more that are publicly accessible in other databases.* I could not think of any other compendium or structure, no matter how massive, that could draw on such a huge database and merit “Tree of Knowledge” as a sobriquet, much less make this database accessible to even the small populace of the Garden of Eden close to the time of Creation.

Of course I realize that a myriad conceptual objections can be raised against this seemingly whimsical intellectual construct. Chief of these is the question of how the Pentium 4 and the Internet could have gotten themselves into the Garden of Eden in the first place. Could it be that they had managed to quietly transport themselves back in time and install themselves into the Tree of Knowledge, or else disguise themselves as the tree itself? Those fixated with time’s immutability would of course deem this too farfetched, as improbable as the tales of extraterrestrial visitations peddled by the Danish writer Erik von Daeniken. But it is at least not as preposterous a concept as a fruit tree being the source of all human understanding and wisdom. A tree as a source of life, yes, like our coconut with its proverbial one thousand and one uses, from food to shelter to medicine to fuel and to lumber; but just any tree as source of all knowledge, I really wonder.

And what about the paradox that would result if we believed that the Tree of Knowledge drew its power from a state-of-the-art Pentium? Would that belief still hold if we consider the fact that the computer and the Web are actually the culmination of the series of small and big inventions that sprung from Adam and Eve having eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge itself? Remember that the computer became possible only because somewhere early in time, man discovered and learned how to harness fire, then found a way centuries later to use it to melt the tiny particles of glass in sand into wafers of silicon, then developed a method for converting these wafers into transistor chips and into extremely powerful motherboards and processors that are the heart of the modern computer. Remember, too, that the Internet and the Web are of a much more recent vintage. It was only in 1973 that the Internet came into being, the happy result of American research into technologies to interlink computer networks of various kinds. Another 21 years into the future, in 1994, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to unify and integrate the Internet’s global information and communication structure. Since then it has expanded into a global network of networks, enabling computers of all kinds—including yours and mine—to directly communicate and share services throughout much of our planet.

What is perhaps little appreciated in this dizzying train of inventions is that the modern computer and the Web have been essentially a continuing but silent Hindu-Arabic-European-American co-production, and that at the root of it was the ancient Indo-European language and the Arabic number system. We know, of course, that these twin foundations of our civilization moved into Europe and jumped across the English Channel into England, polishing themselves into the English language and into the Arabic number system that we know so well today. It really is no wonder that Boolean algebra, a mathematical system of representing logical propositions that became the foundation for the modern computer, was developed by the English language expert and mathematician George Boole in the very same soil that produced the wonder of English literature that was William Shakespeare. The Chinese may have invented paper, the abacus, and gunpowder, and the Romans may have built their empire that extended all the way to Africa and to the banks of the Mesopotamian River in what is now modern Iraq, but I simply cannot conceive of the modern computer built from Chinese script or from the Roman numeral system, with which no stable building taller than the Roman Coliseum could be built because the system simply could not multiply and divide numbers properly.

That the Tree of Knowledge could not have been a fruit tree but a computer linked to the Web may remain debatable, and I will not quibble with that fact. But to me, one thing is clear and certain: the computer and the Worldwide Web have made the Tree of Knowledge much more accessible and closer to us than ever before, and it would be a tragedy if not outright foolish for anyone not to learn to freely partake of its fruits. (2002)

From English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*After this essay was written, of course, the Pentium 4 processor had since been supplanted in personal computers by much more advanced and powerful processors like the Core-Duo, and Google has grown even more explosively from 2,469,940,685 web pages in 2002 to over 30,000,000,000 today. It can thus be said that the computing machines and the online search engine capability that I had described glowingly in this 2002 essay are now obsolete. (2009)

Personal Tribute to a Nobel Prize Literary Laureate

How I Discovered Gabriel García Márquez
By Jose A. Carillo

It is a very private story that I occasionally tell, but only to aspiring literary types, younger executives, and teenage bookworms who find time to ask me what is a good English-language book or novel to read. The story is about how, many years ago, I discovered Gabriel García Márquez in the romance section of a big bookstore at Claro M. Recto Avenue in Manila. It was shortly before or right after martial law had taken the life of the daily paper where I was working as a roving reporter, I cannot remember the exact date now. But there was Márquez, still a total stranger to me, in the Avon hardback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad in the original Spanish), enjoying in the same shelf the company of such rupture-and-heartbreak novelists as Emily Loring, Barbara Cartland, and Jacqueline Susann. No, García Márquez did not get there as an occasional stray, chucked absentmindedly or insensitively into the shelf by some browser. If memory serves me well, the book had been actually misclassified and miscatalogued in the same genre as the more popular company it was keeping when I found it.

The reason why it got there was probably serendipity of the most sublime order, but I think you can dismiss that thought as just me imagining the whole thing in chronological reverse. A more plausible reason was that it had the green and grainy cover art of a naked man and woman in passionate embrace, which I later thought was the publisher’s well-intentioned attempt to make the Buendia family’s otherwise unimaginable tragedies and grief more commercially acceptable. It was actually this somber study in solarized chiaroscuro that drew my eye to the book. When I began to leaf through it, however, furtively expecting some passages about women in the throes of illicit sex, I read something much more exciting, much more stimulating, and much more intriguing. “Many years later,” García Márquez began, “as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” A few passages later I was irretrievably sold to the book. I promptly paid for it, tearing the plastic wrapping no sooner had the sales clerk sealed it, and started to read as I trudged the sidewalk on my way to my apartment somewhere in the city.

When I had read the book twice or thrice and still couldn’t get over the thrill of the discovery, I excitedly recommended and lent it to a broadcast acquaintance at the old National Press Club. I can’t remember now who the borrower was, but he was one of those press club habitues who would dawdle over beer or gin tonic at the bar till somebody’s self-imposed midnight closing song-and-piano piece was over. What I do remember is that he never returned it to me. He assured me, however, that he had read it and enjoyed it so much that he could not resist lending it to someone—was it Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil or the late Renato Constantino?—who in turn lent it to someone who lent it to someone until finally the chain in the lending was lost. The last I heard from the original borrower was that the book had been passed on to an English Lit. professor at the University of the Philippines, where a few years later I was to learn that it had become mandatory reading in its English graduate school.

Being pathetically inept in Spanish, I could never really know what Castilian or Colombian idioms I missed in the English translation, but the English-language García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude truly set my mind on fire. He lit in me a tiny flame at first, then a silent fire for language that burned even brighter with the passing of the years. He was not only robust and masterful in his prose but devastatingly penetrating in his insights about the flow and ebb of life in the archetypal South American town of Macondo. Not since I chanced upon a battered copy of The Leopard (Il Gatopardo in the original Italian) by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa two years earlier, this time a real stray in a smaller bookstore nearby, had I seen such soaring yet quietly majestic writing. Here is García Márquez at his surreal best: “Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats as she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant when Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identity the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the sheets of the flapping sheets that rose up with her…” With prose like this I became a García Márquez pilgrim, re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude countless times and devouring, like an adolescent glutton, practically all of his novels and short-story collections in the years that followed.

Many years later, in 1982, I was to discover in the morning papers that García Márquez had so deservedly won the Nobel Prize for literature. I was so happy for the new Nobel Laureate and for myself, and I no longer thought anymore of ever recovering that first copy of him that I had the pleasure of retrieving from the company where it obviously didn’t belong. In homage I went back to the bookstore where I first found García Márquez, quietly and almost reverently picking up a new Picador paperback edition of him. Its cover art was no longer the man and woman in the deathless embrace, but this time an image more faithful to the elemental truth of the book: the whole Buendia family in a portrait of domestic but elegiac simplicity, at one and at peace with the chickens and shrubs and flowers that gave them sustenance, awaiting the last of the one hundred years allotted to them on earth.

The book is mottled with age and yellow with paper acid now. Now and then I would lend it to a soul that is intrigued why I would keep such a forlorn book on my office desk, but only after tragicomically extracting an elaborate pledge that he or she would really read it and give it back to me no matter how long it took to finish it.
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This essay originally appeared in the author’s “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently became Chapter 40, Section 7 of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. Copyright 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The essay likewise appeared as a CNN iReport feature in memory of Gabriel García Márquez's death on April 17, 2014. He was 87.

Read my personal tribute to to the late Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez in Jose Carillo's English Forum on Apri 18, 2014.  https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6200.0

A Quintessential Love Story Worth Sharing

 Rediscovering John Galsworthy

Exactly twelve days after I was born in a small farming town in southeastern Philippines, the great director and actor Orson Welles broadcast on radio in Wisconsin a dramatic adaptation of John Galsworthy’s classic short-story, “The Apple Tree.” Of course there was no way that I could have known this at the time; I was only a malnourished infant in a country that had just come out of brutal enemy occupation. I only discovered the fact about this confluence of events four nights ago while surfing the modern-day marvel called the Web. I stumbled serendipitously on the complete script of Welles’ broadcast while looking for traces of the great love story that had so bewitched and given me so much pleasure one magical summer in the late 60s.

You must forgive me for what in every way looks like juvenile excitement over only an old story and an old English-language writer that modern anthologies seem to have even completely forgotten. But to me “The Apple Tree” was—and still is—the quintessential love story. The quiet tragedy between the London cosmopolite Frank Ashurst and the beautiful Welsh country lass Megan David, told with great empathy and narrative skill by a master of the English language, haunted me for years. To me it was just a happy accident that the story was written by a writer who was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. Galsworthy was an English prose stylist so luminous in his language and so engaging in his storytelling that I gladly surrendered that summer and the next, reading practically the whole body of his novels and short fiction.

Take, as a first taste of Galsworthy, this passage from the opening lines of “The Apple Tree” as retold by Welles: “The familiar words of Hippolytus echoed in my mind: ‘The apple-tree, the singing, and the gold.’ The apple tree. And then, quite suddenly, I remembered. I’d been here before. Years before. I’d stood on this self-same hill. I knew the valley into which I looked. That ribbon of road and the old well behind. Life has moments of sheer beauty, of unbidden flying rapture that—they last no longer than the span of a cloud’s flight over the sun. I’d stumbled on just such a moment. In my own life, I’d stumbled on a buried memory of wild, sweet time.”

The English I am writing and you are reading now is, for the most part, what it is precisely because I had stumbled on “The Apple Tree” and Galsworthy and fell in love with both many years ago. It was in the public library of the British-Philippine Council, that time when it was still at old R. Hidalgo Street, in what is now largely Manila’s Muslim quarter in Quiapo. The story was part of a Galsworthy hardbound collection with russet cover simply entitled Caravan. I never got to own a personal copy of the book, but read and reread everything in it, so enchanted was I by Galsworthy’s narrative art, which was so far removed from the run of the English-language authors available to me at the time. But in the following years Galsworthy dropped out of sight from the shelves of bookstores. I looked far and wide to get a copy of Caravan, scouring every bookstore I could get myself into both here and in my travels, but could not find one. In time, distracted and enthused by English-language stylists with comparable if not greater facility with prose, I gave up my search for both the writer and the book.

But four nights ago, from the lens of more than half a century, there was Orson Welles in digital form talking to me about “The Apple Tree” and Galsworthy in his Mercury Theater dramatization of the story, sponsored intriguingly by then the leading American maker of beer. To the tune of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, as indicated in the script, the great actor and director of Citizen Kane (which, it is probably worth mentioning, is considered the greatest film of all time) began: “Tonight, the Mercury brings you one of the loveliest of all love stories. It’s by John Galsworthy and it’s called ... ‘The Apple Tree’.” I almost fell off my computer swivel chair, so profound and delightful was my shock. The treasured gem that I had given up looking for after so many years was suddenly and literally in my fingertips again.

And so now I can relive again and again that unforgettable first encounter between Frank and Megan, as first imagined by the great Galsworthy and now retold by the digital Welles:

FRANK ASHURST (narrates): It was a girl. The wind blew her crude, little skirt against her legs and lifted her battered tam-o’-shanter. It was clear she was a country girl -- her shoes were split, her hands were rough and brown, and her hair waved untidily across her forehead. But her lashes were long and dark, and her gray eyes were a wonder: dewy, as if opened for the first time that day.

MEGAN: Hello.

ROBERT: Could you tell us if there’s a farm near here where we could spend the night?  My friend’s getting pretty lame.

MEGAN: Well, there’s our farm, sir.

FRANK: Oh, could you put us up?

MEGAN: I’m sure my aunt would be glad to. If you like, I’ll show you the way.

The way that Megan showed to Frank was, in the small compass of “The Apple Tree,” a path that led not only to such great love and so much heartbreak, but also to some of the most compelling and beautiful lines of prose I have seen in English literature. I dare you now to tarry a little from your purely mundane pursuits to take that path. (written circa 2002-2003)

This essay, which first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed part of my book English Plain and Simple, is part of a collection of my personal essays from mid-2002 to date.

A Conversation About Language and Grammar Well-Worth Sharing

BLESSED ARE THEY WHO CAN SPEAK IN
SIMPLE, CLEAR, EFFORTLESS ENGLISH!

With great nostalgia and admittedly with not just a little excitement, I am sharing with every English speaker and serious learner of English very interesting and animated conversations I had in 2016—that's over seven years ago!—with two very articulate readers of my English Plain and Simple column in The Manila Times.

The extended online conversation was triggered by this tough grammar question by reader Michael Galario: “Do noun clauses grammatically functioning as subjects in a sentence follow the sequence-of-tenses rule?” He followed it with this even tougher question: "What about sentences with relative clauses? Do they obey the sequence-of-tenses rule in English?”

Michael then presented three examples of such sentences, among them this provocative one: “The girl who is singing the song right now had an affair with the CEO.” (He observed parenthetically that the singing happens at the moment of speaking; that the affair was in the past and that it may no longer be subsisting at the present time.)

To answer Michael’s second question satisfactorily, I presented a quick review of the relative clauses in English, in the course of which I observed that "there's really no such thing as a complex-complex sentence but only four types," namely simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. (Read my essay "The sequence of tenses for sentences with relative clauses," November 5, 2016) https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6724.0)

At that point a very articulate new follower of my column, Maximo Tumbali, interjected with a contrary thought. He suggested that there’s even a need to add a sixth type—the complex-complex-complex-complex—and presented this sentence as an example: “He got mad when I told him that he should study in order to be able to move on to the next level until he graduates from the secondary.”

What followed next was this very interesting, instructive, and high animated online exchange of views about grammar and communication between Max Tumbali and me.

Part 1 - Blessed are they who can speak in simple, clear, effortless English!

Max Tumbali: Don’t you think the continuing complexity of a sentence complicates one’s effort to seize what it all means, but to the composer it’s a mark of ingenuity?

Joe (that’s me): Oh, yes, complexity is the stuff that not a few stupefying grammarians in academe love to revel in. It feeds their vainglory to declare that some sentences can get very complicated in construction. It’s really a good, absorbing, brain-stretching diversion to parse and diagram them. From the looks of it, though, that example of yours is simply a complex sentence. It has “he got mad” as the independent clause, with “when I told him” as the first dependent clause and “that he should study” as the second dependent clause, which is then modified by the adverbial clause “to be able to move on to the next level until he graduates from the secondary.” I hope I didn’t confound you with that analysis.

                   IMAGE CREDIT: SKYGRAMMAR.COM
                                        The Four Types of Sentence Structure in English

Max: Absolutely not! On the contrary, you enlightened me so much about that sentence type’s anatomy. You’re truly a guru. But how would you classify Marcel Proust’s typical kilometric sentence?

Joe: I would classify Proust’s long prose as one overextended sentence that wonderfully works without any hitch, as in a flowing, uninterrupted dream. Of course, it defies traditional sentence diagramming, and I won’t recommend to lesser creative mortals like you and me to pursue such writing. To be truly communicative, it pays to write plain and simple prose.

Max: You’re undoubtedly right, although sometimes some writers admit that they can better express their thoughts through more complex sentences. And do you agree with what one English teacher said sometime ago that the easiest way to learn English is through or by ear? And that an English sentence is construed to be correct if it sounds good to the ear?

Joe: Yes, absolutely, it’s easiest to learn English by ear. Just beware that doggerel can sound good to the ear even if it has atrocious grammar and syntax.Max: But if communication is the apparent purpose, shouldn’t there be less emphasis on the study of English grammar and more on the oral use of English where most often grammatical rules are violated or just taken for granted?

Joe: All the more should good English grammar be emphasized, whether in written or oral communication. It’s the mark of an educated, precise, discerning, knowledgeable thinker. Whether we admit or not, we get assaulted by bad English and get leery at someone who, no matter how high in social standing or authority, bungles grammar and usage much too often and may not even be aware of it.

Max: That should always be the case. So aren’t you alarmed that most college students, graduates, professionals—worst, even statesmen—can’t speak correct English these days? How would you account for this decadence in the quality of their spoken English?

Joe: Those who habitually express themselves in complex-compound and compound-complex sentences aren’t really clear and precise thinkers. They haven’t learned how to organize their thoughts and make them easily understandable to their listeners. When I listen to them, I can’t help but silently exclaim that blessed are they who are able to speak in simple, clear, plain, effortless English! (December 10, 2016)

Part 2 - Blessed are they who can speak in simple, clear, effortless English!

This continues the extended conversation between Maximo Tumbali and me that started the previous week.

Max: I agree with you but with regard to a philosopher trying to deliberate on a philosophical issue, he thinks that by employing complex sentences, he can better drive home the point taking into account not only its denotative meaning but also its connotations and nuances. His effort is much similar to preparing a special menu that requires more varied ingredients to achieve a desired taste.

Joe: Maybe so, Max, but I think a philosopher who can explain his complicated ideas in plain and simple language can convince people much more easily than philosophers who use very dense and convoluted prose.

       IMAGE CREDIT: BY LLUÍS MAS MANCHÓN, E. RODERO     PUBLISHED IN COMMUNICATIONS 2018

              The complex chart of the Interactive Communication Process (ICP)

Max: I think so, too. But then simplifying the medium of expression in the desire to make an idea or thought intelligible and understandable, one may court the danger of reducing the scope that that idea is intended to cover, thus sacrificing the integrity and the wholeness of the thought. The explanation may be complicated, but if it serves to evoke all that the idea stands for, then why should it be jettisoned in favor of a much simpler one?

Joe: Let me be lecturesque a little bit, Max. Communication is actually a matter of conveying one’s thoughts and ideas in the appropriate language register, which is simply the variety of language that a speaker uses in a particular social context or situation. Philosophers will have their own language register, and so with poets, clerics, managers, salesmen, office clerks, and janitors, but the good communicator calibrates his language register to fit a particular audience or listener. In truth, you can only communicate effectively with someone by using the words, thoughts, ideas, and images that are already in that person’s head.

Max: Well, I think I deserved that lecture considering my mind’s limited reach. But what I want to point out is that in our attempt to convey our message to others in the clearest and simplest way possible, we somehow in the process chip away some elements that, though maybe not essential, can aid in capturing the whole essence of what we want to convey… We dare reduce to the barest minimum our mode of expression in the hope that others won’t miss the meaning of our message. But then as you have said, one has to calibrate his mode of communicating to suit his listener’s capacity to understand. In short, it obliges all parties involved to be generous, sincere, capable, tolerant, and unprejudicial in pursuing the task of attaining clarity of meaning.

Joe: That’s true, Max. When we write or say our ideas aloud, we are actually trying to share our perception of reality with other people. But no matter how long or detailed we are in sharing that perception, it will never be the totality of all that we know because that totality can only be perceived by ourselves alone. It’s the stuff of what we are as a unique living mind.

Max: Well, I guess that encapsulates our understanding of the nature of human communication. But just a thought: Wouldn’t we in the future perhaps stumble on an invention that will render obsolete our usual way of communicating—perhaps a piece of invention that will bring us closest to a genuine understanding of ourselves, our thoughts, and our reality? And I’d like to add that our unintended misperception of reality is a dangerous thing.

Joe: That’s right, Max. It’s just that some people actually couldn’t resist pursuing dangerous things. (December 17, 2016)

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This two-part conversation appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times in its December 10 and 17, 2016 issues, © 2016 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

Noble and Inspiring Thoughts in Jeopardy: "Desiderata"

As every competent advertising practitioner or propagandist would know, people tend to uncritically accept ideas that conform to their strongly held beliefs or give vent to their own deepest desires and expectations. This was certainly true with the poster that spuriously attributes to Abraham Lincoln an anonymous writer’s letter to his son’s teacher—an attribution that I made an effort to rectify in my previous two columns. 

There is another popular inspirational poster that similarly uses a wrong attribution to give more weight to its message. The poster carries a very well-worded meditative poem and credits it as follows: “Found in Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore; Dated 1692.” This attribution makes it appear that the poem, despite its very contemporary English, dates back to the American colonial period over 300 years ago and had been written anonymously. As it turns out, however, the poem is of much recent vintage. It is a 1920s creation by a Terre Haute, Indiana lawyer and poet, Max Ehrmann (1872-1945). 

That poem is “Desiderata.” 

Because “Desiderata” (Latin for “things to be desired”) still has a subsisting copyright, I can only quote a few lines for those whose recollection of it may have somewhat dimmed through the years:

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

“As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit…

“Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

Click the link that follows to read “Desiderata” by Max Ehrmann in full.   

How did the credits for this charming meditation on life get it all wrong? 

It turns out that sometime before 1959, the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore had come across a copy of “Desiderata” and included it in his collection of devotional materials. When he made a handout of it for his congregation, he identified its source by putting this notation on top of the handout: “Old St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore A.D. 1692.” In the ensuing years, as the handout changed from hand to hand and went through many printings, some printer evidently took the notation as indicating that the poem itself had been found in Old St. Paul’s Church way back in 1692, its founding date. Nobody noticed this mistake, and the poem’s suddenly acquired centuries’ old patina gave it even more depth and charm.

Indeed, so popular had the poem become that the U.S. magazine Success printed it in its August 1971 issue. For this the magazine was sued for copyright infringement by Robert L. Bell, owner of Crescendo Publishing Co., which had acquired the rights to “Desiderata” from Ehrmann’s successors. After a five-year litigation, during which the defendants argued that “permission [to publish] was given gratuitously” in this particular case, the court ruled in favor of Success magazine. However, on the strength of a copy of “Desiderata” published by Indiana Publishing Co. with a 1927 copyright notice, Bell was able to pursue his copyright claim elsewhere in the U.S.

So then, as in the case of the spurious Lincoln letter, I think the producers of the “Desiderata” poster should stop using the poem’s wrong attribution once and for all and give credit where credit is due. This will not only give justice to Ehrmann, who said in his diary that he wrote the poem simply “to leave a humble gift—a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods,” but also give our children and ourselves a keener sense of history and a greater respect for it.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 17, 2006 issue © 2006 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

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