Tales of perdition

Tumultuous times like these, both here in the country and in many other places in the world, prompt me to hark back to a cautionary essay I wrote in the early 2000s, “The Strength of Materials and the People’s Folly,” where I bewailed our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.” It’s an essay that I think is as relevant and as timely as ever, so I’m posting it in this week’s edition of the Forum. (March 1, 2015)

The Strength of Materials and the People’s Folly

In the engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiom about “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all. 

Lewis Carroll, that humorous English mathematical logician, also captured this logic of destruction in this rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. In Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, for instance, five apparently morally faultless people on a religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of Our Lady of Peñafrancia, the region’s religious patroness, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned. To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in life, as was done by the cleric in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but just a few hours after the bridge collapsed, I went to the scene and this was what I saw: the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for it.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke when it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic that fateful night on April 14, 1912, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of probably the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become extremely brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor had been breached and they failed.

As in these tales of perdition, the danger to all of us is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by popular culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum and maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the The Manila Times. This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Open secrets to writing prose that leaps out from the page

If you are simply writing a memo to your manager, a job application letter to a prospective employer, or an accomplishment report to a socio-civic or professional organization, your best bet will always be plain and simple English—simple words, concise and uncomplicated phrasing, short and straightforward sentences, expositions with not a trace of embellishment. But if you are a professional writer doing nonfiction feature stories or opinion pieces; a literary writer doing short fiction, novels, or stage plays; or a public speaker who ply the lecture circuit for a living or do a lot of social advocacy or political speeches, it definitely won’t do to depend on plain and simple English alone. You need to discover, learn, and practice the open secrets of writing English that leaps out from the page, English that engages and keeps your readers or listeners enthralled until you’re done with what you have to tell them. In short, you need to acquire ample skills in rhetorical writing and speaking in English.

In “Playing Boldly with Sentences,” an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column of The Manila Times in the early 2000s, I related my thrill of discovery in coming across Lucille Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing, a reference book that methodically but delightfully describes the nuts-and-bolts of writing sentences and expositions with the power to hold readers and listeners by their lapels. I am sure that Forum members and guests can greatly benefit from that book’s writing prescriptions, so I have posted that essay about them here. (December 16, 2014)

Playing Boldly with Sentences

One of the most lucid and delightful books I’ve read about writing is Lucille Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing. The slim volume, which I discovered many years ago when I was still very self-consciously grappling with writing technique, taught me one unforgettable truth about doing a sentence: it’s all a matter of developing a basic idea. No matter how complex our thoughts are, we can actually boil down each of them to a few words that capture its essential meaning. The emotional turmoil that seizes a love struck person, for instance, can normally be whittled down to this deadpan statement: “I’m in love and I don’t know what to do.” The righteous anger that a manager feels when a subordinate violates a time-honored corporate rule usually culminates in two words: “You’re fired!” And the feeling of certainty of a religious convert usually gets affirmed in these words: “I believe.” They are all that simple.

It is only when we ask ourselves—or when other people ask us—to support and justify those simple ideas that we have to elaborate on them with more words. Who are involved? Why? Where? When? How? And so what? To answer these questions, we begin to build our sentences. We make them long and complex to the extent that will make our thoughts clear, not only to ourselves but also to anyone who would care to read or listen to us.
  
Building those sentences can actually become much easier once we understand clearly that any sentence falls under either of three patterns: loose sentence, periodic sentence, or combination sentence. As delightfully discussed by Ms. Vaughan Payne in her book, every sentence begins with a basic idea or statement: “The doves flew.” “Ana lost her temper.” “The manager burst into laughter.” It is how we build structures upon these basic ideas that determines how good a writer or speaker we are.

We come up with a loose sentence every time we add a string of details to the tail end of a basic statement: “The doves flew, flapping their wings in the still air, breaking the morning stillness with their shrill cries, warning their kindred of the approach of the deadly hawks.” On the other hand, we produce a periodic sentence when we place additional details before or inside the basic statement: “The imperturbable Ana, ever the patient one, the girl who never got angry even with the worst provocation, lost her temper.” In a combination sentence, of course, we add details before, inside, and after the basic statement, freely combining the elements of both the loose and periodic sentence: “The morose and demanding manager, with an ax to grind against anything and everything, was so pleased with the quarterly sales that he burst into laughter, the first time in so many years in his beleaguered company.”

You must have already noticed that periodic sentence structures usually expand the subject or verb, while loose structures expand the verb or object. The usual methods of expanding the subject in a periodic sentence are, of course, description and the use of appositives, adjectives, prepositional phrase, and participles. In her book, Ms. Vaughan Payne suggests that the easiest way to make details flow in a periodic sentence is to think of the subject as being followed by a pause.

It is, she says, the same kind of pause that occurs in conversations every day, as in these sentences: “My friend [pause] a Political Science graduate [pause] wants to run for town mayor.” “That volcano [pause] sheer and high as it is [pause] is not really that hard to climb.” “The school [pause] in keeping with tradition [pause] required graduates to wear togas and gowns.” “Annabelle [pause] grown tired of her boyfriend [pause] broke off with him last night.”

In the case of verbs, whether in periodic or loose sentences, we can expand them by showing how their action progresses. We can use adverbs and adverbial phrases to do the expanding: “The interviewer listened, attentively at first, but distractedly and impatiently towards the end.” “The soldiers paused at the road junction, wearily scanning the horizon for jet bombers, fearfully spying the buildings for snipers.”

As in the case of subjects, we can likewise expand objects to form loose sentence structures by using appositives, adjectives, prepositional phrase, and participles: “Today I am seeing Miss Jennifer Cruz, the human resources manager.” “The newlyweds took the bus, a rickety affair that perilously transported the mountainfolk and their produce to the nearest lowland town.”

There’s actually no limit to how much we can expand subjects, verbs, and objects in our sentences—except, of course, good sense and a keen awareness of how much our readers and audiences can take. In the end, the good writer is one who exercises restraint: not saying too little as to be irritatingly cryptic, nor saying too much as to be a big, tiresome bore.

This essay is Chapter 80 of Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The versatility of free relative clauses in modifying our ideas

In “Crafting more elegant prose with free modifiers,” an essay of mine that I posted here last December 2, 2012, I showed how we can craft more elegant English prose by making good use of the so-called free modifiers instead of bound modifiers. To highlight the difference between these two, I likened a bound modifier to an animal species that has already perfected itself genetically, thus arriving at its evolutionary dead-end; in contrast, I said that free relative clauses form part of the wide gene pool of language that makes infinite permutations of thought possible.

This time, in “Making good use of free relative clauses,” an essay that I wrote for my daily English-usage column in The Manila Times on February 26, 2004, we will take an even closer look at the great versatility of this grammar device in modifying ideas. This is the last of the seven essays on grammar strategies for crafting more readable and compelling sentences that I have posted here from June 2012 onwards.

 

Making good use of free relative clauses

In the preceding chapter, we compared a bound modifier to an animal species that has already arrived at its evolutionary dead-end, and a free relative modifier to a species that partakes of a wide gene pool for its further evolution. This was in the context of the power of free relative clauses to expand ideas beyond the limits of the usual subject-verb-predicate format. We saw that while bound relative clauses simply affirm the identity of a subject noun, free relative clauses expand ideas in any way the writer or speaker deems suitable to his exposition.

There’s a handy guide for spotting the two: most bound relative clauses that refer to non-persons are introduced by “that,” while most free relative clauses that refer to non-persons are introduced by “which”: “The sedan that you delivered to me last week is a lousy clunker!” “That sedan, which you told me would be the best my money can buy, is a lousy clunker!” Notice how self-contained and peremptory the first sentence is, and how awkward it would be to add any more ideas to it (better to start all over again with a new sentence!).

In contrast, marvel at how the second sentence readily lends itself to further elaboration: “That sedan, which you told me would be the best my money can buy, which you bragged would give me the smoothest ride, and which you claimed would make me the most sophisticated-looking motorist in town, is a lousy clunker!” We can add even more “which” clauses to that sentence in direct proportion to the speaker’s anger and indignation, and still be sure that the speaker won’t be gasping for air when he gives vent to them.

We must be aware, though, that bound relative clauses are sometimes not that easy to spot in a sentence. Recall that we learned to routinely knock off “that” from relative clauses as part of our prose-streamlining regimen. Thus, the bound-clause-using sentence above would most likely present itself in this guise: “The sedan [that] you delivered to me last week is a lousy clunker!” This, as we know, is a neat disappearing act that “which” can oftentimes also do to link free relative clauses smoothly with main clauses.

But what really makes free relative clauses most valuable to prose is their ability to position themselves most anywhere in a sentence—at the beginning, in the middle, or at the tail end—with hardly any change in meaning; bound relative clauses simply can’t do that. We can better understand that semantic attribute by using three ways to combine sentences using the free-relative-clause construction technique. Take these two sentences: “The new junior executive has been very astute in his moves. He has been quietly working to form alliances with the various division managers.”

Our first construction puts the relative clause right at the beginning of the sentence: “Working quietly to form alliances with the various division managers, the new junior executive has been very astute in his moves.” The second puts it smack in the middle: “The new junior executive, working quietly to form alliances with the various division managers, has been very astute in his moves.” And the third puts it at the very tail end: “The new junior executive has been very astute in his moves, quietly working to form alliances with the various division managers.”

The wonder is that all three constructions yield elegant sentences that mean precisely the same thing—sentences that look, sound, and feel much better than when they are forced into bound-modifier straightjackets like this: “The new junior executive who is working quietly to form alliances with the various division managers has been very astute in his moves.”

We can see clearly now that free relative clauses work in much the same way as resumptive and summative modifiers: they allow us to effortlessly extend the line of thought of a sentence without losing coherence and cohesion and without creating unsightly sprawl. However, free relative clauses differ from them in one major functional attribute: they specifically modify a subject of a particular verb.

In contrast, resumptive modifiers pick up any noun, verb, or adjective from a main clause and elaborate on them with relative clauses, while summative modifiers make a recap of what has been said in the previous clause and develop it with another line of thought altogether. Free relative clauses specifically need verbs to start off thoughts that elaborate on the subject of the main clause: “She loves me deeply, showing it in the way she moves, hinting it in the way she looks at me.”

We can attach more and more free relative clauses to that sentence, but the point has been made: using free relative clauses is—short of poetry—one of the closest ways we can ever get to achieving elegance in our prose.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 26, 2004 issue © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved. This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 64 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

The magic that resumptive modifiers can do to our English

During these past two months, I have presented here in the Forum four basic grammar strategies and techniques for crafting more readable and compelling sentences: the use of synonyms to enliven prose, the reference word strategy for avoiding repetitive use of the same nouns, the use of the demonstrative reference words, and the use of repeated action and sequence words. This time, I’ll now go to the advanced sentence-development techniques for giving more substance and feeling to our sentences: the use of resumptive modifiers, the use of summative modifiers, and the use of free modifiers.

As the fifth in the Forum’s series of pointers for expository writing, I am now posting for starters the composite essay below, “The Usefulness of Resumptive Modifiers,” that I wrote for my daily English-usage column in The Manila Times in January of 2004. The essay shows that far better than relative clauses, resumptive modifiers can dramatically improve the organization of our ideas and make our sentences much more readable and compelling. (September 2, 2012)

The usefulness of resumptive modifiers

Useful as the four basic grammar strategies and techniques are for crafting more readable and compelling sentences, they are not all we need to write really good prose. In fact, indiscriminate reliance on them can hook us to a lifetime of plain and simple but thoroughly unexpressive writing. So this time, to better equip ourselves against producing stiff, dreary, and uncompelling prose, we will take up three highly effective techniques for giving flesh and feeling to our sentences without running them to the ground and without getting our thoughts entangled in verbal sprawl. These advanced sentence-development techniques are the use of resumptive modifiers, the use of summative modifiers, and the use of free modifiers.

Let’s begin with resumptive modifiers, a device that can dramatically improve our organization of ideas while packing emotional wallop into our sentences.

The best way to understand what resumptive modifiers are and how they work is to scrutinize a sentence that uses a string of relative clauses. Here’s one such sentence: “The incumbent provincial governor is being seriously threatened by an upstart with absolutely no public service experience who is being propped up by a ragtag band of political discards who are desperate to recover lost glory and whose qualifications for the post are at best doubtful or downright spurious.”

With such a jawbreaker of a sentence, figuring out who does which and what modifies which can be infuriatingly difficult indeed! This is because the sprawl created by the multiple relative clauses has horribly garbled the ideas in the sentence and weakened the linkages between them.

Now see what happens when we restructure that sentence by using the noun phrase “an upstart” to take the role of the reference relative pronoun: “The incumbent provincial governor is being seriously threatened by an upstart with absolutely no public service experience, an upstart being propped up by a ragtag band of political discards who are desperate to recover lost glory, an upstart whose qualifications for the post are at best doubtful or downright spurious.”

The key phrase “an upstart” in this new sentence is what is called a resumptive modifier, and its virtue is that: (1) it allows the elimination of the relative links “who is” and “whose” to make the sentence more concise, (2) it arrests the verbal sprawl of the original sentence by making its ideas more clear-cut and their procession more orderly, and (3) it makes the sentence more expressive and forceful. Note that as a resumptive modifier, “an upstart” replaced the unexpressive linking phrases “who is” and “whose” to become the subject or theme of the modifying phrases that come after it.

Let’s now generalize the steps for making resumptive modifiers decongest and perk up sentences that are badly encumbered by relative clauses: first, at or near the end of the main clause, find a key word or phrase that can serve as a resumptive modifier; second, repeat that key word or phrase so it becomes the pivotal subject or theme of all the relative phrases that come after the main clause; and third, have that key word or phrase modified by those relative phrases.

A resumptive modifier can take the form of a noun, a verb, or an adjective central to the idea of the main clause, like the noun “woman” in this sentence: “She was a woman of a few thoughts, a woman of a few words, a woman with not a single bit of true feeling or informed opinion in her.” Contrast that sentence with this one that’s overly laden with relative clauses: “She was a woman who was capable of only a few thoughts, who was capable of saying only a few words, and who did not have a single bit of true feeling or informed opinion in her.”

Verbs and adjectives can also be freely used as resumptive modifiers. See how the verb “threatens” serves as a resumptive modifier in this sentence: “An upstart with absolutely no political experience threatens to dislodge the incumbent provincial governor by capitalizing on his immense popularity, threatens to resurrect political discards desperate to recover their lost glory, and threatens to win by a landslide in a province dominated by voters beguiled by his phenomenal mass appeal.”

And then, see how the adjectives “real” and “serious” work as resumptive modifiers in this variation of the sentence above: “The threat to the incumbent provincial governor by the inexperienced political upstart is both real and serious, real because of the continuing deterioration of the economic life of the province, and serious because the upstart is immensely popular among the impoverished provincial folk.”

The beauty in using resumptive modifiers is that, aside from being a powerful tool for clarifying and emphasizing ideas, they also make it so easy to add information to sentences. They allow the widest latitude possible for developing a chosen theme and going into new directions of thought within the same sentence—and all that without missing a beat or making readers gasping for air. This is what makes resumptive modifiers superior to most other modifying devices in organizing sentences and in fighting sprawl.

We will see this superiority more clearly when we compare how two of the usual sentence-organizing techniques fare against resumptive modifiers in extracting sense from the usual meandering prose that passes for academic writing these days.

Take this breathtakingly convoluted sentence:

According to a leading Filipino social scientist, the public has to have a clear appreciation of the factors that have brought about the primacy of celluloid popularity in gaining a foothold on Philippine voting preferences, of which the most outstanding characteristic is the profound tendency of Filipinos to identify very strongly with their favorite movie heroes, which in turn makes them embrace the latter’s make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less as the real thing.

This 79-word behemoth, as we can see, needs nothing less than major surgery.

First, as a newspaper journalist might do it, we will boil that sentence down into the bite-size sentences that go with the obligatory inverted-pyramid structure of most newspaper reporting:

A Filipino social scientist has urged the public to clearly understand why celluloid popularity has gained such a strong foothold on Philippine voting preferences. He said that Filipinos have such a profound tendency to identify with their favorite movie heroes, which makes them actually think that the latter’s make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less is for real.

The reconstruction is clear and not really bad, if all we are after is bland objectivity.

Second, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an opinion writer sold to the limitless utility of relative clauses:

We must seriously ponder a leading Filipino social scientist’s admonition that the public should have a clearer appreciation of why celluloid popularity has gained such a strong foothold on Philippine voting preferences, a situation which, of course, stems from the fact that Filipinos identify very strongly with their favorite movie heroes, as a result of which they embrace make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less as the real thing itself.

Said with more conviction perhaps, but the deadly sprawl of the relative clauses still makes the sentence teeter on the edges of incomprehension.

Now, for our third and last recourse, we will use resumptive modifiers to see if they can whip up the original sentence into better shape and give it more verve. Let us pick, say, “celluloid popularity” as the resumptive modifier and use it to get rid of most of the relative pronouns in the sentence:

We have to seriously ponder a leading Filipino social scientist’s admonition that the public should clearly understand why Filipinos are so strongly influenced by celluloid popularity in their voting preferences, a celluloid popularity that makes them identify so strongly with their movie heroes, a celluloid popularity that makes them embrace make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less as the real thing itself.

The ideas in the sentence have remained complex, of course, but they are much clearer and they flow much better than the original and the previous two rewrites. More than that, however, something amazing has happened to the sentence as a result of using a resumptive modifier. It now seems not only to have a greater ring and rhythm of truth to it but also the strong sense of conviction of someone who truly believes every word he says. This, other than better organization and clarity and verve, is the magic that a good resumptive modifier brings to prose.

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This posting combines two essays that appeared consecutively in the daily column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the February 23 and 24, 2004 issues of The Manila Times © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. The two essays subsequently appeared as Chapters 60 and 61 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.