Sunday, August 25, 2013

Six informal prescriptions for better writing in English

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Over the past 11 years, readers of my English-usage column in The Manila Times  and, from May 2009 onwards, members of this Forum as well w...
Sunday, August 11, 2013

What to do when a simple indicative sentence can’t drive home your point

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What is the secret of writers who can make their point more forcefully without resorting to imposing words, inflammatory statements, or thu...
Monday, July 15, 2013

Dealing with sentence constructions that seem to defy grammar rules

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I just thought it’s timely to post here an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in  The Manila Times  in late 2010. The essay, “T...
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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Strategies for avoiding tedious repetition of words in English

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For everyone who’d like to get rid of the unpleasantly bureaucratic tone of their English, I recently reposted in Jose Carillo's Englis...
Sunday, June 16, 2013

The need to avoid officious stock phrases when writing or speaking

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I seem to recall posting this essay here two-and-a-half years ago but I thought it was high time posting it once again for the benefit of t...
Sunday, June 2, 2013

What to do when notion and grammar disagree in our sentence

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As we all know, it is simplicity itself to make the subject and verb agree in a sentence when (1) the subject is a single-word noun or pron...
Sunday, May 5, 2013

A figure of speech that’s often used to subvert reason and logic

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A figure of speech that’s often used to subvert reason and logic During the run-up to every hotly contested election, when the major p...