THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH STANDARD FOR OUR DICTIONARIES

Looking More Closely at Our Dictionaries
By Jose A. Carillo

Several years ago, when I was still managing an English-language service, I chided one of my English-language tutors for insisting on using her 1980-vintage Webster’s Desk Dictionary as reference. The day before that, I had the 11th edition of The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary in compact disc loaded on the computers in our office, and had asked my staff to delete from their hard drives all old dictionaries, particularly the British-English ones—the venerable Oxford English Dictionary included. I had also asked my staff to put away all of their print copies of the British-English Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture and the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, both of which had long ago been bought inadvertently for our use.

 

These acts may sound like that of an Anglo-hater gone mad, but I assure you that there was rhyme and reason to them--I wanted to thoroughly bring the small company’s English usage to the American English standard. I was therefore a bit miffed that one of my staff should cavalierly resist the standardization effort, claiming that she was more comfortable using her fading but trusted Webster’s. So, not entirely in jest, I gave her an ultimatum: keep that dictionary out of sight, or I would throw it into the dustbin myself.

My reason for banning British-English dictionaries and outdated American-English dictionaries from our office was dictated not by a sudden anti-British feeling or spite for things old, but by a very pragmatic consideration: the business depended greatly on the consistency of our English grammar, form, and semantics with American English as the standard. We could ill afford even the slightest variation in the spellings, meanings, and usage of the language, in our understanding of its idioms, and in its punctuations, prepositions, and conjunctions.

It had become clear to me that our mixed use of British-English and American-English dictionaries had been responsible for not a few of our gaffes—some innocuous, some serious—like spelling the word “center” as “centre,” “check” as “cheque,” and “aluminum” as “aluminium”; thinking of “corn” as “grain” instead of “maize”; using the wrong prepositions in sentences like “We live in a quiet street in the city and stay in a farm cottage at weekends” (that’s how the British say and write it, while Americans put it this way: “We live on a quiet street in the city and stay in a farm cottage on weekends”); and worse yet, using the wrong quotation marks and putting commas at the wrong places in quoted material.

A few months back, in particular, when a new editor of ours made a final copyreading pass on a long manuscript, she methodically replaced all of the double quotes with single quotes and took out all of the commas inside them and put them outside the quotes, British-style, like this: ‘This was the title of Paul Zindel’s book, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”, and I thought it rather queer.’ Before that, the sentence used American-English punctuation, like this: “This was the title of Paul Zindel’s book, ‘The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,’ and I thought it rather queer.” We were already way past our deadline, so we had to undo her well-meaning but ruinous work in white-hot haste.

Using a dictionary in the wrong English standard could, in fact, not only wreak havoc on our English but trigger needless controversies as well. Once, when a Filipino-Canadian reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times used the word “miniscule” in a letter that I quoted in that column, the newspaper’s editor in chief told me in good-humored ridicule that I was foisting the wrong spellings of English words on readers. “‘Miniscule’,” he said, “should be spelled ‘minuscule’—with a ‘u’ and not an ‘i’.” When I stood my ground, he opened the Oxford English Dictionary for me and for all of the other editors who were present to see. To my dismay, it confirmed “minuscule” as the official spelling, making only a passing reference to “miniscule” as a variant.

Checking the online Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary later, I discovered that it was even harsher on “miniscule”: “a common spelling of ‘minuscule’ that is not correct.” To my relief, though, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language accepts the variant without comment, and I also took comfort in my electronic Merriam-Webster’s assurance that while “miniscule” continues to be widely regarded as an error, it now commonly occurs in published writing.

Most of the English dictionaries we had on hand, of course, whether using the American or British English standard, were products of great scholarship, but in that former language business of mine, there was a screaming need for only one English standard and only one English-language authority. We simply had to be scrupulously consistent and current in our English, and it just so happened that in the Philippines and in many parts of Asia, the standard for English is American English. We really had no choice then but to begin to live up to that standard by getting a good, up-to-date American English dictionary—and that, I am happy to say, was precisely what I had done. (circa 2005)
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This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times and subsequently appeared as Chapter 130 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

INSTILLING LOGICAL THINKING EARLY AMONG OUR YOUNG PEOPLE

Teaching Our Children to Think Logically

    By Jose A. Carillo 

Not that I ever entertained the notion that they couldn’t think very logically, but sometime in 2008, I casually asked my two school-age sons whether they had been formally taught logical thinking sometime in their studies. The elder, now 22 (he attended primary school in a leading sectarian university and is now in college taking information technology), said the only time it was taken up was in Grade IV—and only in passing in language arts (“jumping into generalities is illogical”); there was no further discussion of it ever after. The younger, now 14 and in Grade VII in another sectarian school, said he hadn’t heard the word “logic” in class ever; neither was it taught in Montessori School during his kinder. In short, except perhaps in a very few schools in parts unknown in the Philippines (and I’ll be grateful to know where they are), logical thinking is not formally taught to young children at all.

We can be sure, though, that our children are taught many other things our educators traditionally deem more important, such as religion and physical education and civics and ethics. On these the instruction—indoctrination is perhaps a better word—is forceful and intense, very successfully for the first two I must say, yet mostly middling for the other two. Formal instruction in logical thinking, however, is surreptitiously made to wait till first year college. It is, in fact, difficult not to suspect that many schools—particularly the sectarian ones—don’t really want to teach logical thinking to children at all, fearing perhaps that it could undermine the teaching of the major dogmas and beliefs they want to implant unchallenged in young minds.

Thus, by the time our young people enter college and take Logic 101, they could only look at the strange new discipline with great suspicion and distaste. Their mental armor of unthinking habit, religion, superstition, and wishful thinking is already well in place, so what’s the point of replacing it with a new one? Fortunately, some survive the unrelenting assaults on their rational thinking and get to understand how things in our world and in the known universe really work. They are the precious endangered few that keep our country’s tiny fires of rational thinking burning. But most of the children in our country, like most of our generation before them, develop mindsets with little capacity for critical thinking at all.

That our educational system is unable to teach us to think logically early enough is very much in evidence around us, resulting in too many fallacious behaviors among the populace. And based on some history readings that I have done lately, the situation in our country seems to be very much like what Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician and schoolteacher, saw in England toward the end of the 19th century—a situation that prompted him to write a book introducing elementary logic to children.

Dodgson, who taught at Christ Church, Oxford, is, of course, better known as Lewis Carroll, the pen name he used for two enduring children’s books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Although a clergyman, he had a passion for recreational mathematics, using whimsy and satire to show the illogical ways of English society in his time. Finally, in 1896, two years before his death, he published Symbolic Logic, formally setting out his ideas on how children could learn to think clearly and logically.

Here’s what Carroll said in his introduction to the book: “Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health. Symbolic Logic will give you clearness of thought—the ability to see your way through a puzzle—the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form—and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art.”

Carroll made classical logic easy for children by expressing it through riddles, amusing problems, and mathematical puzzles. He made his riddles perplexing but thoroughly engaging exercises in semantics, which of course is the discipline upon which the basic foundations of logical thinking are built.

How delightfully revolutionary it would be if our educators in the Philippines will take the same tack in reforming the thrusts of our schoolchildren’s education—and the earlier, the better for our nation’s future! (2008)

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This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo circa 2008 in The Manila Times and later appeared as Chapter 147 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

DEMOCRACY'S VULNERABILITY TO ORGANIZED DECEPTION

Caution in times of reasonable doubt
By Jose  A. Carillo

There was a time when the spread of false information took a much slower and largely linear path. A jealous or enraged person concocts a lie against a perceived enemy, whispers the lie to a neighbor’s ear ostensibly in the strictest of confidence but certain that in no time at all, that neighbor will break that confidence and whisper the same lie to another neighbor, who, in turn, can be expected to ensure that the process gets repeated ad infinitum. The lie then acquires an attractive reality of its own. Still, there was a downside to the process. Word of mouth was relatively slow, so even the most resourceful prevaricator needed at least a few days or weeks to fan the tiny flame of a lie to a major conflagration.

Modern communications technology has changed all that. These days, radio and TV, the daily papers, landline and mobile telephony, e-mail, and now even the mechanisms of the law itself make disinformation as fast as blabbering a sound-bite over the broadcast networks, punching the “Send” key of a cellular phone or computer keyboard, or filing fabricated charges against one’s target in a fiscal’s office. Organized deception has become a thriving industry, ruthlessly exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the very same mechanisms that make democracy possible.

This is clearly manifest in contemporary national election campaigns. Every seeker of public office is a prime target. Both the good and the bad are fair game for political demolition. Each of them—whether a true leader, visionary, zealot, crackpot, or nincompoop—is prey to the dangerous phenomenon described by the British psychologist Robert H. Thouless in his “Law of Certainty” (1953): “If statements are made again and again in a confident manner, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.”

Thouless has pinned down one fundamental flaw of the human psyche: its profound tendency to believe statements based on repetition instead of actual evidence. Of course, few would take pleasure in the notion that even the intelligent and more discerning among us can be so gullible, but other investigators have validated the “Law of Certainty” and have come up with even more disturbing corollaries: (1) The exposure effect, demonstrated by Borstein in 1989, which states that repeated exposure of people to a stimulus results in the enhancement of their attitude toward it; (2) The twin repetition-validity effect and the frequency-validity effect, established by Brown and Nix in 1996, the first confirming that belief in a supposed truth increases with repeated exposure to it, and the second, that the rated truth of a stimulus is determined by how often it is repeated; and (3) The truth effect, demonstrated by Schwartz in 1982, which states that when messages of questionable truth value are repeated, their repetition tends to move their truth-value ratings toward the truer end of the scale.

The “Law of Certainty” and its corollaries are, of course, the principal tools of ideologues, religious extremists, and political propagandists in foisting untruths in the minds of their targets. They know that by sheer repetition, the feeble resistance of rationality soon caves in and crumbles. This is why in this election campaign season, practically all of the communication channels in our midst are bristling with deceptive messages. Their financiers and practitioners have no time to lose and everything to gain, and can take comfort in the fact that the effort costs so little and that the laws against it are so weak and inutile.

Now, the big question we have to ask ourselves is this: Shall we be sitting ducks to these blatant deceptions? What is our defense against the syndicated lie and half-truth? Thouless gave us what I think is a sound course of action: be thoughtful and skeptical, and adopt a position of caution when there’s reasonable cause for doubt about a particular assertion. In plainer terms, we should never, ever make a fool of ourselves by taking scurrilous political messages at their face value.

So the next time we see a derogatory blind item in the papers, a slanderous e-mail in our electronic mailbox, or a poison text message on our cellular phone, we should not honor it even with a single thought. We should resist the temptation to pass it on. We should stop it on its tracks by skipping it or by zapping it with the “Delete” button. That’s the only way we can run the character assassins out of business. If we don’t, who knows, they just might succeed in getting us to elect people who will send this country further down the road to perdition.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 27, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

THE WEB AS OUR VERITABLE PASSPORT TO THE WORLD

Waltzing on the Web: A Retrospective
By Jose A. Carillo

I don’t remember now if it was because the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle had fallen in love with the English phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins, or because she had miraculously acquired such exquisite English under his tutelage that she had convinced the crusty London upper class that she was a member of Hungarian royalty. But there she was ecstatically singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” in that magical bedroom scene of the 1964 movie production of the stage musical My Fair Lady, waltzing all by herself and wondering what brought her so much joy:

I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night
And still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings
And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.
I’ll never know what made it so exciting
Why all at once my heart took flight…

For some reason, this was the image that came to mind when it dawned on me how wonderful and how indescribably powerful the World Wide Web is. That was seven years ago, when my four-year initiation with the personal computer and word processing finally led me to the joys of sending and receiving electronic mail on the Internet, and of entering its chat rooms to talk with friends and strangers in every imaginable place in the planet. I thought then that that was the ultimate high, making my personal presence felt not only in my immediate neighborhood but also anywhere where there was a soul with a computer and a fax modem. But I was wrong. I was soon to discover an even bigger high: that with my personal computer and the Web, the whole world and most everything that it had to offer were now literally at my fingertips.

Like most people, I began using the computer as simply a more elegant and more efficient typewriter. That was when it was no longer possible for me to defend the merits of my portable Underwood against those of its digital counterpart. From there I progressed to making my computer do simple math and spreadsheet accounting for my family business at the time. Every now and then, of course, I would enjoy and amuse myself with the many ingenious games and diversions that could be played with it. Then, with the advent of the fax modem and the Internet, the computer became my indispensable personal communication tool. Not long afterwards, through the Web, it became my veritable passport to the world, my key to the immense body of knowledge and information whose surface I had barely scratched even long after I was through with college.

The beauty of the Web is that you can both literally and figuratively waltz on it while you discover its many treasures. With the click of the mouse you can saunter into any of its millions of sites and discover many things you have not known or rediscover those you have already forgotten, such as what the weather or the price of diapers was when you made your inauspicious debut into this planet, what movie or song album was the rage when you had your first crush, and how much was the price of a bottle of Coke when regular gasoline was 25 centavos to the liter. You can trot from one website to another to find out how much it will cost you to rent a flat in Reykjavik at this very moment, hire a mountain guide in Nepal for an ascent to Mt. Everest, or lease a car in Rome for a land tour of Europe all the way to Moscow. And at any time of day, without leaving your computer desk, you can enter the U.S. Library of Congress and pore over its more than 12 million bibliographic records of books and periodicals, get glimpses of the Smithsonian Institution’s engaging bits of American natural history, or make a virtual tour of the fabulous art collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris.

The Web is especially a great boon to English learners in whatever exciting or exasperating stage of the language learning curve they find themselves right now. This is because English is the lingua franca of the Web, and the latter has everything the learner needs to know about English or anything written in English—from its many idioms and figures of speech to the peculiar conjugations of its irregular verbs, and from the secret feeding grounds of the aardvark to the doomed genetic path of the zebronkey. There are, moreover, hundreds of free English proficiency learning sites on the Web to help the learner perfect his English grammar and diction. And once through with your quest for better English, you can perhaps download the trial edition of the amazingly instructive Rosetta Stone to learn a new language or two from its selection of no less than 22 foreign languages, ranging from French to Japanese and from Polynesian to Norwegian.

I used to snicker at Microsoft’s slogan, “Where do you want to go today?”, as patronizing and pretentious, but now I know in my heart that it captures the fundamental truth about the Web. There truly is no limit to where you might want to roam and wander on it. My favorite Web search engine alone, Google, boasts of an accessible collection of 2,469,940,685 Web pages—almost 2.5 billion pages of knowledge and information, enough to fill hundreds of the biggest physical libraries on our planet! I have peeped every now and then at this hoard and I have discovered veritable gems, like the complete or substantive collections of the poetry and other works of the English poets John Donne, William Blake, and Dylan Thomas, the French poet Jacques Prevert, and the American poet Walt Whitman; the Perseus Project that had put together vast selections from the Greek literary classics; and entire Holy Bibles of every religious denomination.

All of my readings from grade school through college, in fact, would amount to only a tiny fraction of the readings that I have already done on the Web in the less than six years that I started mining it for its treasures. And I have been enjoying every minute of my freewheeling incursions into its pages, far better than when I had the likes of Professor Higgins telling me to my face to read my English textbook from cover to cover or else fail and repeat his English course. (2003)
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This essay first appeared in the English-usage column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times sometime in 2003, © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing. It subsequently appeared as Chapter 1 in Part IV, Section 1 of the author's book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language, © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

My Fair Lady “I Could Have

Danced All Night”

(Music Video)

As sung by Marni Nixon, dubbing the singing

voice of Audrey Hepburn, in the 1964 film

adaptation of the musical

WHEN RHETORIC GOES BEYOND BOUNDS

Retrospective on the Dangers of Overstatement
By Jose A. Carillo

As a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon in an in-house chapel of a Metro Manila mall. The Roman Catholic priest officiating the Holy Mass* exuded the verve and confidence of an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience impressed if not spellbound.

His elocution was classically Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given a suitable introduction for him, the priest restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his ethos, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”). Then, for pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the full-house audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive logos or appeal to reason as well.

THIS GENERIC HOLY MASS CELEBRATION PHOTO IS USED IN THIS ARTICLE
FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT TO IDENTIFY THE PRIEST
 OR ANY OF HIS ASSISTANTS MENTIONED IN THE NARRATIVE

To my bewilderment, however, he used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a native-language phrase—let’s just say “pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully asked everybody what each letter of the first word (“pinakamatalik”) represented. Of course, there really was no way even the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like prodding a quiz show contestant with this riddle: “Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music movie. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask: ‘Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (i)sang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.” (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)

The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.” It could not have been a simile or metaphor either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of synecdoche, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of metonymy and prosopopoeia, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called personification—one that invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up providing all the answers himself.

The words he assigned to each of the letters of the word “pinakamatalik” were so convoluted and are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God extends to us all. There was no question about that. 

The problem was that the priest simply didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word; when anyone balked, the priest would browbeat him or her until he or she relented and blurted out the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the impertinent and absurd: to declare this to his or her seatmate “Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend”). He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.

That was where, I think, the logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps “Ikaw ay aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone to tell a total stranger that he or she is “your closest friend”? This gave you the feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the blind and thoughtless obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.

In his classic book, Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public speakers must always guard against to retain their persuasiveness and credibility intact.

*At that time he looked like he was somewhere between his mid-30s or early-40s.
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This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times circa 2003 and subsequently appeared in his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo. © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

GIVE DEPTH AND MORE LIFE TO YOUR WRITING

Playing Boldly with English Sentences
A Personal Critique by Jose A. Carillo
of Lucille Vaughhan Payne's The Lively Art of Writing

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 get 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.
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This personal essay first appeared in Jose Carillo's English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently as Chapter 80 of his book Give Your English the Winning Edge,© 2009 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The Lively Art of Writing by Lucille Vaughan Payne, a 192-page paperback published by Berkley in 1969, is sold by Amazon.com (https://www.amazon.com/Lively-Writing-Lucile-Vaughan-Payne/dp/0451627121).

COMMUNICATING BETTER WITH OUR ENGLISH

Getting rid of wordy beginnings for our writing

Let’s start aiming our guns today on two of the most blatant enemies of good English writing--the empty legal-sounding phrases that frequently worm themselves into the beginnings of sentences, and the similarly hollow expletives that only deflect emphasis from what’s being written about. We often welcome these deadly grammatical scourges in the mistaken hope that they will lend elegance to our prose; instead, they only waste precious space and time to the discomfort and consternation of our readers.

To begin with, let’s do ourselves a great favor by cultivating the art of eliminating wordy legalisms or pompous phrases, which do nothing but give a false sense of importance to our writing. Here’s a laundry list of 31 of the most common wordy phrases in English:

“as regards,”

“as to,”

“in view of,”

“the fact that,”

“due to the fact that,”

“what I believe is,”

“in my opinion,”

“the reason is,”

“along the lines of,”

“at this point in time,”

“for the purpose of,”

“cognizant of the fact that,”

“in order to,”

“in spite of the fact that,”

“despite the fact that,”

“in such a manner that,”

“in the event that,”

“with respect to,”

“on the basis of,”

“by means of,”

“on the part of,”

“relative to,”

“such that,”

“in connection with,”

“in the nature of,”

“in relation to,”

“in case of,”

“in terms of,”

“to the extent that,”

“in the course of,” and

“in acknowledgment of the fact that.”

Examined closely, these phrases turn out to be wordy equivalents of some of the coordinating and subordinating conjunctions as well as conjunctive adverbs. The phrase “in spite of the fact that” is actually the fanboy* “yet” in disguise; “in recognition of the fact that” is the subordinating conjunction “because” in lawyerly garb; and “despite the fact that” is roughly the conjunctive adverb “nevertheless” in argumentative disguise. By dumping these awkward phrases and routinely replacing them with the appropriate conjunctions, we can inject a surprising freshness and vigor to our writing.

Let’s engage right now some of these roundabout phrases to show how we can jettison them right after with more sensible, concise equivalents. Awkward: “As regards your request, please be advised that it has been approved.” Forthright: “Your request has been approved.” Awkward: “For the purpose of paying off your loan, we recommend selling your townhouse.” Forthright: “We recommend selling your townhouse to pay off your loan.”

Awkward: “At this point in time, it is not appropriate to debate old issues.” Forthright: “It is not appropriate now to debate old issues.” Awkward: “In the course of the trip, we encountered major delays.” Forthright: “We encountered major delays during the trip.” Awkward: “In acknowledgement of the fact that you returned the defective goods, we are sending you this refund check.” Forthright: “We are sending you this refund check for the defective goods that you returned.”

Now let us deal with the expletives, those meaningless words that often terribly weaken the fiber of our sentences. These handy but shady grammatical operators allow us to manipulate sentences at the expense of their true subjects; they also de-emphasize action by forcing us to construct sentences in the passive voice. Used habitually, they make our prose sound amateurish, stilted, and flat.

Here are the expletive forms that we should consciously avoid in beginning our sentences:

(1) “There” when used with any form of “be” as the main verb. The expletive “there” moves the subject to a position after the verb, which as we know creates a weak, passive sentence. Example: “There were five airborne squadrons that engaged the enemy troops.” Shorn of the expletive: “Five airborne squadrons engaged the enemy troops.”

(2) “That” and “whether” when they introduce noun clauses. “That” does not do work within a noun clause; and when it begins a sentence, it often just creates a convoluted sentence structure. Example: “That she closed the windows last night is what Alicia said.” Shorn of the expletive: “Alicia said she closed the windows last night.” The expletive “whether” also does not do any work within a noun clause; since it carries important information, however, it can only be omitted if replaced by the simpler “if.” Example: “Whether his battalion had surrendered is something the soldier wanted to know.” Shorn of the expletive: “The soldier wanted to know if his battalion had surrendered.”

(3) “As” when used in certain transitive verb sentence patterns to connect an object and objective complement. Beginning with the expletive “as” forces the construction of a convoluted sentence. Example: “As a role model is what we think of her.” Shorn of the expletive: “We think of her as a role model.

Wordy phrases and expletives will always crop up in our early drafts, but there is really only one thing we should do to them: to better see our way to good writing, we should strike them off mercilessly and keep no prisoners.

This essay, 184th in the series, first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the April 15, 2003 issue of The Manila Times, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*Recall that “fanboy” is the acronym for the seven basic coordinating conjunctions, using the first letters of “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so.”