My reply:

October 27, 2013

Dear Shirley,

Just call me Joe.

Thank you so much for your compliment about my book. I want you to know that I greatly appreciate it.

You express yourself very well. I have no doubt that even without having come across my book, you already had the facility to write good, compelling English prose. Perhaps all that my book has really done was to perk up your imagination and give you some ideas on how to put your writing talent to good use. But at 75, having discovered that you have the power to do it, you can now pursue a worthy enterprise that definitely can see you through in the years ahead—write a volume of personal essays perhaps or, if you strongly feel it’s worth telling, even the story of your life. Mind you, Shirley, not everybody is blessed with the talent or the motivation or the energy to do what you can do at your age, so my advice is: Go for it!

About H. L. Mencken, I must say that he was a great influence during my formative years; in fact, I still get a thrill down my spine every time I’m rereading his overarching polemics. Which gives me an idea: While waiting for that Nook from your daughter, why not read Mencken’s In Defense of Women in the Project Gutenberg e-book right now? The beauty about Mencken is that even if you don’t agree with his strong views, it’s always a delight to savor his acerbic thoughts in his superb English.

To ensure no dull moment in between your bouts of writing, Shirley, I have another suggestion: join Jose Carillo’s Forum, my English-usage website. You can ask questions or share your views about English or whatever in its discussion boards. You can even use it as a sketch pad or sounding board for material intended for your essays or autobiography. Who knows, someone from among the Forum’s over 42,000 members worldwide just might give you invaluable feedback or, at the very least, simply brighten up a sullen day for you.

Sincerely yours,
Joe Carillo

(The e-mail conversation above originally appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 2, 2013 issue © 2013 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.)

Rejoinder by Shirley A.:

My reply:

November 2, 2013

Dear Shirley,

I owe you an apology for this much delayed reply. Due to a very urgent personal project of mine (it will continue to occupy me for the next several days or week), I hardly had time to do anything else until now. At this very moment though, I am enjoying a brief hiatus from the work so I’m taking the opportunity to write this e-mail.

That first e-mail of yours definitely wasn’t a waste of my time. On the contrary, Shirley, it was a great pleasure to hear from you and to know that somehow, a book that I wrote almost a decade ago has proven providentially useful to someone in a way that I had never really imagined. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous e-mail, I was so taken by your disarming frankness and decided to publish your e-mail verbatim and my reply in my English-usage column in The Manila Times. It came out this morning, Saturday (November 2), and you can check it out by clicking this link to “Never too late to pursue writing if you’ve got the talent.” I also posted it in Jose Carillo’s English Forum and you can check it out by clicking this link.

As to your writing style and English grammar and usage, Shirley, you absolutely have no reason to apologize for them; they are very good and they hardly have any notable flaw in them. In fact, you write much better—vocabulary, grammar, structure, syntax and all—than many writers who get their feature articles and commentaries published these days in Philippine newspapers and magazines. And your two e-mails to me are actually so grammatically airtight that they are among the very few that I’ve ever published verbatim in my column and in the Forum without fear of embarrassing the writer or myself. I daresay that at this stage in your development as a writer, you already have the creative resources and language facility within yourself, so all you really have to do is to find subjects, themes, and projects you will find worthy of writing about.

When you are done reading English Plain and Simple, I suggest you find time to read my third book, Give Your English the Winning Edge. It’s some sort of advanced course in English grammar and usage, focusing as it does on how to construct clear, lively, and readable sentences and how to fashion them into interesting and compelling expositions. I understand that the book has gone out of stock in most of the Metro Manila bookstore chains, but you still might chance upon a copy from a neighborhood outlet. Do let me know if you are able to get one.

To append a PhD to your name would be great, for that would strongly enhance your stature in degree-conscious social circles. But a PhD is really no guarantee for clear thinking and good writing, and I must tell you that are much better off than some PhDs I know in your creative energy level, in the felicity of your thoughts, and in the cogency of your English. At this time of your life, I do think that you really couldn’t ask God for a much greater blessing than that!

Enjoy the rest of the long weekend! 

Sincerely yours,
Joe Carillo

P.S. You can access the online edition of The Manila Times for free. Just log on to the site by clicking the indicated link. The online edition updates to the next day’s issue a little before or a little after midnight daily.

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I – The four general forms of composition

To put things in perspective, let’s first recall that the activity of organizing and clarifying our thoughts in writing is formally called composition, and that composition can take four general forms: description, narration, exposition, and persuasion. These are not mutually exclusive forms, of course; a particular composition can use any or all of them in combination.

As we all know, descriptive and narrative compositions are the simplest to do. It’s because they only require us to write about the things we have seen, heard, or felt and to just present them in a straightforward way to the reader. Falling under this category are written eyewitness accounts, testimonies, news stories, general feature articles, and travelogues. Our primary objective in writing them is simply to convey our information and our impressions to the reader. Once this task is done, we can stop without a formal conclusion; we can simply say “I’m done” or say nothing further. (In straight news stories, for instance, the inverted pyramid type of reporting allows the narrative to just trail off without a formal closing.)

In contrast, expository and persuasive compositions are much more complicated to do. To these categories belong essays, masteral or doctoral dissertations, interpretative or investigative reports, editorials and opinion pieces, court pleadings, advocacies, and position papers on debatable or controversial issues. In these types of writing, we need to explain more rigorously what’s in our mind, which could be a new idea or concept, a proposition, a theorem, or a stand on a raging issue. Our objective is not only to let the reader know what we know and think about the subject but to influence him or her to think or act about it our way. This is definitely a more exacting kind of writing, so we need to draw not only from our own stock of knowledge but also from the collective wisdom of other thinking minds—the familiar process that we know as research. Our goal is not only to make our point clearly understood and appreciated but, even more important, to make the reader accept that point and make it part of his or her own repository of stock knowledge and beliefs.

II – Writing the body of the composition

Even up to this point, it’s still too premature to talk about how to keep the paragraphs flowing in the composition and how to finally stop the flow. These are still a universe away, so to speak, for we still have to do the main business of writing the body of the composition. Indeed, ending it should be the least of our worries at this stage.

Now, if we are any good in our writing ability, we should be able to make short shrift of most descriptive and narrative compositions; competent newspaper writers, for instance, manage to come up with news and feature stories day in and day out despite their punitive deadlines. But coming up with readable and convincing expository or persuasive writing is an altogether different matter. This is because it requires the writer not just to share information and impressions with the readers but also to convert their lack of knowledge or their reservations or doubts about the subject under discussion into certainty, understanding, and belief. This is a much more demanding writing enterprise, one that requires most, if not all, of what I’d call the primary arsenal for doing compositions, namely definition, restatement, example, comparison, contrast, and cause and effect.

Let’s do a quick rundown of these basic composition devices:

Definition. This composition device clarifies or explains a concept or term for the reader, depending on our assessment of the level of knowledge or understanding of the reader about that concept or term. If the concept or term requires an extended definition, we may use the following methods to clarify it: (a) comparison-contrast, (b) description, (c) exemplification, and (d) negation.

Example:

Definition of psychology by the American Psychological Association (APA)

Restatement. This composition device states an idea in another way to heighten the reader’s understanding of it.

Example 1:

Excerpt from “Locating an Arabic Translator” by Donald D. Groff, Salon.com Travel and Food Advisor

Example 2:

Quoted from a newspaper story

Comparison. This composition device examines similarities between two subjects to enhance perception and understanding about them.

Example:

Excerpted from “Powering Up for an Important Merger,” Accenture.com 

Contrast. This composition device examines differences between two subjects to enhance perception and understanding about them.

Example:

From “Image Makers” by Michael Imeson, The Banker, February 5, 2007 issue

Cause and effect. This composition device examines particular effects or outcomes in relation to their possible causes. Generally, since causes are not always easy to identify, we often will need to speculate about causes rather than offer absolute answers when we use this composition device.

Example:

Excerpt from “Looks do Matter” by Daniel Akst, from Wilson Quarterly

Experimental exposition using the six composition tools. To give you an idea of how to use all six composition tools, I am posting in the Forum “On the Trail of Serendipity,” an essay that discusses an experimental essay that I developed based on this topic sentence: “Serendipity has shaped the life of the schoolteacher’s son more than he will admit.” Click this link now to read that essay.

III – Paragraph transition techniques

To ensure the smooth and cohesive flow of the ideas that we are presenting in an expository or persuasive piece, we need an adequate mastery of paragraph transitions—the craft of bridging a succeeding paragraph with the paragraph preceding it. I posted a four-part essay on this subject in the Forum last week, “Basic and advanced techniques for doing paragraph transitions,” and I presume that reading that essay was what prompted you to describe those techniques as “ways to keep paragraphs flowing.” If you still haven’t fully read or if you need to review the paragraph-transition techniques presented in that essay, click this link now; otherwise, you can proceed to the matter of properly stopping the flow of paragraphs—in short, how to end an expository or persuasive composition.

IV – When the time has come to conclude your composition

Let’s assume that your expository or persuasive article is now almost a done thing. You’ve been able to effectively bridge your paragraphs into a cohesive and convincing argument in support of your thesis, so you now think it’s time to end or conclude the article. Unlike a descriptive or narrative composition, however, you can’t leave an expository or persuasive composition on a lurch. You’ll surely infuriate and alienate your readers if you just say “I’m done” and blink off the page all of a sudden. Indeed, a good and effective expository or persuasive composition is one that its writer is able to bring to a compelling and satisfying close.

To get a good feel of compelling and satisfying closes, I suggest you do a focused, attentive reading of two full-length articles by two exemplars of the expository writing craft. The first is Joseph Epstein’s “I Dream of Genius” in Commentary Magazine and the second, Deborah Solomon’s “Inside America’s Great Romance with Norman Rockwell” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Here’s the one-paragraph conclusion to Epstein’s “I Dream of Genius”:

And here’s the two-paragraph conclusion to Solomon’s “Inside America’s Great Romance With Norman Rockwell”:

There are really no hard-and-fast formulas or firm rules for doing conclusions, but I’ll list below some often-suggested options for doing them:

1. Restate the thesis or the main points of your essay.
2. State the broader implications or significance of your thesis.
3. Present a culminating example that pulls all of your arguments together in support of your thesis.
4. Make an educated prediction or outcome based on the arguments you presented.
5. End with a well-stated, satisfying flourish that echoes the soundness of your conclusion.

For a comprehensive discussion of these options, I suggest you read and study the “Concluding Paragraphs” page of the Capital Community College Foundation’s Guide to Grammar and Writing. It covers most of basic things that writers need to know about the subject, so there’s really not much I can add to it without sounding repetitive. Take time to study and internalize its prescriptions. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be on your way to developing the knack for knowing precisely when to stop your paragraphs from flowing and for bringing your articles of whatever kind to a satisfying close for your readers.

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