By June this weekly column, which used to come out six times a week during its first two years, will have been running for 10 years. Its primary aim is to promote good English usage in everyday life—at home, at school, in the workplace, in public platforms, in the mass media, in books, and most everywhere else where English is used. To date, it has logged nearly 900 columns in all about things English, in the process spawning three English-usage books and—even more far-reaching—also giving birth three years ago this week to Jose Carillo’s English Forum, an interactive website for discussing problems in English grammar and usage and for enhancing appreciation of English as a global language.

On this its third anniversary, I would like to take stock of what the Forum has achieved in its attempt to create a virtual classroom for English grammar and usage, to build a continually expanding repository of knowledge and instruction about English, and to host a lively symposium about English and about language and learning in general.

Let me begin this appraisal by citing that as of today, the Forum now has over 24,000 registered members* not only from the Philippines but from many parts of the world, such as the United States, China, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, South Korea, and Thailand. The growth of its membership is fanned largely by the power of the social media. My pageload tracker has recorded over 137,000 visits to the Forum to date, but I don’t put too much store on that figure because it records only the visitors who actually go inside the Forum’s discussion boards; it is unable to track those who read or skim only the Forum’s weekly updates upfront of the website (which should account for an even larger number of visitors). 

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that of much greater interest and importance are the topics presented or discussed in the Forum that have commanded the highest readership since their posting. So, irrespective of when they were posted, I am listing below the top 20 topics in the Forum based on the number of times they have been read as of midnight of April 25:

1. Lesson #8 – “Specific Rules for Preposition Usage” (read 32,627 times); 2. Lesson #3 – “The Matter of Case in English” (26,814 times); 3. “TOEIC Practice Test #1, Reading Comprehension – Part VII” (26,476 times); 4. Link to the short-story “Summer Solstice” by Nick Joaquin (23,830 times); 5. “Subject-Verb Agreement” (23,062 times);

6. “Usage: ‘I hope you’d get well soon’ or ‘I hope you’ll get well soon’?” (19,441 times); 7. Link to the short-story “Dead Stars” by Paz Marquez Benitez (15,505 times); 8. “TOEIC Practice Test #1 - Error Recognition” (10,901 times); 9. “Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers” (10,855 times); 10. Link to “Copernicus’ heliocentric theory as the mother of all paradigm shifts” (10,805 times);

11. My essay on “Reducing adjective clauses to adjective phrases” (10,407 times); 12. A Forum member’s “Advocacy for Formal Language Instruction” (9,275 times); 13. “TOEFL Practice Test – Reading Comprehension #1” (8,275 times); 14. Discussion thread: “Did Rizal ever speak and write in English?” (4,713 times); 15. Discussion thread: “Thoughts on Education” (4,033 times);

16. “Learning to use the relative pronouns confidently” (3,537 times); 17. “Measuring up to the human body’s perfection,” link to excerpt and review of Toby Lester’s Da Vinci’s Ghost (3,529 times); 18. “Lost in the English translation” (2,990 times); 19. “Two viewpoints on academic research in the Philippines” (2,968 times); and 20. Discussion thread: “What’s correct: ‘privilege speech’ or ‘privileged speech’?” (2,692 times).

These are the top-rating topics about English that have interested visitors the most in the Forum during the past three years. Check them out for the instruction and insights about English that they might hold also for you.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 28, 2012 issue © 2012 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

-------------
*The membership figures cited here, along with the readership data for the Forum postings that follow, are as of April 28, 2012. Those interested in knowing the latest figures can check them by going into the Forum’s discusssion boards.

Click here to discuss/comment

Of the many varieties of flawed English that I encounter when reading news and feature stories, I consider fused sentences the most serious and the most annoying. This is because I’m pretty sure that they aren’t just run-of-the-mill grammar errors arising from haste or oversight but a disturbing sign of an inadequate grasp of how the English language works.

As discussed in my book The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors, a fused sentence is formed when two or more clauses are improperly linked or wrongly punctuated, resulting in a fractured, badly articulated, and confusing statement. Of course, in an essay written by a college freshman, a fused sentence every now and then may be forgivable, but in the lead sentence of a major education news story?

Consider the following lead sentence in a report of a leading Metro Manila newspaper last weekend about the country’s preschool education initiative:

Like me when I was reading the lead sentence above, you must have stumbled in bafflement at midsentence. This verb phrase, “expected to reach 2.5 million enrollees under its universal kindergarten program this coming school year,” simply won’t connect to the preceding clause. The sentence suddenly got garbled and won’t make sense because the reporter—or perhaps the desk editor—had been so intent to cram into that sentence every bit of information in just one long uninterrupted burst of words (a tendency that, I regret to say, is very profound indeed among reporters and editors when constructing lead sentences for their news stories).

On inspection, we find that the problem with that sentence is that with neither rhyme nor reason, it fused the following two independent ideas:

1. “the Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils,” and

2. “enrolment is expected to reach 2.5 million under the DepEd’s universal kindergarten program this coming school year”

Note that these two ideas are actually independent clauses—grammar elements that, as most of us learned early in English grammar, need to link up properly and logically so they can work and make sense together. In this case, however, the fused construction was unable to do that basic sentence-combining task.

So how can that sentence achieve a functional linkage? Here are four grammatical options:

1. The relative cause option (using “who” as relative pronoun): “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach the 2.5 million pre-school pupils who are expected to enroll under its universal kindergarten program this coming school year.”

2. The coordinate conjunction option (using “as” as conjunction): “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils this coming school year as enrolment is expected to reach 2.5 million under its universal kindergarten program.”

3. The subordinate conjunction option (using “because” as subordinator”): “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils this coming school year because enrolment is expected to reach 2.5 million under its universal kindergarten program.”

4. The total rewrite option: “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach the 2.5 million pre-school pupils expected to enroll this coming school year under its universal kindergarten program.”

My personal preference is Option 4, for this total rewrite makes for a much simpler and more streamlined sentence—a far cry from the tangled original and decidedly more readable than the other three options above. (May 28, 2011)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 28, 2011 issue © 2011 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.
-----------
*That fused sentence unfused: “The woman won the lotto jackpot, went into a state of shock, then fainted” or “When the woman won the lotto jackpot, she went into a state of shock and fainted” or “The woman went into a state of shock after winning the lotto jackpot, then fainted.” Any other possible way?

 

Click here to discuss/comment