Jose Carillo's Forum

ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO

On this webpage, Jose A. Carillo shares with English users, learners, and teachers a representative selection of his essays on the English language, particularly on its uses and misuses. One essay will be featured every week, and previously featured essays will be archived in the forum.

Writing is a craft that requires precision in our word choices

Constructing grammatically and structurally correct sentences is a must in writing, but we all know that this isn’t enough to command and retain the attention of the reader. We need to come up with clear, readable, and compelling sentences for our expositions—a craft that requires precision in our choice of words as carriers of the thoughts and ideas that we want to share. English being a particularly rich language, with thousands upon thousands of words that mean more or less the same thing, we must develop the knack for choosing the word that best captures the sense that we want to convey. Obviously, this needs more than just a passing acquaintance with the definitions of words and their synonyms. Indeed, to be effective writers, we must make a continuing and purposive effort to widen our English vocabulary. For the wider and richer our vocabulary, the better we will be able to differentiate between the various meanings, senses, and nuances of words and their synonyms, and the better, livelier, and more interesting our writing will be.

It was to bring home this point that I wrote the essay below, “Using synonyms to enliven prose,” for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in January of 2004. I am now posting it in the Forum as part of a series of back-to-basics lessons in writing that I intend to present in this section in the next several weeks. (June 10, 2012)

Click on the title below to read the essay.

Using synonyms to enliven prose

The French novelist Gustave Flaubert believed that only one word could give justice to a particular thing—“le mot juste”—and he obsessively searched for it before committing himself on paper. He may well have been right. After all, short of deliberately destroying the thing itself, there really isn’t much we can do to change its fundamental nature. Thus, in the English language, an “apple” will remain an “apple” till it’s eaten and digested, and “Eve” will remain “Eve” even after she has eaten that apple and is cast away from Paradise. Fortunately for us, however, there’s really no semantic law forbidding us to call an “apple” or “Eve” by some other word the next time it figures in our thoughts or on our tongues.

How dreary language, communication, and literature would be, in fact, if Flaubert’s prescription for words—like what is generally believed as the preferred French prescription for kissing—were to be followed to the letter! Then we would have to contend every time with the tedium of going through passages like this:

The apple is the popular edible fruit of the apple tree. The apple has the scientific name Malus sylvestris and belongs to the family Rosaceae. The apple is widely cultivated in temperate climates. The apple has more than 7,000 varieties but only 40 are commercially important, and the most popular apple variety in the U.S. is called Delicious. Apples are of three main types: cooking apples, dessert apples, and apples for making cider.

Using synonyms or similar words in place of a particular key word is actually one of the most powerful devices for giving zest and substance to language. Along with the other reference word techniques that we have already learned, they help ensure that our listeners or readers won’t tune us out because of boredom. Synonyms, while not exactly le mot juste, allow us to clarify meaning by focusing on the word’s specific attributes, thus throwing new light on the same idea. They make laborious, complicated explanations unnecessary; as in painting, well-chosen single words or short phrases are quick brush strokes that illumine ideas or clarify meaning and intent. As Peter Mark Roget, author of Roget’s Thesaurus, remarked in his introduction to the revolutionary book in 1852: “Some felicitous expression thus introduced will frequently open the mind of the reader to a whole vista of collateral ideas.”

Indeed, see what happens to the dreary apple passage above when we take Roget’s prescription to heart:

The apple, the mythical fruit often associated with the beginnings of the world and mankind, is the popular fruit of the tree of the same name. The fleshy, edible pome—usually of red, yellow, or green color—has the scientific name Malus sylvestris and belongs to the family Rosaceae. As a cousin of the garden rose, it has the same usually prickly shrub with feather-shaped leaves and five-petaled flowers. It is widely cultivated as a fruit crop in temperate climates. More than 7,000 varieties of the species are known but only 40 are commercially important, and its most popular variety in the U.S. is called Delicious. The fruit is of three main types: the cooking apple, the dessert apple, and the type for making cider.

This revised passage uses a total of eight apple synonyms and similar words: “popular fruit,” “tree of the same name,” “pome,” “a cousin of the garden rose,” “a fruit crop,” “species,” “variety,” and “the type”—each one capturing a new shade of meaning, aspect, connotation, or denotation of the apple and throwing the idea of the word “apple” in bolder relief.

We must beware, however, that synonyms can only establish contexts, not definitions; they may help illuminate discourse but not offer an analysis of things. For instance, in the revised apple passage, the synonyms used will be useful only to the extent that each of them is already understood by the listeners or readers. All of the apple-related words used—except “pome”—work very well as synonyms in the passage because they are of common knowledge; depending on the target audience, however, “pome” may need some clarifying amplification. (A pome, for those confounded by the word, is “a fleshy fruit with an outer thickened fleshy layer and a central core with usually five seeds enclosed in a capsule.”) The speaker or writer must ultimately decide if such amplification is needed.

When using synonyms, we also must make sure that their antecedent words—whether nouns, pronouns, or verbs—are clear all throughout. There is always the danger of overdoing the word replacements, particularly when the conceptual link between the original sword and the synonym is not strong enough. In that case, repeating the original word or using the obvious pronoun for it—“he,” “she,” “it,” “they,” or “them”—may be more advisable. Go over the revised apple passage again and see how the pronoun “it” for apple was used twice to provide such a link and continuity.
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 12, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

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Previously Featured Essay:

Matters about English that interest people the most

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.

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*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.

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