Which should get higher priority in an English refresher course—mastery of the conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs or mastery of the prepositions?

This question came up when a graduate-school English professor and I were designing a two-day seminar on English grammar and usage for a client company. There was simply too much ground to cover in less than 12 hours of course work, so we needed to focus only on the most critical usage areas where the English of the participants could be demonstrably improved.

We agreed that mastery of both the conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs as well as the prepositions is crucial to good English, but we differed on which of them should get a slot in the course. He wanted to give it to the prepositions because of their rampant misuse not only in business and commercial writing but also in journalism. It is embarrassing, he said, that far too many people are incorrectly using “at” instead of “on” or “in” as a preposition for specific points in time, “in” instead of “on” as a preposition of location, and “into” instead of “onto” as a preposition of motion and direction. He wanted to correct the problem by focusing on preposition usage.

I agreed with him that preposition misuse is indeed rampant, but I said that the problem is one that just couldn’t be solved by 30 minutes or so of seminar instruction. A much better solution, I said, is sustained, conscientious self-study. What’s more, I argued, preposition usage is largely a matter of convention and can sometimes be arbitrary among some major English users; in particular, I pointed out, British English in some cases even uses “in” and “on” in exactly the opposite way that American English does.

Then I called his attention to the even more complicated matter of the prepositional idioms and prepositional phrases—those quirky verb forms, adjective forms, and adverb forms that demand the use of specific prepositions to be grammatically correct, as in “composed of” instead of “composed from” and “charge with a crime” instead of “charge of a crime.” These forms don’t really have an overt logic, I said; they simply become entrenched in the language through repeated use. And since there are hundreds of these prepositional forms, people obviously can’t learn them through quick bursts of instruction in a seminar environment. Along with the basic prepositions, they can be learned more effectively by committing them to memory over the long term.

In contrast, I argued, the conjunctions are something that people need to master right away to graduate from just making simple, one-idea sentences into constructing more informative and expressive ones. They need the conjunctions to effectively correlate and link sentences into a logical train of ideas, then to unify those ideas into coherent and understandable writing or speech. But people can achieve this mastery only by becoming truly conversant with the conjunctions, specifically (1) the coordinating conjunctions “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so”; (2) the whole range of subordinating conjunctions such as “after” and “before,” “since” and “because,” and “though” and “even if”; (3) the conditional subordinating conjunctions such as “if” and “while”; and (4) the conjunctive adverbs such as “however” and “therefore.”

Conjunctions, I pointed out, are actually what drive the logic of sentences and provide coherence and unity to a particular set of ideas. Thus, we can bungle our sentences with several ill-chosen prepositions yet still get ourselves understood, but just one wrong conjunction can make our ideas go astray, demolish our line of argument, and confuse our readers or listeners. At worst, I said, wrong preposition choices can mark a person only as someone deficient in English grammar, but wrong conjunction choices can mark that person as a bad, illogical thinker, perhaps even a buffoon.

After our discussion, I am glad to report, my fellow seminar developer agreed to drop preposition usage from the seminar and gave the slot to conjunction usage instead. (March 12, 2007)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 12, 2007 issue © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

P.S. For those who need a dramatic improvement in their connectives usage, my book Give Your English the Winning Edge (Manila Times Publishing, 486 pages) devotes 14 chapters to the English conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, and prepositions. Click this link to the Forum’s Bookshop section for the book’s table of contents where these chapters are listed.

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Propaganda did not start as something undesirable or downright evil. In fact, it had its origins in what many of us would consider the holiest of causes. Almost four centuries ago, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV was confronted with a twin-horned problem: heathens were fiercely resisting Christianity in the new lands that the papacy wanted to evangelize, and where the faith had already made a beachhead, heretics were attacking its very genuineness and patrimony.

Alarmed, the 68-year-old pope, once a fiery and outspoken doctor of laws but now afflicted by a dreadful bladder stone barely two years into the papacy (he died of the illness a year later), decided to form a special task force. He called it the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or “the Congregation for propagating the faith,” and gave it the task of putting more teeth to the worldwide missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

That congregation’s successes and failures are today firmly etched both in the world’s religious geography and in the inscrutable, sometimes shockingly irrational ways that people on both sides of the great religious divide view that world. That, of course, is a fascinating subject crying for an intelligent discussion, but at this time, we will limit ourselves to how the entirely new word “propaganda” crept into the language, first into Latin and later into English, and how its practice evolved into a deadlier hydra than the twin-horned devil it was originally meant to vanquish.

Today, as most of us know, the word “propaganda” has become a noun that means “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In plain and simple English, it is a one-sided form or persuasion seeking to make people decide and act without thinking. This blight on the logical thought process becomes virulent when serious clashes in religious, political, and ideological beliefs become inevitable. And what makes the once pious word and activity even more unchristian and linguistically anomalous is that it is waged as fanatically by the really bad guys as by the presumably good guys on our side.

The essential problem with propaganda, of course, is its single-minded goal of short-circuiting rational thought. As practiced in the Philippine election campaign, for instance, it is excessively bigoted in agitating our emotions, in exploiting our insecurities and ignorance, in taking advantage of the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of the language, and in bending the rules of logic whenever convenient or expedient. Propaganda can delude both the ignorant and intelligent alike, and the even greater danger is that even astute people could become its victims and crazed believers, as we are witnessing right now.

To fortify our defenses against political propaganda, we have to do two crucial things ourselves: (1) know at least the most basic tricks used by political propagandists to subvert rational thinking, and (2) cultivate an open and objective mind to counter their deceptions and sleighs of the mind.

A practical first step for this propaganda-defusing process is to critically scrutinize those aspiring for the top national positions. For our own and this country’s sake, and no matter what the poll surveys and the TV or radio commercials say, we must cut the candidates down to size. We must for decision-making purposes think of them simply as applicants for a specific job, or consider them as nothing more than branded products on the supermarket shelf.

By looking at a candidate as just another job applicant, we can greatly loosen the grip of his or her propaganda on our senses. That will allow us to dispassionately go over his or her application and résumé and make a reasonably sound judgment on the following basics: (1) communication and writing skills, (2) quality of mind and self-appraisal, and (3) qualifications and job-related work experience. Anybody who skips this elementary procedure for hiring entry-level stock clerks and senior corporate executives alike is obviously an incompetent, irresponsible fool who deserves to be fired outright. And yet, as we can all see, skipping this very basic process is what many propagandists of national candidates would like the Filipino electorate to do.

It would be even more instructive to treat the candidates simply as products on a supermarket shelf. We can then proceed to mercilessly strip them of their elaborate branding and packaging to see the intrinsic worth of the actual product inside. It would shock many people to know that the cost of the packaging of certain shampoos in glitzy sachets can run to as much as 85 percent of their total selling price. How much more profound their shock would be to find that some highly touted candidates, when stripped of their glitzy imaging and positioning, have less probative value for the national positions they are seeking than the paper their faces and names are printed on. (March 29, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 29, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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