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Getting to Know English / Using grammar as a tool for persuasion
« Last post by Joe Carillo on October 18, 2023, 11:23:46 PM »
Most of us will be in familiar territory when we talk about using vocabulary as a tool for persuasion. To begin with, hardly ever are we neutral in our choice of words. As parents, we slant our words in particular ways to reinforce our parenting. Children do the same thing to get what they want or get away with their mischiefs. Our enemies do it to denigrate us in the eyes of others. Religious fanatics do it to make the faithful suspend their disbelief despite overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t. Advertisers do it to make people part with their money gladly or without guilt. Ideologues and seekers of public office do it to prime up the public for their political agenda. With no exception, all of us subtly stamp our words with a personal bias to persuade others to believe what we believe and to do what we want them to do.

First on our language agenda is, of course, to label people, places and things. Depending on our intent, biases, or predispositions, for instance, a medical doctor becomes a “health professional,” “physician,” “cutup artist,” or “quack,” and a public relations man becomes a “corporate communicator,” “spin master,” “hack writer,” or “flack.” We do this not to denigrate people or fellow professionals per se, but only to quickly indicate in our minds our attitude and feelings toward them.



Using labels is only the beginning of how we slant our language. Even without meaning to and often without knowing it, we take recourse to idiomatic expressions, clichés, slogans and metaphors to drive home our point more efficiently. Most of us know, for instance, that “it’s water under the bridge” and “as sure as the sun sets in the west” are horribly timeworn clichés, but we continue using them compulsively to emphasize our point. We have no qualms of running clichés to exhaustion, unless we happen to be professional speakers or writers who must always come up with new ways of saying things as a matter of honor. In fact, the only time we get more circumspect about using clichés is when we write something for the public record or for publication under our names.

There are, however, two major disciplines that methodically and ruthlessly use clichés, slogans, and metaphors for mind-bending purposes: advertising and politics. Here, we enter that region of language where hardly anything said is exactly what it means literally. We come face-to-face with “double-speak” or rhetoric exploited to the hilt—language that sometimes teeters at the very outer edges of the truth and carried out by incessant repetition. Suasive diction, for good or ill, seeks to build niches in our minds for all sorts of marketing or political agenda. We need not dwell on them in detail here because we are relentlessly subjected to double-speak in the mass media every day. It’s enough that we are forewarned against taking them at their face value. As they say in Latin, caveat emptor, a warning against language that outwardly feels soft but that’s barbed all over inside.

These thoughts about advertising and politics bring us to the use of grammatical ambiguity as a tool for suasive diction. Remember how many of us routinely use “it”-cleft sentences to achieve emphasis? We “cleave” or split a single-clause sentence into two clauses for semantic emphasis, as in this statement: “It appears that our candidate will score a landslide victory.” This sentence construction is often designed to artfully hide the source of the statement of the “experiencer” to make the statement appear as a fact rather than a mere conjecture to give it the semblance of certainty. It is a deliberate distortion of language to create what we all know as the “bandwagon” effect.

To guard against the perils of suasive diction, we need to watch not only our own language but be ever vigilant of the language of those who would deliberately subvert truth to promote their agenda at our expense.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Using grammar as a tool for persuasion      

This is a condensed version of an 808-word essay by the author that first appeared in this column on June 5, 2009.

Next: The battle for our minds      October 19, 2023

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
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PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR OCTOBER 6 - 13, 2023 OF THE FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 14 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Getting To Know English: “Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English -2”    
 



2. You Asked Me This Question: “Slogans are meant to ambush the mind into acquiescence”




3. Use and Misuse: “How the three kinds of grammatical objects work in English”




4. Essays by Jose Carillo Retrospective: “The power of wordplay”    






5. Students’ Sounding Board: “Does ‘have to’ mean the same thing as the modal auxiliary verb ‘must’?”




6. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: “Belief without evidence to support it is always morally wrong”
   

     

7. Essays by Joe Carillo: “‘Like’ and ‘such as’ are such slippery grammar trippers”




8. You Asked Me This Question: “Inverted sentences have a subject-verb agreement peculiarity”




9. Language Humor at its Finest: “20 spot-on political quips for our times”
   



10. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Oodles of reasons to love (or hate) the Philippines!”




11. You Asked Me This Question: “Is it intellectually dishonest to cite a source one has not actually read?”


IMAGE CREDIT: LIBRARY.MADONNA.EDU

12. Getting To Know English: “Noun clauses as subjects don’t obey the sequence-of-tenses rule”
   



13. Time Out From English Grammar: “U.S. math professor stumbles on ancient Babylonian trick to solve quadratics”
   



14. Getting To Know English Better: ”Is your English better than that of a competition-level high school senior?”    





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Getting to Know English / Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English -2
« Last post by Joe Carillo on October 12, 2023, 06:05:52 AM »
Before taking up a workable strategy for banishing officious stock phrases from our written and spoken English, I am first presenting a chart of the most irksome 33 stock phrases that creep into our memos and reports with us not even realizing it.



In 2013, while running a series of columns discouraging the use of very officious stock phrases in English, I received a very illuminating response from a Tanzania-based Forum member, Mwita Chacha:
   
He wrote:   

“I agree that the best way to effectively get our ideas across is by making our sentences as precise as possible. But as a beginning writer, I sometimes feel reluctant to use a word more than two times in the same writing. That’s why I’m sometimes tempted to alternate, say, ‘about’ with unpleasant bureaucratic phrases like ‘with regard to,’ ‘with reference to,’ and ‘as regards.’ Admittedly, they sound standoffish and tend to just get in the way of clear communication, but I think they help in many ways to eradicate repetition in the prose.”

I replied to Mwita that the repeated use of a particular word in writing is by itself not objectionable if not carried to ridiculous extremes. What’s to be avoided altogether is the dysfunctional misuse of words or phrases—even if done only once—in a wrong language register and tonality.    

Language register is simply the variety and tone of the language used in a particular social, occupational, or professional context. In degree of formality, the English language register has six categories: very formal, rigid, bureaucratic language; formal, ceremonious, carefully precise language; neutral, objective, impartial language; informal, casual language; very informal, very casual language; and intimate, very personal and private language.

It just so happens that over the centuries, the legal profession had developed a variety of English that’s pejoratively called legalese, an officious language that can be roughly classified between very formal and formal language. Lawyers liberally use legalese in contracts, affidavits, depositions, and pleadings before a court of law. As we should all know by now, a distinctive feature of legalese is the replacement of the day-to-day preposition “about” with the longish phrases “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” and the replacement of the day-to-day conjunctions “because” and “so” and of the conjunctive adverb “later” with their longish equivalents “whereas,” “therefore,” and “hereinafter,” 

When legalese is used and stays within legal circles, all will be well with English as we laypeople know it. But legalese has continually leached into both written and spoken business English over the centuries, such that a typical memo or business report these days—despite the fact that they are meant to be read by laypeople like most of us—sounds like an abstruse legal brief written by lawyers for the consumption of adversarial lawyers and court magistrates. Often liberally peppered with such officious phrases as “attached herewith,” “aforesaid,” “heretofore,” and “for your perusal,” they are too rigid, bureaucratic, and needlessly harsh in tone.   

For this reason, my advice to users of English outside of the legal profession is to fiercely resist the temptation to use those very officious and legalistic phrases in their own written and spoken prose. Anyone will be much better off as a writer and as a communicator by sticking to the standard, vanilla-type English prepositions and conjunctions instead. There’s little room for doubt that readers or listeners will understand and appreciate memos and reports much, much better if they are shorn of legalese and rendered in plain and simple English.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English-2/1914383      

Next: Using appositives for texture and depth      October 19, 2023

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
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PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 5, 2023 OF THE FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings from the same weekly period in October of previous years:

1. Getting To Know English: “Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English -1”    
 



2. The Forum Lounge: “Silicon Valley AI developers are hiring literary writers and general humanities experts”




3. You Asked Me This Question: “The usage of the article ‘the’ in serially enumerative sentences”


IMAGE CREDIT: YOUTUBE

4. Your Thoughts Exactly Retrospective: “A harrowing, uplifting tale of September 2009’s killer flood”    



5. Students’ Sounding Board: “Differentiating the use of ‘than’ and ‘than that of’"




6. Advice and Dissent: “A compelling alternative to Shakespeare's true identity was that he was a woman”
   

     

7. Essays by Joe Carillo: “‘Like’ and ‘such as' are such slippery grammar trippers”




8. You Asked Me This Question: “An SOS on the usage of ‘resulting i‘ vs. ‘resulting to‘”




9. Language Humor At its Finest: “Some really amazing anagrams”
   



10. Readings in Language Retrospective: “An exemplar in horror fiction shares his thoughts on writing”




11. You Asked Me This Question: “Is it intellectually dishonest to cite a source one has not actually read?”


IMAGE CREDIT: LIBRARY.MADONNA.EDU

12. Getting To Know English: “Noun clauses as subjects don’t obey the sequence-of-tenses rule”
   



13. Time Out From English Grammar Retrospective: “The monstrous folly of ‘end of the world’ prophecies—II”
   



14. Notable Works by Our Very Own: “It’s time for the Filipino to make himself truly globally competitive”    




15. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: “A few minutes of undiluted joy!”    







95
Getting to Know English / Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English -1
« Last post by Joe Carillo on October 05, 2023, 12:05:16 AM »
Let’s face it: Bureaucrats, lawyers, and not just a few academicians use a lot of officious stock phrases in both their written and spoken communication, among them “by virtue of,” “with reference to,” “in connection with,” “with regard to,” “in order to,” “with respect to,” “in line with,” and—perhaps the most irksome of them all—“this is to inform you that” for both bad and good news and everything in between. These phrases make their English sound so highhanded—even somewhat threatening—but we learn to tolerate them because they are actually part of their professional jargon.

The problem though is that owing to our repeated exposure to them, these stock phrases creep into our own writing and speech. They make us sound like bureaucrats, lawyers, and academicians ourselves although we are not. Our English becomes contrived not only in our day-to-day conversations with friends and coworkers but also in our job applications and office memos, letters, and reports.

 
But should we really allow abstruse tradition and peer-group pressure to tyrannize us into using these officious stock phrases despite our better judgment? In business and in our personal lives, wouldn’t it be advisable and desirable to speak in more concise, more pleasant, and friendlier English?

Way back in 2004, I advocated in this column that we should always use the most forthright but pleasant English to clearly and precisely convey our meaning. To get along with people and get things done promptly in the workplace and most everywhere, we definitely don’t need bureaucratic, lawyerly, or academic language but plain and simple English instead.

To start with, the most commonly used officious English words or phrases today are these six: “about,” “regarding,” “concerning,” “touching on,” “in terms of,” and “on account of.” The shortest of them—“about”—conveys essentially the same sense as “regarding,” “concerning,” and “touching on.” Also the most natural and most forceful, it’s clear that “about” is our best choice for informal statements that need to refer to something: “About our agreement last night, put it on hold until next week. I have second thoughts about some of the provisions.” 

“Regarding” and “concerning” have a mildly officious and legalistic undertone, but if that doesn’t bother us, we can use them freely instead of “about.” Feel how they sound: “Regarding your application for a loan, you may expect release in two weeks.” “We are writing concerning your daughter’s academic performance.”

On the other hand, the phrase “touching on” is of very limited use, appropriate only in constructions like these two: “Touching on the subject of romance, he became a spellbinding speaker.” “It will help if you touch on the subject of overtime pay in your briefing.” By some quirk of the language, “touch on” seems to work only when it latches on to the phrase “the subject of.” We thus must avoid “touch on” if we can.

The prepositional phrases “in terms of” (which means “considering”) and “on account of” (“because”) are respectable business English, if a bit officious: “A time deposit is superior to a savings deposit in terms of interest income.” “We canceled the games on account of the inclement weather.” We must take note though that “in view of,” “owing to,” and “due to” can very well take the place of “on account of” in that second sentence; the choice really depends on what we do for a living and the company we keep. (Lawyers gravitate to “in view of” for their own reasons, but if you ask a non-lawyer like me, I’d much prefer to use “due to” most of the time.)   

English abounds with more prepositional phrases that mean the same thing as “about”—“in accordance with,” “in connection with,” “in conformance to,” “by reason of,” “as to,” “apropos of,” and “anent.” We are well advised to stay away from them altogether, for they are too abstruse and can give our everyday prose a false, awkward tone.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English -1
      
Next: Avoiding very officious stock phrases in our English -2           October 12, 2023

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
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Silicon Valley AI developers are hiring literary writers and general humanities experts

To improve the depth, range, and quality of artificial-intelligence (AI) creative writing, major Silicon Valley training data firms are hiring literary writers with humanities backgrounds to write or annotate original short stories, novels, and poetry to feed their AI models.

In an article  in the September 20, 2023 issue of Rest of the World website, writer Andrew Deck reports that high-profile training data companies such as Scale AI and Appen are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a Ph.D or master’s degree, and more of these companies are also looking for general annotators with humanities degrees or those with extensive work experience in literary fields. The want ads are mostly for English literary writers while others are specifically targeting poets and fiction writers in Hindi, Japanese, and in languages less represented on the internet.


The contractors will write novels, short stories, or poetry on a given topic to be fed into the AI models being developed, and they will provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.

Prof. Dan Brown, a professor at the University of Waterloo (Ontario) who researches computational creativity, describes the demand for these AI-oriented jobs: “​​If you can properly generate tabloid headlines in French, that’s one thing. But if [a product] can replicate [Victor] Hugo’s style or somebody famous, that gets a different kind of credibility. Replicating classical language forms is a way of looking prestigious.”

The client rosters of Scale AI and Appen include some of the biggest names in AI development, among them OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft that are all trying to take the lead in the increasingly growing and competitive generative AI race.

Read "Silicon Valley AI developers are hiring literary writers and general humanities experts" in the Rest of the World website now!
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PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 23 - 29, 2023 OF THE FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 14 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings from the same weekly period in September of previous years:

1. Getting To Know English: “The shocking inadequacy of our written English”    
 



2. The Forum Lounge: “Silicon Valley AI developers are hiring literary writers and general humanities experts”




3. You Asked Me This Question Retrospective: “How a ‘lawful wedded wife’ differs from a ‘lawfully wedded wife’”




4. Use and Misuse Retrospective: “Why are legal documents not in plain and simple English”    

           


5. My Thoughts Exactly Retrospective: “Whatever Became of ‘Fine!’, ‘You’re Welcome!’, and ‘Dead’?” by Isabel Escoda, Forum Contributor




6. Getting to Know English: "Forming negative sentences correctly”
   

     

7. Getting to Know English Retrospective: “How to reduce adjective clauses into adjective phrases – 1”




8. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: “Choosing between a descriptivist and prescriptivist dictionary”




9. Language Humor at its Finest: “Some one-liners for good measure”
   



10. Time Out From English Grammar Retrospective: “A taste of vintage Mencken”




11. You Asked Me This Question: “Is it correct to use the verb 'invite' as a noun?”




12. Essays by Joe Carillo: “Is 'presently' present or future?”
   



13. Going Deeper Into Language: “Learning the English idioms”
   



14. The Forum Lounge: “New worm species found to have three—not just two—different sexes”    


     


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Getting to Know English / The shocking inadequacy of our written English
« Last post by Joe Carillo on September 27, 2023, 10:55:42 PM »
Let me share my unsettling experience in 2003 when, as general manager of an English-language services company, I ran a want ad for editors. Most of the 100 applicants had an AB in English or mass communication; three were magna cum laudes and six cum laudes; and 10 even had Master’s degrees. But most of their job application letters—with two or three exceptions—were written in disappointingly strange, convoluted, stilted English like this one below:

“Dear Sir/Madam:   

   “Greetings in Peace!   

   “Responding with utmost immediacy to your job opportunity ad published on January 6, ____ in the __________, I wish to inform you of my fervor interest in applying for the position of Editor. I am an AB graduate of the University of ______ with distinct recognition as a leader and achiever in the field of debating and as editor-in-chief of the student publication, journals, and other newsletters of the academe.   

   [The applicant then described a glowing work experience.]

   “For your evaluation, I am enclosing my résumé as an attachment as a first step in exploring the possibilities of employment in your client’s organization. I would appreciate hearing from you soon.

   “Thank you for your consideration and God Bless.”
   


With such appalling English, I didn’t call the applicants for interview anymore and just decided to run another want ad. This, in fact, was what later motivated me to write English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. First published in 2005, its third revised edition came off the press this mid-September.

For entrants to the country’s work force like those who answered my want ad, my book strongly suggests using plain and simple English: “The English of [their] job application letters is obviously not the English to use when you want to present yourself in the most favorable way to a prospective employer. The truth is that many of us who write in English distrust our own ability to present ourselves in a good light. No matter how educated or experienced we are, we often assume the persona and voice of someone else when we start writing. We take refuge in some pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo that we think will impress our reader or listener. And once we get started in this legal-sounding language, we become addicted to it. Instead of writing as we would talk, we habitually grasp at these arcane words and phrases in the mistaken belief that like some mantra, they will miraculously make things happen for us.”

It’s evident that not a very high proportion of the graduates of our country’s colleges and universities are being taught or are learning to think, speak, write, and communicate in English clearly, convincingly, and confidently. The shocking inadequacy of the written English of most of those who responded to my want ad for editors is proof positive that they had remained clueless, unaware, and dismissive of the value and virtue of plain and simple English.

Our country’s educational system thus needs to focus vigorously on addressing this serious communication inadequacy of the English of its college graduates.
***
Roly Eclevia, digital creator and writer-editor, observed on my Facebook page: “I visited Landbank’s main office in Makati. An entire floor was occupied by Corporate Communication. I got to talk to the staff, most of them UP and Ateneo graduates. I was shocked to find out they had not heard of and much less read the classics. Milton and Shakespeare were strangers to them and so were the more popular American authors Steinbeck and Hemingway. They had no idea who was Voltaire or Tolstoy or Pushkin or Cervantes.”

My reply to Roly: “A very revealing observation. I must say though that not having heard or read those foreign English classic masters doesn’t seem to be a very serious problem. Rather than obligating our students to read them, maybe we should consider encouraging our students to shift instead to reading our own English classics written by Filipino writers.”

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
The shocking inadequacy of our written English

Next: Avoiding very officious English stock phrases – 1    October 5, 2023

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
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Getting to Know English / Never allow “only” to go haywire
« Last post by Joe Carillo on September 21, 2023, 01:59:16 AM »
A friendly warning to English speakers and writers: Never allow “only” to go haywire.   

The word “only” is easily the most movable, most easily misplaced modifier in English. In any of its three roles as adjective, adverb, or conjunction, “only” can effortlessly flit from place to place, creating as many meanings as the number of positions it perches upon in the sentence. It is, in a word, the ultimate floating quantifier, either intensifying or diminishing the semantic degree of the nouns or verbs it modifies, neatly linking one clause to another of its kind, but when badly positioned ruins an otherwise well-thought-out and well-crafted piece of English writing.


Consider the different meanings the word “only” creates by virtue of the five positions it takes in the following sentences:

Only I think Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“It’s only I that think Jennifer belongs to this league.”)

“I only think Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“That’s the only thought I have at the moment: that Jennifer belongs to this league.”)

“I think only Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“This is what I think: only Jennifer belongs to this league and no one else around here.”

“I think Jennifer belongs only to this league.” (“This is what I think: Jennifer belongs only to this league and to no other.”)

“I think Jennifer belongs to this league only.” (“This is what I think: it is only to this league that Jennifer rightfully belongs.”)

Then, after these five adjectival or adverbial roles, consider, too, how “only” works as a conjunction:

In the role of “but”: “You may vote anyone you like, only vote wisely.”

In the role of “yet”: “Jennifer looks lovely, only she’s already very much married.”

In the role of “except” or “were it not that”: “I’d like to bring Jennifer to Baguio, only that she might enjoy the place so much and stay there the whole summer.”

Even without its role as a conjunctive, however, “only” would already be capable of creating so much ambiguity and semantic mischief if we are not careful. For instance, when describing a situation where we wanted to talk to a manager but only got as far as talking to his secretary, we probably would say “I saw only his secretary” or “I only saw his secretary,” either of which would adequately convey what happened. Then take note that a rather stilted way to say it, “I saw his secretary only,” even more faithfully describes what happened. Even so, the ambiguity remains.

The situation isn’t that bad in spoken usage, where “only” can be floated more freely without creating ambiguity. This is because a stronger stress can always be given to the word that the speaker wants to modify with “only,” thus clearly establishing a clear intent and semantic linkage. We can see how this speech mechanism operates in the following spoken constructions, where the stressed words are shown in all-capital letters:

“I only saw HIS SECRETARY.” (“I saw nobody else.”)

“I only SAW his secretary.” (“Yes, I did see her, but I didn’t speak to her.”)

Taking into account the pitfalls in using “only” as a floating modifier in written prose, language experts have come up with the following recommendation: to be safe, place “only” immediately before the phrase we want it to modify. This means that in the office situation we described earlier, for instance, the safest—but not necessarily the best—written construction to describe what happened is the first version: “I saw only his secretary.” With “only” coming right before the noun phrase it modifies, “his secretary,” the construction poses the least danger of ambiguity.

When spoken, however, the most natural and most felicitous version is obviously this other one: “I only saw his secretary.” It’s much closer to the rhythm of speech, and it will be foolhardy for us to tinker with it simply to conform to the norms for edited or more formal prose.*

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Never allow “only” to go haywire

This is a condensed version of an 800-word essay in the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge. Copyright ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corporation.
--------------
*There will be situations when written and spoken prose will clash head-on as to where to position “only” in a sentence. When this happens, we have to take recourse to what linguists call disambiguating qualifiers, or additional statements designed to clarify our meaning and eliminate ambiguity. A true disambiguating qualifier is integral to the statement, and already anticipates the ambiguity created when the main statement uses “only” as a floating quantifier. Here’s a good example: “I think only Jennifer belongs to this league; all the others simply fall short of the stringent requirements.”

Next: The shocking inadequacy of our written English      September 28, 2023

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
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