My experience tells me that there are many ways we can get ahead in life on this planet. I’m sure you all have heard this: if you just applied yourself conscientiously and devotedly to whatever it is you want to become or to achieve, you could be anything that you want to be. But I have found that the most successful people are those that fall under four classifications: people who have a way with things, people who have a way with people, and people who have a way with words. The rest, as a great poet has written, are people who are consigned to living “lives of quiet desperation.”
You are all familiar with people who fall under these three classifications. People who have a way with things—the farmers, the public-transport drivers and conductors, the secretaries, the store clerks, the doctors and dentists, the engineers, the businessmen, the tinkerers, and the inventors—ensure the basic survival of our society as well as enable us to maintain our way of life. People who have a way with people—the salesmen, the politicians, the advertisers and PR men, the religious clerics, and the charlatans and con-men—impel us to make major life decisions and to acquire goods, beliefs, or biases and prejudices for either good or bad. People who have a way with ideas—the poets, the philosophers, the scientists, and the true teachers—open our eyes to news ways of looking at and doing things, thus ensuring for the human race its continuing renewal and progress, on one hand, or its suffering, damnation, and annihilation, on the other.
To me, however, people who have a way with words are the real movers of our world and the true custodians of its body of knowledge, the true arbiters of its tastes, and the true trailblazers and torchbearers for the future. Whether they like it or nor, people who are able to see the significance and seize the meaning of unfolding events, who can report them to people in terms the latter can appreciate and understand, and who can write them in ways that not only entice you to read on but get you enthralled by the simple power of their words—people like these are superior to the greater mass of humanity in terms of real power and influence. And in my survey of great ideas and epoch-making books I have found that many if not most of them had been written or articulated by journalists or former journalists.
I myself was shocked and humbled to find that some of the greatest writers and teachers of the modern world were former newspaper reporters and editors, magazine writers and contributors, or those who had pursued the journalistic craft near to or up to the end of their careers. And all of these people had one thing in common: they had a simple but powerful way with words. In the Americas and in Europe the newsrooms and magazine editorial offices had produced the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, H. L. Mencken, E. B. White, and William Zinsser. The same has been the experience of the Philippines, the newspapers and magazines of which had produced such notable writers as Carlos P. Romulo, Salvador P. Lopez, Blas Ople, F. Sionil Jose, and Teodoro Locsin both senior and junior.
I think the reason for this is quite obvious. Journalists, armed with acute powers of observation and analysis couple with a way with words, see more of humanity’s foibles and frailties as well as its possibilities for greatness than anybody else. They see more of mankind’s glorious triumphs as well as its most egregious and tragic mistakes. They see more people and talk to more people, in the process learning more about the way they think and dream and scheme and plan. To even the least among hardboiled and dedicated journalists, the usual professor with a PhD but without a newspaper or magazine background is often a rank neophyte by comparison, a small fry both in the art of English and in the art of life.
Now, you may ask, precisely how do we achieve this way with words that makes even tabloid reporters more powerful than a senator with a Harvard degree or a business executive with an MBA from the Wharton Business School? My answer is very simple: Write and speak plainly. Use English or the vernacular in a way that the greatest majority of the people will understand. Abhor and avoid the flatulent prose spawned by academicians whose way with prose is to ladle words and phrases on a page as an eight-year-old usually dumps ketchup or syrup on burgers and pancakes until it drips from the sides, like this passage from a 1996 book published in the United States:
"Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self."
In sum, we should banish forever obtuse writing like this from books and other printed matter, from public forums, and from the print and broadcast media. We deserve better English from our staple sources of information and in our communication environment.
