November 19, 2023—Now available at National Book Store and Fully Booked branches in key cities nationwide is the third updated edition of Jose Carillo’s best-selling book
English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. Hailed by leading academicians, journalists, and critics upon its release in 2005 as “a charmer of a book that delights as well as instructs,” it won the National Book Award for linguistics from the Manila Critics Circle that same year.
The Manila Times Publishing Corp. accepts direct volume orders for the 500-page book for delivery to institutional and corporate buyers and interested individual distributors. Copies can also be ordered from Lazada or Shoppee for immediate delivery to individual customers in Metro Manila.
English Plain and Simple brings together Jose Carillo's first collection of grammar lessons and advice that originally appeared in his long-running
Manila Times column that started coming out six days a week in 2002. Two more volumes drawing material from his
Times columns followed, namely
The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors (2008) and
Give Your English the Winning Edge (2009).
In his foreword to
English Plain and Simple, Dr. Jose Y. Dalisay, Ph.D, professor emeritus of English at the University of the Philippines and Hall of Famer of the Carlos Palanca Awards for Literature, says: “There are many guides to English that the avid student can pick up, but quite a few, I think, actually do more harm than good as ponderous rulebooks meant for rote memorization. But every now and then comes a charmer of a book that delights as well as it instructs.
English Plain and Simple is one such gem, for which we have the pseudonymous Mr. Carillo to thank. Whether he was walking me through the hierarchy of adjectives or discovering Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carillo never failed to show me something new and cause me to smile in recognition of a shared experience.”
In the latest edition of
English Plain and Simple, the author finally revealed his identity after over 20 years of using Jose Carillo as pen name and explains why he used it. The author is the veteran newspaper journalist and communications executive Carlos O. Llorin Jr., a former college newspaper editor-in-chief (the weekly
Dawn, University of the East), marketing field researcher (Asia Research Inc.), national newspaper reporter (
Philippines Herald), and ad agency public relations manager (J. Romero & Associates). He worked for San Miguel Corporation for 18 years as editorial services head, audio-visual group head, senior communications assistant, and product manager, then as corporate communications manager for rhe company's Magnolia Divison with the rank of assistant vice president.
He won nine major Philippine industry awards as editor in chief of the company’s monthly magazine
Kaunlaran and fortnightly newsletter. As executive director of San Miguel’s Magnolia Youth Achievement Awards, he won a Gold Quill Award from the U.S.-based International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in 1989 and the Golden World Award from the U.K.-based International Public Relations Association (IPRA) in 1990.
Llorin took optional early retirement as assistant vice president for communications of San Miguel’s Magnolia Division in 1993, later running the English-language services company Asia Herald Inc. as general manager for five years until 2007. Currently, aside from writing his weekly column in
The Manila Times, he is an independent writer and book editor as well as editing and communication consultant for corporate, institutional, and individual clients.
Describing the rationale for writing his three English-usage books, Carlos Llorin Jr. says: “As with my weekly columns in the
Manila Times, they aim to help nonnative English speakers improve their written English without having to go back to the classroom and, frankly, also to make Filipinos keenly aware that if their English is bad, it’s largely due to the Philippine culture’s fervid addiction to legalese. This done, his English-usage books then gently walk the reader through the basic and practical and later the finer aspects of English grammar and semantics, revisiting all of the parts of speech and their rudiments. The emphasis is to train themselves to think, speak, and write in clear and simple English.
