November 2, 2013
Dear Shirley,
I owe you an apology for this much delayed reply. Due to a very urgent personal project of mine (it will continue to occupy me for the next several days or week), I hardly had time to do anything else until now. At this very moment though, I am enjoying a brief hiatus from the work so I’m taking the opportunity to write this e-mail.
That first e-mail of yours definitely wasn’t a waste of my time. On the contrary, Shirley, it was a great pleasure to hear from you and to know that somehow, a book that I wrote almost a decade ago has proven providentially useful to someone in a way that I had never really imagined. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous e-mail, I was so taken by your disarming frankness and decided to publish your e-mail verbatim and my reply in my English-usage column in
The Manila Times. It came out this morning, Saturday (November 2), and you can check it out by clicking this link to
“Never too late to pursue writing if you’ve got the talent.” I also posted it in Jose Carillo’s English Forum and you can check it out by
clicking this link.
As to your writing style and English grammar and usage, Shirley, you absolutely have no reason to apologize for them; they are very good and they hardly have any notable flaw in them. In fact, you write much better—vocabulary, grammar, structure, syntax and all—than many writers who get their feature articles and commentaries published these days in Philippine newspapers and magazines. And your two e-mails to me are actually so grammatically airtight that they are among the very few that I’ve ever published verbatim in my column and in the Forum without fear of embarrassing the writer or myself. I daresay that at this stage in your development as a writer, you already have the creative resources and language facility within yourself, so all you really have to do is to find subjects, themes, and projects you will find worthy of writing about.
When you are done reading
English Plain and Simple, I suggest you find time to read my third book,
Give Your English the Winning Edge. It’s some sort of advanced course in English grammar and usage, focusing as it does on how to construct clear, lively, and readable sentences and how to fashion them into interesting and compelling expositions. I understand that the book has gone out of stock in most of the Metro Manila bookstore chains, but you still might chance upon a copy from a neighborhood outlet. Do let me know if you are able to get one.
To append a PhD to your name would be great, for that would strongly enhance your stature in degree-conscious social circles. But a PhD is really no guarantee for clear thinking and good writing, and I must tell you that you are much better off than some PhDs I know in your creative energy level, in the felicity of your thoughts, and in the cogency of your English. At this time of your life, I do think that you really couldn’t ask God for a much greater blessing than that!
Enjoy the rest of the long weekend!
Sincerely yours,
Joe Carillo
P.S. You can access the online edition of
The Manila Times for free. Just log on to the site by clicking the indicated link. The online edition updates to the next day’s issue a little before or a little after midnight daily.