October 12, 2010

Dear Fellow Communicators,

I would say that easily the most common and confusing error committed by newspaper writers and editors is their mishandling of relative modifying clauses. In their haste to deliver the news, many of them disappointingly fail to distinguish between restrictive or essential modifying clauses on one hand, and nonrestrictive or nonessential modifying clauses, on the other. They either deliberately knock off or neglect putting the crucial pair of commas that should set off a nonrestrictive relative clause from the main clause, or they unnecessarily—and fatally—insert a a pair of commas to set off a restrictive relative clause from the main clause. Either way, the result is a grammatically and semantically disastrous sentence, as in this lead sentence last week by one of the four major Metro Manila broadsheets: “Thousands of veterans, who have been dead for two or three years, continued to receive state pension, an official revealed during a Senate hearing Tuesday.” In my postmortem of this sentence in this week’s edition of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, I demonstrate that this flawed sentence construction makes zombies of those thousands of veterans, literally dead for two or three years now but still very much with us in the here and now to perpetually collect their state pensions.

THIS WEEK IN THE FORUM (October 9-15, 2010):
• My Media English Watch: Misuse of a Restrictive Relative Clause Makes Zombies of Dead War Veterans (An unnecessary pair of commas brings them back to life)
• Essays by Jose Carillo: Steeling Ourselves Against Common Subject-Verb Disagreement Pitfalls (We need to be much more methodical in avoiding them)
• Readings on Language: People’s Let’s Now Take a Much Deeper Look at Books, Acronyms, and Fairy Tales (Reading would be a joy forever if acronyms are few)
• Use and Misuse: For Good or Ill, the Filipino Word “Hulidap” Enters Global Lexicon (Sic transit gloria mundi!)
• Time Out from Grammar: Wife of Russian Literary Genius Chronicles Life of Untold Misery (Sofia Tolstoy’s diary is “infuriating, heartbreaking, unputdownable”)
• You Asked Me This Question: How To Make Effective Paragraph Transitions in English Exposition (We need to think of them as logical bridges)
• News and Commentary: English Now Language of Europe As 2/3 of Its People Can Speak It (Recent research marks eclipse of French as language of diplomacy)
• Advice and Dissent: Why We Find It Pleasing To Read Stories That We Know to Be Untrue (They serve as a social simulator, stretching our scope beyond the actual)
• The Finest in Language Humor: Some Really Amazing Anagrams (Sampler: “A Decimal Point == I’m a Dot in Place”)
• Students’ Sounding Board: Distinguishing Between the Use of “Than” and “Than That Of” (The basis for the choice is the nature of the elements being compared)
• Education and Teaching Forum: Philippine Education Reform Under Poverty and Scarcity (What are proposed aren’t based on properly done studies, says scientist)
• Notable Works By Our Very Own: Non-Historian Explores the Heart and Soul of the Modern Filipino (He decides that history is too important to leave to historians)
• How Good is Your English?: How Criterion-Referenced Tests Can Help Improve Your English (You can work your way up to really great English!)

See you at the Forum!

Joe Carillo

Website: http://josecarilloforum.com