How I Lived; and What I Lived For
Notes on English and Writing
When I was still in college, our neighbors who were beneficiaries of the PLAN International would ask me to help them write letters to their foster parents. Free of charge, I would write the letter for an American or German benefactor. But after I had finished the letter, they would send to our house food or similar stuff that could “pay” for what I did. I hardly knew then that good writing skill could already mean business.
I myself was a recipient of Salamat Po Kai Foundation at the Ateneo de Naga University, a scholarship which required me to write regularly a Japanese benefactor on how I fared in school, how my grades were, and what activities I involved myself in. So I would write letters in English, as I should, prolifically.
At the time, the best thing to look forward to in a week was to get a reply from my pen friends. And I would gladly write them back. I even wrote to more than three of them at one time. I enjoyed exchanging ideas and sharing stories with them. They simply made my day.
All these nurtured in me the habit of writing letters, and more letters. Initially I was interested in it; but eventually I was hooked in it that it became part of my system.
Normally for a young student like me who preferred writing letters to dunking basketball in the school gym, I was being groomed to becoming a student writer. Perhaps I just recognized that having good English skills, in fact, was a prized possession in school, in college and in the world. And I think it is.
In high school, I began writing for the school paper. I wrote letters to friends constantly or whenever I had the time. Sometimes I really had to find time. I also kept a journal on which I recorded a lot of my ideas, observations, and privations and many experimental works.
I was studying for free so I thought I better maximize the opportunity. I borrowed books from the library, and read them. Then, English was one subject that I could not trade for any computer game—a leisurely activity which I could hardly afford.
There was also no stopping me from reading books, and from making things out of what I read—poems, puzzles, imitations of sayings, and stories.
But I was not really a recluse. More often than not, I was also playing ball with my cousins. I was also active in school clubs—these included writing cliques, collectors’ groups and similar stuff.
In 1996, I found myself working for a newspaper in Bicol. Then, I also wrote articles for Teodoro Locsin’s Today, a Makati-based national broadsheet which has now merged with the Manila Standard.
Both working and writing, I did not stop writing and learning in English—also Filipino and Bikol. I wrote and sent articles and poems to national periodicals. My submissions were rejected and others were published. I even got paid for the ones published in magazines; but the newspapers hardly paid. The newspaper work did not promise compensation, but I held on to writing news and feature articles because I knew I was making sense.
I just kept writing, and with it, I easily found work in publication desks where I managed the newsletter and more importantly, “got to know some real people” [apologies to Sunday Inquirer Magazine].
For the past years I have been writing, I have been enjoying each moment of it.
While some people say that the knack in writing and perhaps everything related to it are given to rare people, I say it’s not absolutely true. I would like to think that all my choices in the past had collectively done their part to make me like writing, and prefer it to any other occupation or preoccupation.
While it may not be a very lucrative occupation, I also consider that with the power to articulate oneself [in English or any language], I have more chances of being privileged—if at all, not actually being gifted.
And times have changed. Nowadays, people who know how to better communicate cannot just remain disadvantaged or say, underpaid, unlike [what] other people [say].
As editor and journalism teacher, I have been editing my own and other people’s writing. When it comes to expressing ourselves in writing, I find some things which hinder the very purpose for which we write. Let me cite them here.
Verbosity or wordiness
Wordiness results from many things. Regardless of where we are, many of us pad our writing with all sorts of empty phrases perhaps to reach the length required in the school or office. Wordiness tends to occur when we are struggling to clarify our ideas or when we’re tired and therefore cannot think clearly. Regardless of our reason for padded writing, we can achieve concise writing if we are aware of the individual patterns of wordiness which is typical of the way we usually write.
Problem comes in when we do not become aware that we are using more words than is necessary. Because we are the authors—we are not inclined to correct ourselves more openly by perhaps slashing the words we have written. We think they are so perfect because they capture what we wish to express so we could get our message across to whoever reads it.
Yet, it’s good when you come to constantly critique your own work—to the extent that pruning words and phrases in your original draft, revising and rewriting your entire work will come naturally. One day, wordiness will be crime to you. Your familiarity with words will tell you whether you have to improve your drafts and can still make it better, even the ones you have written with a colleague.
For one, knowing that language works best by being brief will help you become a more effective communicator.
English is Filipinos’ second language
This issue is nothing new. We Filipinos normally—or more aptly, by heart—speak Hiligaynon, Waray, Bikol, etc., dialect or vernacular, but we are also asked to write and speak English.
Needless to say, we Filipinos are bombarded by so many languages around us—that we find it confusing which to use and how and why. Consider other languages we learned around us, the street language and the television language, aside from our very own vernaculars—modernized Bikol or Hiligaynon, or combined with Taglish, etc.
When we are asked to write in English but we essentially think in the local language—Bikol, Hiligaynon or Filipino—our mother tongue, which we know by heart. Problem sets in because most of the time we are tempted to transliterate: we write in English what we think, know or feel in our mother tongue. Sadly, because a large number of words in our own language have no exact English equivalents, we end up linguistically challenged—we do not realize that, say, not all things in our realities have counterparts in the English language.
All these years of education in the country, our schools must have not succeeded on an effective English language policy. But in the past, our grandfathers and grandmothers must have been well versed in English because they underwent rigid training on the English language, even studying Latin which is the root of [source of the words in] the language.
Today’s schools tell a different story. Despite DepEd’s staunch campaign to use only English or Filipino in the classrooms and schools, everything boils down to what the learners are really comfortable doing—code-switching [speaking combined English with Filipino combined with Bikol or Hiligaynon, etc.]. Moreover, students are overwhelmed by all forms of media; so asking them to speak and write in perfect, flawless English becomes a dream.
It is not cynical to say that young people can learn. In fact, I had students who were inclined to really write well not only because they were inclined—genetically, personally, whatever—but because they chose to do so.
To write and speak good English then is a choice. One simply prefers to do it, for it is something he strives to do—just like someone who endlessly strums the chords, until he masters them, and who later becomes the best guitarist onstage, because he’s strumming most people’s pains away.
Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do—that excellence therefore is not an act, but a habit. To do something in the best way constantly is to be the very best in it—excel in it.
English is really our second language
Another problem crops up from our unfamiliarity with English. Being Filipinos, let’s face it, we were not born saying, “Oh My God!” or “Ouch!” We rather say things automatically, naturally, using our dialect, depending on our ethnic group.
Despite that some parents today would train their young children to speak English—confident that starting them young might make a difference—it’s the yaya’s English that is rather internalized by their wards. We are naturally born Filipinos, and we live in a country where most people speak countless languages.
This exaggeration is true, given the many kinds of language that we human beings invent to suit their own purposes and eccentricities.
[When we were younger, my brothers and cousins themselves communicated in a way only they understood—they reversed words, phrases and sentences until they learned to speak them spontaneously and with finesse. To them it was cool. I was too young to learn it. I did not find it cool either. So I gave up decoding their conversations. But through the years, that has become their bond. Until now, in family gatherings, they would throw jokes and banters that only they understand.]
Because English is our second language, each of us must be familiar with it.
Back in the campus, I used to tell my students to read English and read anything in English. I asked them further to always find the chance to learn anything in English—word, phrase, title of a movie, catchphrase, etc.—and it will become a habit.
Like many other disciplines, English is habit-forming. Despite what others are saying that it is too late for people to do that, if we do this constantly and earnestly, it will do us good.
The problem with legalese
Browsing over documents—whether in schools or offices—makes me think that we are also hindered by the use of jargon, or technical language, like the ones that lawyers use in public and legal documents.
The use of legalese in government communications has been pervasive. Some people who draft them may be lawyers, law teachers, or administrators who have management credits. In other words, such documents are written by people who have been exposed to organizing their work, starting from what they will do to how they will go about in doing and accomplishing them.
Because legalese reads and sounds so foreign we simply dismiss it as difficult. Indeed, it is difficult because ordinary people have not studied law. Everything legalese sounds alien because it reads so formal—and it sounds detached and impersonal.
Thus our attitude towards this kind of language should be open-minded. For instance, if we encounter a document that reads so difficult—we hardly understand anything it says except the names of those who signed them, let us have this resolve that in our own way, or work, we can simplify our expressions so those who will read anything we have written can understand us.
After all, writing is about seeking understanding.
When I was still in college, our neighbors who were beneficiaries of the PLAN International would ask me to help them write letters to their foster parents. Free of charge, I would write the letter for an American or German benefactor. But after I had finished the letter, they would send to our house food or similar stuff that could “pay” for what I did. I hardly knew then that good writing skill could already mean business.
I myself was a recipient of Salamat Po Kai Foundation at the Ateneo de Naga University, a scholarship which required me to write regularly a Japanese benefactor on how I fared in school, how my grades were, and what activities I involved myself in. So I would write letters in English, as I should, prolifically.
At the time, the best thing to look forward to in a week was to get a reply from my pen friends. And I would gladly write them back. I even wrote to more than three of them at one time. I enjoyed exchanging ideas and sharing stories with them. They simply made my day.
All these nurtured in me the habit of writing letters, and more letters. Initially I was interested in it; but eventually I was hooked in it that it became part of my system.
Normally for a young student like me who preferred writing letters to dunking basketball in the school gym, I was being groomed to becoming a student writer. Perhaps I just recognized that having good English skills, in fact, was a prized possession in school, in college and in the world. And I think it is.
In high school, I began writing for the school paper. I wrote letters to friends constantly or whenever I had the time. Sometimes I really had to find time. I also kept a journal on which I recorded a lot of my ideas, observations, and privations and many experimental works.
I was studying for free so I thought I better maximize the opportunity. I borrowed books from the library, and read them. Then, English was one subject that I could not trade for any computer game—a leisurely activity which I could hardly afford.
There was also no stopping me from reading books, and from making things out of what I read—poems, puzzles, imitations of sayings, and stories.
But I was not really a recluse. More often than not, I was also playing ball with my cousins. I was also active in school clubs—these included writing cliques, collectors’ groups and similar stuff.
In 1996, I found myself working for a newspaper in Bicol. Then, I also wrote articles for Teodoro Locsin’s Today, a Makati-based national broadsheet which has now merged with the Manila Standard.
Both working and writing, I did not stop writing and learning in English—also Filipino and Bikol. I wrote and sent articles and poems to national periodicals. My submissions were rejected and others were published. I even got paid for the ones published in magazines; but the newspapers hardly paid. The newspaper work did not promise compensation, but I held on to writing news and feature articles because I knew I was making sense.
I just kept writing, and with it, I easily found work in publication desks where I managed the newsletter and more importantly, “got to know some real people” [apologies to Sunday Inquirer Magazine].
For the past years I have been writing, I have been enjoying each moment of it.
While some people say that the knack in writing and perhaps everything related to it are given to rare people, I say it’s not absolutely true. I would like to think that all my choices in the past had collectively done their part to make me like writing, and prefer it to any other occupation or preoccupation.
While it may not be a very lucrative occupation, I also consider that with the power to articulate oneself [in English or any language], I have more chances of being privileged—if at all, not actually being gifted.
And times have changed. Nowadays, people who know how to better communicate cannot just remain disadvantaged or say, underpaid, unlike [what] other people [say].
As editor and journalism teacher, I have been editing my own and other people’s writing. When it comes to expressing ourselves in writing, I find some things which hinder the very purpose for which we write. Let me cite them here.
Verbosity or wordiness
Wordiness results from many things. Regardless of where we are, many of us pad our writing with all sorts of empty phrases perhaps to reach the length required in the school or office. Wordiness tends to occur when we are struggling to clarify our ideas or when we’re tired and therefore cannot think clearly. Regardless of our reason for padded writing, we can achieve concise writing if we are aware of the individual patterns of wordiness which is typical of the way we usually write.
Problem comes in when we do not become aware that we are using more words than is necessary. Because we are the authors—we are not inclined to correct ourselves more openly by perhaps slashing the words we have written. We think they are so perfect because they capture what we wish to express so we could get our message across to whoever reads it.
Yet, it’s good when you come to constantly critique your own work—to the extent that pruning words and phrases in your original draft, revising and rewriting your entire work will come naturally. One day, wordiness will be crime to you. Your familiarity with words will tell you whether you have to improve your drafts and can still make it better, even the ones you have written with a colleague.
For one, knowing that language works best by being brief will help you become a more effective communicator.
English is Filipinos’ second language
This issue is nothing new. We Filipinos normally—or more aptly, by heart—speak Hiligaynon, Waray, Bikol, etc., dialect or vernacular, but we are also asked to write and speak English.
Needless to say, we Filipinos are bombarded by so many languages around us—that we find it confusing which to use and how and why. Consider other languages we learned around us, the street language and the television language, aside from our very own vernaculars—modernized Bikol or Hiligaynon, or combined with Taglish, etc.
When we are asked to write in English but we essentially think in the local language—Bikol, Hiligaynon or Filipino—our mother tongue, which we know by heart. Problem sets in because most of the time we are tempted to transliterate: we write in English what we think, know or feel in our mother tongue. Sadly, because a large number of words in our own language have no exact English equivalents, we end up linguistically challenged—we do not realize that, say, not all things in our realities have counterparts in the English language.
All these years of education in the country, our schools must have not succeeded on an effective English language policy. But in the past, our grandfathers and grandmothers must have been well versed in English because they underwent rigid training on the English language, even studying Latin which is the root of [source of the words in] the language.
Today’s schools tell a different story. Despite DepEd’s staunch campaign to use only English or Filipino in the classrooms and schools, everything boils down to what the learners are really comfortable doing—code-switching [speaking combined English with Filipino combined with Bikol or Hiligaynon, etc.]. Moreover, students are overwhelmed by all forms of media; so asking them to speak and write in perfect, flawless English becomes a dream.
It is not cynical to say that young people can learn. In fact, I had students who were inclined to really write well not only because they were inclined—genetically, personally, whatever—but because they chose to do so.
To write and speak good English then is a choice. One simply prefers to do it, for it is something he strives to do—just like someone who endlessly strums the chords, until he masters them, and who later becomes the best guitarist onstage, because he’s strumming most people’s pains away.
Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do—that excellence therefore is not an act, but a habit. To do something in the best way constantly is to be the very best in it—excel in it.
English is really our second language
Another problem crops up from our unfamiliarity with English. Being Filipinos, let’s face it, we were not born saying, “Oh My God!” or “Ouch!” We rather say things automatically, naturally, using our dialect, depending on our ethnic group.
Despite that some parents today would train their young children to speak English—confident that starting them young might make a difference—it’s the yaya’s English that is rather internalized by their wards. We are naturally born Filipinos, and we live in a country where most people speak countless languages.
This exaggeration is true, given the many kinds of language that we human beings invent to suit their own purposes and eccentricities.
[When we were younger, my brothers and cousins themselves communicated in a way only they understood—they reversed words, phrases and sentences until they learned to speak them spontaneously and with finesse. To them it was cool. I was too young to learn it. I did not find it cool either. So I gave up decoding their conversations. But through the years, that has become their bond. Until now, in family gatherings, they would throw jokes and banters that only they understand.]
Because English is our second language, each of us must be familiar with it.
Back in the campus, I used to tell my students to read English and read anything in English. I asked them further to always find the chance to learn anything in English—word, phrase, title of a movie, catchphrase, etc.—and it will become a habit.
Like many other disciplines, English is habit-forming. Despite what others are saying that it is too late for people to do that, if we do this constantly and earnestly, it will do us good.
The problem with legalese
Browsing over documents—whether in schools or offices—makes me think that we are also hindered by the use of jargon, or technical language, like the ones that lawyers use in public and legal documents.
The use of legalese in government communications has been pervasive. Some people who draft them may be lawyers, law teachers, or administrators who have management credits. In other words, such documents are written by people who have been exposed to organizing their work, starting from what they will do to how they will go about in doing and accomplishing them.
Because legalese reads and sounds so foreign we simply dismiss it as difficult. Indeed, it is difficult because ordinary people have not studied law. Everything legalese sounds alien because it reads so formal—and it sounds detached and impersonal.
Thus our attitude towards this kind of language should be open-minded. For instance, if we encounter a document that reads so difficult—we hardly understand anything it says except the names of those who signed them, let us have this resolve that in our own way, or work, we can simplify our expressions so those who will read anything we have written can understand us.
After all, writing is about seeking understanding.
Comments
Post a Comment