Aguilar: English written and spoken

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WRITTEN English is not the same language as spoken English. People don't write the way they talk. See it for yourself, take notes of their conversations and put them all down word for word, and they will never look like written English. Rather, they would be a shapeless rambling mass of words that could baffle readers.

Likewise, you will notice that important ideas are missing because in conversations many things are understood without being said. Otherwise, they would appear over and over again because in conversations people keep repeating themselves.

Indeed, writing isn't just putting talk on paper. It's much more than that. Writing is a short-cut method of expressing ideas without the rambling vagueness of ordinary talk. In other words, it's putting your ideas in such a way that they would be immediately clear to the readers.

How do you go about it? How can your ideas be tightly packed so that your readers could easily and immediately understand what you mean as they follow the lines? What short-cuts can you use in writing English? The answer lies in the style of the writer even as the famous writer E.B. WHITE said, "Style is the person."

Even then, however, if you haven't develop your own style yet, then you may start by marking the Pause-for-breath with a period or a comma, a colon or semicolon. There are also the time-saving tricks by writing a sentence with one subject and two predicates, instead of two sentences with a period in between.

Consider this simple example: The is the way it should be written: "Duturte Approved of extrajudicial killings and fulfilled his campaign promise of ridding the country of junkies who are not humans." Instead of writing: "Duterte approved of extrajudicial killings. He fulfilled his campaign promise of ridding the country of junkies who are not humans."

But wait. Don't get me wrong. I am not an English teacher. Neither am I a born writer like E.B. White. I am just like any Tom, Dick, and Harry who's trying hard to write well in a foreign language. Nevertheless, I can plume myself on being able to write and be easily understood in our native tongue. Soon you can see my column in the SuperVoxPop, the native dialect twin newspapers of Sunstar Pampanga.

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