It bothers me how the literate publishing industry of the Philippines tends to favour people whose credentials precede the actual writing.
It is no wonder than that I've found many essays bland or, to say the least on a positive note, merely grammatically sound.
An essay is not a slough [the correct spelling of 'slew' - another word gone awry in the Philippines and trans-Altantic English] of information spelled out like a memorandum or invitation. An essay is necessarily a revelation of the writer's preferences and prejudices, likes and dislikes. No matter how 'objective' one would like to be in presenting information--and this is demanded of the writer in headline news--lifestyle essays need to offer more quirk and character than the customary, perfunctory invitation and embedded advertisement to events and places of interest. Quirk doesn't have to sound like a cheeleader; character doesn't have to be conveyed by way of diatribe.
A lifestyle columnist and essayist is a taste-maker, and it is his or her job to sway the public's consumer options towards that which he or she thinks represents 'the good stuff'.
For this reason, the actual 'swaying' of public opinion requires that the prose should contain the rhythms and impulses of the writer's natural speech. When the prose sound s choppy and when sentences are chopped up into phrases that mistake themselves for sentences, neither ordinary reader cannot nor intelligent reader will not be lured in.
The queen of quirk is, if you might want to know, in my books, is Edith Wharton. Read her novels and you will find the 'dominatrix' of all fashion, art, home-making, gardening and all things related to lifestyle written with vigour and disdain, passion and loathing. Yet unlike those who express their disdain and loathing by blaming others for their lack of refinement, Wharton communicates her preferences and prejudice by description and by a carefully constructed cautionary cause-and-effect caveat, i.e. if she were writing in this era, 'If you don't listen to what I say, how would you, dear reader, expect to walk tall in your new Louboutin shoes?'
The King of character in American writing, in my books, is Mark Twain. I'm sorry, Henry James, but each page costs a tree and a half these days. If publications go on this way--hack-written, muddled in thought and uninspired--then surely, more publishing houses will be in peril.
To the publishers, editors and managing directors of Philippine dailies, do your searching amongst the young in the country's best universities. Be wise, hire them. Then train them immediately to train those who, clearly, want to be writers yet need the opportunity to become writing apprentices, though they be without a college education. Surely, within a generation, there will be more interesting writing that will bleed upon your parchment, because those writing apprentices will bring their lives into their writing, which are far more interesting than your average middle-class, sheltered laptop owner.
Teach them to read the masters of great journalism - literary journalism, please. Fielding, Richardson, Capote, Mailer, Sontag, Amis, to name a few. Those apprentices will have voices resounding with your readers, will have been educated to introduce their ideas properly yet without losing touch with their audience.
This, I think, is how to save the Philippines from illiteracy. Something needs to be done to educate the non-university graduate in the workplace. I think the writing workplace would be the best place to take these risks.
