During last year’s company outing at a posh island resort, when everyone was more piss-drunk than is appropriate at a company outing, my piss-drunk friend JJ climbed out of the resort’s swimming pool, soaking wet in her pink dress, and cried:
“WHERE’S MY SLIPPERS?”
At which I, as piss-drunk as JJ, passed out on one of the poolside recliners, snapped out of my drunken stupor, sat bolt upright, and cried back:
“ARE!!! WHERE ARE MY SLIPPERS!”
That’s me: the stickler for English, the grammar nazi, and proudly so. Friends turn to catch my reaction whenever someone’s verb disagrees with his subject; they await my unforgiving smirks when people in meetings rely on clichéd metaphors to conceal their limited vocabularies; they use idioms, and check with me immediately after to affirm if their usage was correct; and they rejoice when I myself slip, exclaiming, “See how the mighty have fallen!”
It’s not an unfounded reputation. After all, I stopped dating a guy who texted me after an abruptly ended cellphone call that “the signal was chappy”; I laughed out loud at a trainer who pronounced “ally” as “alley”; I rolled my eyes at a barista who asked, “Would you like your coffee beans grinded?”; and to me, the phony Amer'can accents of customer service telephone agents are worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.
But can you really blame me, given how I grew up?
My parents are both journalists. Inay has been a columnist, Sunday magazine editor, opinion editor, features editor, associate editor, and contributor for several of the country’s top dailies. She has taught Feature Writing in Ateneo, and she has a handful of National Book Awards, both for works she authored and edited.
Tatay, on the other hand, spent almost 10 years of his life with a company that sent him abroad at least thrice a month—mostly around Southeast Asia, but also to places like Hawaii, Papua New Guinea and Fiji—to give seminars on English newswriting to journalists in these countries’ newspapers. He was also the publisher of Pinoy Times, the bold tabloid founded and funded by PDI founder Eggie Apostol, that helped bring down the Estrada administration.
Like Inay, Tatay taught journalism in Ateneo; but unlike Inay, he earned a reputation for giving F’s. It was like his default grade: “You’re an F unless you prove you're worthy of something else.” Whenever he would talk about his students’ frustrating output over dinner, I would tell him: “Tats, people take Communication to get easy A’s.” (I should know; I took Communication, haha.) To which he would simply reply, “Well, not in my class. I’m a serious journalist.”
Growing up with journalist parents had its perks. I was never subjected to baby talk, I grew up on books, and I was forbidden to watch Tagalog TV shows. As a result, my written and spoken English were flawless, and I soared through grade school Reading and Language classes with hardly any effort, never needing to memorize pluralization, punctuation, capitalization, subject-verb agreement, spelling, tenses, and idioms—all of which came naturally to me.
From books Inay brought home, I learned touch-typing and proofreading—in fact, whenever teachers would remark that I didn’t have to include those little loops when I would cross out words in tests, I would respond, “But that’s the proper editing mark for deletion.”
And in Inay, I had a formidable backer against teachers who dared question my English. In grade two, poor Miss Camacho didn’t stand a chance when she denied me a point on the quarterly exam for spelling “science” with a small “S”, since according to her subjects in school should be capitalized; but Inay countered that “science” is not just a subject, it is a field, so to hell with capital “S”.
But having journalist parents wasn’t always great. I idolized my parents and was eager to make them proud of the budding writer I saw myself as. And so, in grade school, I would let Inay (being home more often) read everything I wrote—whether it was my first writeup for Eaglet, the grade school paper; or assignments in letter writing, paragraph writing, or later, essays; or articles for Eaglet which I, as editor-in-chief in grades six and seven, had already edited.
Each time, without fail, she would say: “This is great! You’re a really good writer! …BUT YOU KNOW, HERE ARE SOME WAYS TO MAKE IT BETTER…”
And then came the slaughter. “This modifier should be placed closer to the noun”… “Your antecedent for this pronoun is unclear”… “This sentence is a little too long, let’s break it up”… “This is not really the best choice of words for what you want to say”… and so forth. Before my horrified eyes, Inay, with her sharp eyes and swift strokes, would dart deftly through my draft—deleting, rearranging, dividing, and adding to practically every line I had written, using my beloved editor’s marks and her beautiful convent school girl penmanship, transforming everything into a crisper, tighter, more correct version of what I had written. Then she would hand me back my draft, and say, “There! Much better!” Holding the massacred paper, bloodied beyond recognition, I would swallow heavily, restrain my tears, and say, “Thank you.”
It’s not as if I never tried to argue. “You’re changing everything!” “But I liked the way I wrote that sentence!” “You’re not editing, you’re rewriting!” To which she would always say, in a gentle but self-assured tone that one can never argue with: “Editing is about preserving the writer’s style, but just making corrections. I’m preserving your style.” And that was that.
And then there was Tatay, bane of communication majors, and no less forgiving of his son’s wrongdoings. On one rare instance that Inay was out of town, I had a paper due, so I showed it to Tatay. That was the first and last time.
Tatay has a very distinct style. Short, clean paragraphs; no-nonsense sentences; and a very logical, linear flow. Boy, was I wrong in thinking that he might be less rigid than Inay as an editor, that he might actually enjoy my writing. His editing led me to believe that, wow, Inay actually did try to preserve my style. Whenever Inay would edit me, I would think, “Hmm, I don’t know if this still sounds like me”; but when Tatay edited me, I thought, “Oh my God, this totally sounds like Tatay.”’
Of course, everything I wrote would get a star, or a very good, or an “A”. Of course, it was never very fulfilling—knowing that the paper was “written” by my parents. Year after year, paper after paper, empty “A” after empty “A”, up until fourth year high school. Sure, there were some papers that didn’t go through my parents—the minor ones, and the ones we had to write in class—but pretty much every written work that counted ran the gauntlet of their scrutiny.
That is, until I decided with one paper in fourth year high school: I will NOT have Inay and Tatay edit this. I submitted a paper they had not seen. And to be honest, I was scared as hell: what if it turned out that I amounted to nothing as a writer after all—that every “A” was really thanks to them, and not to me?
The paper came back days later with a big fat “A” at the top. I guess I really am a writer, I realized; and maybe Inay, in her editing, really was preserving my style.
That night, I showed my parent-free A paper to Inay and Tatay, and told them the story behind it. For sure, they were proud of the achievement, and amused at my concealment of the paper—and, reading through it, they also told me how it could have been improved further. Oh well, I thought, that’s the stuff great journalists are made of.
After that, I stopped showing Inay and Tatay my written work until after it had been graded (or published, when I worked in a job that had me writing for the Inquirer). They understood—and both they and I also saw by that time, that I had already learned enough from their ruthless editing to edit myself.
Today, by and large, I’ve earned their respect as a writer. Inay is generous with praise, and Tatay tells me I would probably be one of his few “A” students. Still, there are times I slip. For example, Inay, once copy-furnished in a correspondence with potential Hangad concert sponsors, replied to me: “Thanks for sharing your letter with me, Paulo. It’s well-written, as usual, but I must point out two minor errors…”
It’s ironic that—at 32, totally independent, and a grammar nazi in my own right—I can still be brought to my ungrammatical knees by these masters of the English language, my parents. But, truth be told, I love it when it happens. I still have much to learn. I laugh at myself. And I’m reminded of the editing I got growing up that shaped not only my English, but the rabid passion for detail, thoroughness, and precision that today dominates pretty much every aspect of my life.
