If you approach a snake-oil vendor, he will tell you, without a moment's hesitation, that something's wrong with you, and that you better take his medicine. A medical doctor, by contrast, after performing a battery of tests, not only will tell what ails you, but also explains what causes your ailment. Then he will recommend the best cure possible.Jose Carillo, the English-usage columnist of The Manila Times, is like the latter---he does not only point out the flaw(s) in a sentence, or in a paragraph, or in an entire composition, he explains as well how come it's wrong, and prescribes an antidote to avoid committing the same mistake again.
With a clinical eye of a doctor, Carillo diagnosed the recurrent---so recurrent that the author finds them annoying---grammar errors in his second English-usage book, "The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors." (The first being "English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense To Learn Today's Global Language"---which was given by the Manila Critics Circle a National Book Award.)
