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EL ARTE DE DECIR SIN DECIR - PEDRO SÁNCHEZ

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 ¡Españoles y españolas! Hoy comparezco ante vosotros, no solo como presidente del Gobierno, sino como un hombre que cree en el futuro. Y os pregunto: ¿qué es el futuro sino el presente que todavía tenemos que mejorar? Hemos conseguido mucho. Muchísimo. Pero debemos hacer más. Porque hacer más no consiste simplemente en hacer más, sino en hacer lo que hay que hacer, cuando hay que hacerlo y para quienes hay que hacerlo. Algunos dicen que tenemos un problema. A quienes dicen que tenemos un problema, les digo: el problema no es que tengamos un problema. El problema es creer que un problema no puede convertirse en una oportunidad. Y nosotros convertiremos cada problema en una oportunidad, cada obstáculo en un peldaño y cada crítica en una prueba de que estamos avanzando. Porque España merece más. España exige más. Y este Gobierno, mi Gobierno, el Gobierno de todos los españoles, seguirá trabajando sin descanso, día tras día, noche tras noche, dejándose la piel, por una España más prós...
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POETRY REPEATS ITELF - ANNE CARSON AND GUILLERMO DE TORRE

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Reading some poetry by the brand-new Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Anne Carson, I was reminded of Guillermo de Torre, the Spanish ultraist poet, and of how Julio Casares took him to task in an article titled   «Hélices, por Guillermo de Torre» . Casares discusses ultraist poetry with considerable humor and a good deal of sarcasm. The article dates from 1920, 106 years before Carson won the Nobel Prize. Yet the two poets have something in common that is worth pointing out. Casares quotes a poem by de Torre entitled «Fotogenia»: Rostros, Muecas, Visajes Acordes faciales de la emoción iluminada Gestos dardeantes... Now consider these lines by Anne Carson: It's good to be neuter. I want to have meaningless legs. There are things unbearable. ................................................. It is curious how poetry repeats itself. A century separates these two writers, yet both seem to challenge our expectations of what a poem should say, and how it should say it. One was ridiculed ...
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QUOTATIONS, MISQUOTATIONS AND MISATTRIBUTIONS

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  “There is no problem that the mind of man can set, that the mind of man cannot solve.” I have always attributed this quotation to Dr. Samuel Johnson; however, it seems I was wrong. I have been unable to authenticate it from Johnson’s writings. Where, then, did I get it from? Google led me to Dr. Terence Meaden’s CV, in which he attributes these very words to Dr. Johnson. Misquotations abound, as do misattributions, but what are we to do about them? Must we double-check every quotation we encounter for the first time? I suggest that, when we cannot trace a quotation to its original source, we should at least identify the source from which we have taken it. In this case, we might write: “As Dr. Terence Meaden attributes it to Dr. Johnson in his online CV: ‘There is no problem that the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.’” It is not proof that Johnson said it, of course. But at least we are being honest about our source. Is that not preferable to perpetuating a po...
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ANNE CARSON - NOBEL IN LITERATURE 2026

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  I think the Nobel Prize in Literature is an event worth looking forward to. This year, 2026, it has been awarded to Anne Carson (1950–), a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and teacher. I should have known that she was the recipient of the Spanish Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2020. I dutifully follow the proceedings on television from Oviedo every year in the fall, but somehow I missed her. This is therefore another of my literary confessions: I had never heard of Anne Patricia Carson. To my shame, I suppose. I tender my congratulations to her and to the English-language literary world. The fact that she has devoted so much of her life to Greek and classical literature in this day and age says something about her, and perhaps also about the enduring power of the humanities. We have someone comparable in Spain: Professor Irene Vallejo, author of the well-known El infinito en un junco ( Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World ). These two women have...
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BREVITY IN WRITING

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Shakespeare comes to our aid often, as in this case about brevity in speech and writing:   Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit , And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief . Your noble son is mad. . . . ( Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2. )
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LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND ENGLISH

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Writing is, in some respects, more difficult than speaking. There is greater scope for misunderstanding when the writer is not there to explain, qualify, or correct what he has written. Faulty punctuation, grammar, or syntax can distort or even deform one's meaning in ways that speech, with its intonation and immediate context, often prevents. But why should we attempt to write in English if we have another language at our disposal? Nathan Heller gives us an intriguing answer in The New Yorker . Writers able to choose their working languages—Joseph Conrad, Jorie Graham, Vladimir Nabokov—often end up writing in English because, as Conrad reportedly put it, “English is so plastic.”
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EFFECTIVE WRITING SKILLS

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1.      Active and selective reading. 2.      Acquisition of words. 3.      Study of basic grammar.  4.      Proper p unctuation. 5.      The ability to use reference books, on paper or online. 6.      The mindful care for one’s readers.
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