THINK BIG in 500 WORDS

Ben Carson’s Think Big had me thinking about how medicine is made interesting and easier to understand if it’s in the hands of those gifted and able to make the complex easier to grasp. Knowledge revealed to ordinary people can transform lives beyond oneself.

Dr. Benjamin Carson talked about medicine and the stories of those encounters he had in practising medicine every day. Ben Carson honors those who made the journey interesting and worth it, those who surrounded him in his life, and those who changed his life.

Even after I have read Carson’s book I can never forget the acknowledgement he made of the influence of his mother. His mother prepared Ben and the elder brother, Curtis, to read. Reading was the foundation for real success in Ben and Curtis’s lives.

I sometimes wonder how anyone in the world can speak with authority about a subject without reading on the subject or even learning all there is to learn about the subject. It seems now-a-days people who are not trained in a subject speak of it as if they have invested their time and training to understand depth and width of a subject.

We are moving towards a society of half-baked intellectuals. I sometimes wonder how this came about. Now anyone can speak about a subject just by Googling it. Knowledge used to be locked in a vault only the learned and privileged have access to it. Now it is no longer the privilege of the few individuals. It is available to anyone who has enough passion and will to know.

Having said that I want to go back to talking about Ben Carson’s Think Big. It is a book written with passion and commitment. The language used was very simple and easier to understand. How Carson explained medicine to non-medical readers makes it fascinating and important to read. Medicine that Carson wants the reader to understand is linked to people, society, and faith. God is in charge in all that humans do on earth. It is the way Ben Carson writes about it that makes it worth reading.

Here lies the point I want to make with this piece. Good writers choose to make themselves understood. Good writers also wants their readers to appreciate every word and every sentence that build up an idea.

Writing in simple language is the goal of great writers. Simple, crystal, and clear language makes even the complex become simple to understand. The key to writing well is writing with simple language that is grounded in reality.

I have written many books across genres that I understand the importance of language use and the appropriate language in different genres.

Novice writers and students’ essays ignore this protocol for good writing. Writing in simple language is often ignored for fancy abstract language that is long and full of grammatical problems.

Part of my headaches of reading novice writing and student essays is just on language use in their works.

This piece is a start of my commitment to use my blog as an online platform to talk about good writing, effective communications, how to avoid grammatical problems, writing books, editing, and publishing books.

I also want to use this platform to develop and publish a book online.

The word limit I have is 500 plus words for this writing project. How can I describe the world in 500 words?

The first PNG Writer: Hosea Linge

With so much going on around us we tend to forget about important foundations of our history. I could not get out of my mind the much neglected discussion on the first Papua New Guinean writer. Every now and then we need to acknowledge the important parts of our history as we move forward. I would like to acknowledge the first Papua New Guinean to write a book in the 1930s. A New Irelander by name of Ligeremaluoga wrote and published his book under the title The Erstwhile Savage: An Account of the Life of Ligeremaluoga in 1932. Ligeremaluoga is from Kono village in New Ireland Province. Ligeremaluoga’s book is by all accounts the first written account by a South Pacific Islander. Most of what we know as Pacific writing is dated to the 1960s and 1970s. Last month I presented a paper at the University of Hawaii to discuss another early Papua New Guinean writer by name of Ahuia Ova of Hanuabada, who published his memoirs in 1939, six years after Ligeremaluoga’s autobiography. ...

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