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. ...

Well Done! Nora

Melanesian writers: Regis Tove Stella (PNG), Nora Vagi Brash (PNG), Sam Alasia (Solomon Islands), USP Fiji campus, 1999. One of the outstanding playwright and poet to emerge in Papua New Guinea is Nora Vagi Brash. She remains the foremost and the only Papua New Guinean female playwright. Nora was involved with acting in amateur theatre, radio plays, and street theatre in early 1970s. Her exposure to the world of theatre in England inspired her to write her own plays on her return to Papua New Guinea. The National Arts School employed Nora as an assistant lecturer in puppetry, dance, and drama. She then moved on to become one of the two artistic directors with the National Theatre Company. Nora wrote her own scripts for the puppets using tradional stories of Papua New Guinea. The National Theatre Company toured local villages and performed in the streets. They went to the Pacific Arts Festival in Rotorua and Wellington, New Zealand. They also danced in Point Venus ...

the dull drumming, Yes of the flat drums. Thud dada thud da thud dada thud

Writer My late Kandre, Vincent Warakai, a robust scholar and intellectual, left a lasting impression on me as a Papua New Guinean with this poem “Dancing Yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat”, which was first published in Ondobondo , a literary magazine of the Literature Department of UPNG in the 1980s, when I studied Literature as a degree program. The poem was later republished in Albert Wendt’s Nuanua: pacific writing in English since 1980s , making it one of the most powerful pieces to have been written by a Papua New Guinean since Independence. Below is the poem: Dancing Yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat We have been dancing Yes, our anklets and Amulets now are Yes, grinding into our skin No longer are they a décor Yes, they are our chains We have been dancing Yes, but the euphoria has died It is now the dull drumming Yes, of the flat drums Thud dada thud da thud dada thud Yes, it is signaling, not the bliss But the impending crisis. It i...

Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

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