Sev­er­al par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are guilty of be­ing obliv­i­ous to the me­chan­ics of writ­ing and speak­ing. Fun­da­men­tal flaws are made with sub­ject/verb agree­ment, con­fu­sion with ho­mo­phones, ho­mo­graphs and homonyms, glar­ing ma­la­propisms, re­dun­dan­cy (MP for San Fer­nan­do East, while be­ing an or­a­tor, said in his last con­tri­bu­tion be­fore his sus­pen­sion: "This will go down in the an­nals of our his­to­ry.")I have al­so heard an Op­po­si­tion MP use the wrong pre­fix in a word which was sup­posed to cre­ate the antonym of the word. Many of the speech­es of both Hous­es of Par­lia­ment tend to be bland and lack vigour, colour and fail to grab and sus­tain the in­ter­est of the gen­er­al pub­lic.

How many Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment know lit­er­ary de­vices/terms such as sim­i­les, metaphors, per­son­i­fi­ca­tion, oxy­moron, hy­per­bole, eu­phemism, al­lit­er­a­tion, ono­matopoeia and pun? These are some of the tech­niques that the great Mar­tin Luther King Jr used ex­ten­sive­ly in his speech­es, es­pe­cial­ly the I Have a Dream speech which has left an in­deli­ble mark in the minds of many across the globe.A few weeks ago, I heard an Op­po­si­tion par­lia­men­tar­i­an plu­ral­is­ing the noun "cri­te­ri­on" by say­ing "cri­te­rias" in­stead of "cri­te­ria." Many par­lia­men­tar­i­ans do not know of the ex­is­tence of the fact that ad­jec­tives have three de­grees of com­par­i­son:

-The pos­i­tive is used when speak­ing of or de­scrib­ing an ob­ject.

-The com­par­a­tive is used when com­par­ing two ob­jects.

-The su­perla­tive is used when speak­ing of more than two ob­jects.

Hence we say good (pos­i­tive de­gree), bet­ter (com­par­a­tive de­gree), best (su­perla­tive). And so when I heard a dis­tin­guished/bril­liant ed­u­ca­tor on the Op­po­si­tion bench say, "It is more bet­ter," I was com­plete­ly tak­en aback.An­oth­er per­turb­ing er­ror that I have wit­nessed be­ing made in the Par­lia­ment is when se­nior mem­bers are un­able to dis­tin­guish be­tween the ac­tive voice and pas­sive voice. When the ac­tion is done by the sub­ject in the sen­tence, we use the ac­tive voice, eg: John­ny sweeps the floor. On the oth­er end of the spec­trum, when the ac­tion is done to the sub­ject in the sen­tence, we use the pas­sive voice, eg: The floor is swept by John­ny.

How many par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are able to an­swer the rudi­men­ta­ry stuff per­tain­ing to a sen­tence?

-Dis­tin­guish be­tween a sen­tence and a frag­ment.

-Dis­tin­guish be­tween a de­clar­a­tive, in­ter­rog­a­tive, im­per­a­tive and ex­clam­a­to­ry sen­tence.

-Iden­ti­fy a noun, verb, ad­verb, pro­noun, con­junc­tion, in­ter­jec­tion, prepo­si­tion.

-Sub­sti­tute a pro­noun for a noun and vice ver­sa.

-Cor­rect num­ber agree­ment and tense agree­ment.

-Iden­ti­fy the sub­ject and pred­i­cate in a sen­tence.

-Change a sen­tence from ac­tive to pas­sive voice and vice ver­sa.

-Use quo­ta­tion marks, com­mas, colons, se­mi-colons cor­rect­ly.

How many are aware that there are four types of gen­der nouns in the Eng­lish lan­guage?

-Mas­cu­line gen­der which de­notes the male sex.

-Fem­i­nine gen­der which de­notes the fe­male sex.

-Com­mon gen­der which de­notes ei­ther sex.

-Neuter gen­der which de­notes things with­out sex.

Many politi­cians tend to be in­sen­si­tive when it comes to com­mon gen­der nouns as they re­fer to cer­tain pro­fes­sions that are held by both gen­ders in the male light eg: In the po­lice force, po­si­tions are held by both men and women and as such they should be re­ferred to as po­lice of­fi­cers and not po­lice­men.An­oth­er ex­am­ple is that po­si­tions of heads of a com­pa­ny are of­ten re­ferred to as chair­man when some of the po­si­tions are held by women. The apt ti­tle of re­fer­ral should be chair­per­son.I hope my let­ter helps those in the Ex­ec­u­tive, leg­isla­tive and ju­di­cial arms of so­ci­ety.