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Monday, December 08, 2003
Lessons in punctuation
By Louis Kong
SHE says a punctuation mark ruined her chances to take potshots at literary immortality. “I might have been the next Nick Joaquin,” she mourns. “I could have scribbled my way to greatness with sentences that go on and on and on. But my teacher was adamant; nobody leaves high school without paying her respects to the Almighty period.”
And so, through gritted teeth, she learned her punctuations. She chopped her sentences short and sprinkled her paragraphs with periods.
But if not a female Nick Joaquin, what, then, did Achinette Joy Villamor become?
An editor-in-chief of Today’s Carolinian, the official student publication of the University of San Carlos, and this year’s winner for Visayas (College Category) in the 3rd Annual Ramon Magsaysay Essay Writing Contest.
But this is no surprise to the people who know Chinchin.
In high school, she was a consistent honor student. She became editor-in-chief of the student paper the same time she was president of the student council. And as an Accountancy freshman at the Ateneo de Davao University, she bested all the contestants fielded by the other departments, a select group which included members of the varsity debating team, and took the university title for extemporaneous speaking. That same year, she also served as editor-in-chief of the Ateneophytes, an AdDU student publication.
When she transferred to USC, she won first place, one after the other, in the essay writing contests sponsored by Today’s Carolinian, the university’s Department of Literature and Languages, and was adjudged first runner-up by the International Food Policy Research Institute in their My Visions for 2020 Essay Writing Contest.
Last summer, she also won the “Why support the Arts?” essay writing contest organized by the Cebu Arts Council.
With all the affirmation of her writing prowess, one could be forgiven for thinking this 20- year-old pretty pen wielder would be a serious, intense, and bookish personality. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
During the 2003 Magsaysay essay contest awarding, when a member of the press asked if writing was truly in their blood (her sister won for Visayas, high school), Chinchin quipped, “No, it isn’t, but we like to pretend it is.” When, after her sister, Afrille, told reporters she wanted to be just like Hilario Davide, one of them asked her what she also plans to become, Chinchin gamely answered, “the charming sister of a prominent judge.”
We all have this image of writers as tortured souls - frail, reclusive people who avoid sun and human contact, and would rather spend the day bending over pen, paper, and a cartload of books. But this girl, who admires Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Tony Morrison, PDI’s Conrado de Quiros, and Sun.Star Cebu’s Mayette Tabada, is as incredibly bubbly as she is incredibly talented, as unassuming as she is friendly, and as artistic (she also draws!) as she is witty.
She also hoards an astounding number of books as compulsively as most girls would collect shoes, handbags, or clothes. “I had a 146 of fiction at last count,” she confessed, grinning, “a dozen or so of nonfiction, plus Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Heller’s Catch-22, and Morrison’s Song of Solomon which I don’t own. I’ll have to put them in my will.”
An incredible girl, all right. And although she still claims it was the period that ruined her chances, Chinchin admits the period is one punctuation mark that has taught her a valuable lesson. “It taught me restraint. Instead of simply romping through the lines, the period makes me stop and think.” And what has writing and yes, winning, taught her? “Humility. To write is to constantly learn. The more I read and write, the more I realize that I know very little about things. And each time I read someone whose prose is truly beautiful, I feel small.”
She may never be another Nick Joaquin, thanks to the period. But believe it; Chinchin’s perceptive, mordantly funny writing will never be one that a period can stop from thriving.
(December 8, 2003 issue)
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