Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

Exercise 44

1. Bring to the class room some book you like, some book of essays or of short stories, or some novel, and be prepared to read and explain at least one introductory paragraph in it. State the method used, whether figure, story, quotation, etc. How does the introduction suggest the sort of essay or book it introduces? Do you think any other method would have been as effective?

2. Find one introductory paragraph beginning with a quotation; find one beginning with an anecdote; find one beginning with a figure of speech; find one which is quite formal.

3. From your school history select some narrative in which the author has made a good beginning. Bring your book to class, and be prepared to explain why the beginning is a good one. Do the same with some introductory paragraph in one of your text-books in science or liter

ature.

4. Revise the introduction to some long theme you have recently written.

Exercise 45

1. Apply 1, 3, and 4, Exercise 44, to concluding paragraphs.

2. Find three or four concluding paragraphs that seem to you to illustrate as many different kinds of conclusions.

3. Find a well-told anecdote. How is the point of the story brought out? Is the moral stated at the close?

4. Read a half-dozen or so fables. How do they end? 5. Study the concluding and introductory paragraphs in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (Exercise 25).

PART II

WRITING AND REWRITING

PLANNING, WRITING, AND REWRITING

AT the very outset of your study of the paragraph, you learned that the paragraph lends itself easily to the art of composition, and that if the principles of its construction are once thoroughly understood, there can be no real difficulty to overcome in the putting of paragraphs together in the whole composition. This matter you have just put to a practical test.1 As the sentence holds the same general relation to the paragraph that the paragraph holds to the whole composition, you might therefore infer that if the principles of sentence structure were once thoroughly understood, there would be no real difficulty in the putting of sentences together in paragraphs. This, however, is not the case. The paragraph is a unit of composition in a sense that the sentence is not. No one ever learned to write by the composition of innumerable detached sentences, although it is nevertheless true that a feeling for the rhythm and flexibility of the sentence is essential to style in writing. But this feeling for the rhythm and flexibility of the sentence, this sentence sense, as it may be called, does not come from the conscious building up of sentences in imitation of certain wellformed models. It comes, aside from inherent power of intellect and feeling, from the rapid writing that always accompanies the outpouring of copious stores of wisdom, and from slow, careful, conscious rewriting of sentences

1 In Sections 25-27 and the accompanying exercises.

written at white heat, and written without thought of kind or form. No one whose mind is wholly possessed by the desire to write something, and who also has something to write and no one else ought ever to write anything

[ocr errors]

ever stops to think of the sort of sentences he is writing; indeed, no one can, in the midst of actual composition, stop to think of the sort of sentences he is writing without at the same time losing the naturalness and enthusiasm that come from knowing what one wants to write and from writing it swiftly. What you do with sentences, therefore, as well as what you do later on with words, you will do in the way of rewriting.

This distinction between the paragraph and the sentence recalls the headings of Part I and Part II in this book, the first of which is "Planning and Writing," and the second, "Writing and Rewriting." These two convenient terms suggest the essence of the difference between the two parts. Part I has to do mainly with the work of planning; Part II has to do mainly with the work of rewriting. You plan your whole compositions and paragraphs before you write them, hence the first term, Planning and Writing"; you do not plan your sentences and words, but first write them, and then revise or rewrite them, hence the second term, "Writing and Rewriting."

66

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

1 See Chapter IV.

« ElőzőTovább »