A First Book in Writing English

=Different Ways of Planning.=—There are various kinds of composition,—description, narration, argument, and others. These will be treated one by one in later chapters. Each kind...

=Ideas without Words.=—It is possible to have ideas without having words in which to express them. Miss Helen Keller[35] had plenty of ideas before any one taught her the words...

=Clearness.=—If composition is the art of communicating one’s ideas in words, it is certain that clearness is the first requisite of good writing. Clearness, perfect intelligibi...

Let it be supposed that a person has learned to plan a composition logically and to write with grammatical correctness; that further he has acquired a noble unrest which keeps h...

=Authority.=—If the art of writing is the art of saying what we mean, we must use words that the reader will understand. Of course the word _reader_ is rather general: there are...

=The Sentence not its own Master.=—Everybody learns at an early age some such definition as this: A sentence is the expression of a complete thought in words. But many students...

Punctuation is a system of disjunctive marks by which the eye and ear are helped to understand the sense of what is written. It is desirable to regard the subject as governed to...

Exposition is explanation. It may either explain a general principle by illustrations and examples, as the preacher’s sermon expounds a statement of scripture, or it may explain...

A sentence may be said to be well-knit if it stands the following tests. It must have unity of form; freedom from excessive looseness; a due amount of emphasis; and climax, if c...

=The English Vocabulary.=—The enormous treasure of English speech contains something like 200,000 words.[33] Most of these were once foreigners to the language. To tell how each...

Narration, or narrative, relates a series of events. Description gives an account of the look of persons or things. Character description gives both physical and mental traits....

=Reading Aloud.=—One of the quickest ways of learning to know good English, is oral reading. For him who would write the language it is therefore a great economy to learn to rea...

=Literal Reproduction.=—The word _reproduction_ is often used in Rhetoric in a somewhat general sense, to mean any version of another composition. As we shall use it, the term m...

=An Art of Communication.=—Language may be studied in various ways. It may be scientifically investigated as a historical growth, or as a curious revelation of how the human min...

=Why Important.=—There are two general classes of letters: informal or personal, and formal or impersonal. Each kind is governed by the general principles of clearness and court...

“If prose literature can ever be successfully studied by means of short extracts, it will be possible to conduct such a study with the aid of this book. As a companion book of W...