slothful, delivering less than their message; and yet others are overzealous, and will say more in a minute than their masters can stand to in a month.

You will admit that it would be very hard for a text-book to give instruction in the nature of the particular class of which you are now a member. The first systematic writer on composition was a very great man, a philosopher, who took all human knowledge for his province; and Aristotle did indeed attempt to set forth, in the second of his three books, the nature of different audiences. He warned writers that young men differ from middleaged men, and these from their elders. He spoke of the feelings of men- their anger, their scorn, their good-will-and tried to show how each of these feelings might be excited by an orator. Modern writers on rhetoric do not attempt to follow Aristotle into systematic study of these matters. The study

of emotions has become a separate science, to which rhetoric can refer but indirectly. And as for the individual members of a class, the task of studying them is hereby cheerfully resigned to themselves. Doubtless there are types enough: the quick, the slow, the exact,

the inexact, the talkative, the reticent, the ambitious, the modest, the bold, the timid, and possibly the pretentious and the unpretentious. These phases of character you may properly keep in mind, but in good earnest you may be advised not to make too much of them. This manual offers only one definite piece of advice on the subject: Write to the better natures of your comrades, out of your own better nature.

The task of the text-book rapidly narrows itself to a study of the instruments of expression. These, in their last analysis, are words. We however shall take them up, not in the order of the last analysis, but of the first. We shall begin with the germinal thought which forms the topic of a composition, and speak of it from the two points of view the writer's and the reader's. We shall do the same with the units of expression in the order of their development - the main division, the paragraph, the sentence, the word. Then, as was stated in the preceding section, we shall consider the kinds of compositionnarration, etc. from the same two points of view.

§ 6. Definition of Terms. - At the start it may be well to define a few terms in the sense which they will bear in this book. A theme will usually mean a connected original composition, though it may be used a few times in the sense of theme-subject. A written exercise will sometimes call for no original composition, and for detached rather than connected sentences. Clearness will mean the quality of style which, resulting from sound thinking, appeals to the reader's intellect and makes him understand the writer's meaning. Force will mean the quality of style that impresses the reader with a sense of the importance of a statement, or sets up in his heart an emotion which the writer intended to transmit. Emphasis is like force, but as a term is hardly so broad; it refers to the impressiveness of a particular statement, while force may exist throughout a whole composition, or in the suggestions of a single word. Coherence will mean logical order and connection; it is the quality which permits the reader to pass smoothly from one thought to another. Good usage is the standard set, in the choice and arrangement of words, by the practice of the best writers of our own nation and time. Colloquial usage is the

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standard of ordinary conversation among educated persons, while vulgar usage is the practice of the uneducated. Colloquial usage is sometimes admissible in themes; vulgar usage never.

PART I

COMPOSITION IN GENERAL

CHAPTER I

PLANNING THE COMPOSITION

§ 1. Growth of the Outline. - By our definition, composition is the art, first, of collecting and arranging thoughts in order to communicate them. The very term composition means placing together. It is this task of collecting and arranging thoughts which gives the most trouble. Thoughts often refuse to be collected; and we say that our minds are muddled. But the very students who say they have muddled minds and no ideas (I would not hear their enemies say so) are often really troubled with too many. Their trouble lies in getting their

thoughts into orderly shape.

The human brain is always putting thoughts