Talks on Writing English. Bates Arlo
“When you pass,” he said to me, “a grocer seated in his doorway, a concierge smoking his pipe, a row of cabs, show me this grocer and this concierge, their attitude, all their physical appearance; suggest by the skill of your image all their moral nature, so that I shall not confound them with any other grocer or any other concierge; make me see, by a single word, wherein a cab-horse differs from the fifty others that follow or precede him.” … Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it; only one verb to animate it, but one adjective to qualify it. It is essential to search for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and never to be satisfied with anything else. —Pierre et Jean, Introduction.
I have given this long quotation because it puts the case so strongly, because it has the weight of authority so high in technical matters, and because it touches upon several points which will come up later. There are dangers in this method of which we shall speak in the proper place, but here the thing to be emphasized is the absolute indispensability of rigorous training when one is struggling to acquire the art of verbal expression.
Robert Louis Stevenson, that beautiful master of words, has also told us how he trained himself to that dexterity and grace which have been the delight of so great a company of readers: —
All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for a pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I wrote thus was for no ulterior use. It was written consciously for practice. —A College Magazine.
It is well in learning to write to select uninteresting subjects; themes which depend for their effectiveness not upon what they are but upon the way in which they are presented. It is the natural tendency of any inexperienced writer to set to work to find something to write about which is in itself attractive. In the daily themes which I receive from students I find that the almost inevitable course of things is that the student writes upon whatever romantic or striking incidents have occurred in his life, and that when these are exhausted he is utterly at a loss for something to write about. It is not easy to persuade students that they will get training far more valuable out of careful attempts to express the commonplace. It is hard for eager young writers to follow the advice which Flaubert gave to De Maupassant. They are not willing to put their most strenuous efforts into the attempt to present vividly the grocer or the cab-horse. Yet there is nothing more valuable in training than to be thrown entirely upon one’s own literary skill, be it much or little. When one deals with a subject fascinating in itself it is difficult to determine how much of the force of what is written depends upon the theme and how much may fairly be attributed to the treatment. In training which is purely technical it is essential to make this distinction, and it follows that the learner is wise to choose for his ’prentice efforts matters little attractive in themselves.
I have said that the way to learn to write is to write. It would perhaps be better to say that the way to learn to write is to rewrite. In the careful revision, the patient reconstruction, the unsparing self-criticism of the student who is determined to be satisfied with nothing short of the best of which he is capable, lies the secret of success. Here, as in everything else connected with the study of technique, patient, painstaking, untiring work is the essential thing.
In regard to revision it is necessary to call attention to the fact that it must extend to the revision of paragraphs and whole compositions. We are apt to confine ourselves to the remodeling and the polishing of sentences, or, if we get so far as to revise paragraphs, to take each separately. It is essential that we train ourselves to consider sentences as part of paragraphs and paragraphs as but portions of a whole. This it is especially hard for untrained writers to do. Those who have taught will recognize how difficult it is to make students realize that the sentences of a theme may all be individually right while yet the theme as a whole is all wrong.
As a matter of practical work it is well to make a schedule of chapters by paragraphs and of the whole composition by chapters, if the work be on so extensive a scale. It is one of the tests of a properly constructed paragraph that it can be roughly summed up in a single sentence, and a longer division may consequently be reduced in substance to as many sentences as there are paragraphs. It is an excellent plan thus to summarize work, and a little practice enables a writer to do this in his head without the trouble of putting the abstract upon paper.
It is evident that to learn the art of composition is no small undertaking, but it is to be kept in mind that this art, being the means of human expression, underlies all study and all thought no less than it underlies all communication. It aids one to understand what one reads, what one studies, what one thinks, no less than it aids one to compose a poem, to produce a novel, to write a letter, or to relate the latest bit of piquant gossip. Do not make the mistake of supposing that it is outside of your other intellectual pursuits, save in the sense that all the rest of your education is inclosed in it. We fully understand only that which we are ourselves capable of; and to comprehend the literature of the world it is necessary to come as near to being able to have produced it as is possible to our individual capabilities.
III
PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURE
Since it is the object of this book first of all to be practical, it is well, before passing to matters more intricate, to consider for a little the elementary principles of composition.1 Written language, to repeat what everybody knows, consists of words arranged in sentences, which in turn are grouped into paragraphs, these again being placed together to form whole compositions. In all composition, it may be remarked, it is necessary to remember that the punctuation is as integral and as important a part of what is written as are the words. It is often more easy to forgive the careless printer for altering a word than for changing punctuation, since the reader more easily corrects an error of diction than of pointing. The student has not mastered even the preliminary stages of composition who is not as sure of the punctuation of a page as he is of its grammatical construction.
There is a general vagueness on the subject of the mechanical forms employed in written or printed language which affects the nerves as if it were connected with the moral laxity of the age. There is probably no real connection between the frequency of bank defalcations and a failure to recognize the relative values of the comma and the semicolon, but to a literary man this ignorance is so culpable as almost to seem likely to lead to crime. When an inexperienced writer gets the words down he is apt to suppose that all is well, and frequently he does not even know when to put in a period. It is necessary not only to close a sentence when it is done, but also to bear in mind that if it is not finished putting a period in the middle does not really make two sentences of it. When a tyro finds that his pen is getting out of breath, he has a tendency to set down a period, and then to go on with a conjunction, supposing, in the innocency of his heart, that he is beginning afresh. He is really only setting up the divorced better half – for the latter portion of a sentence should be the better half – in a sort of separate maintenance. The period in such a case has not even the power of a divorce, since it cannot make the separation legal. A sentence is like an ingot: if it be chopped in two, each piece is half of the original whole. It must be melted and recast to make individual ingots of smaller size.
It is also to be noted that students too often fail to recognize the fact that there are reasons as definite and as binding for the divisions of sentences into paragraphs as for the division of words into sentences. A teacher recently told me of the definition of a country schoolboy which, if not over-elegant, represents pretty fairly, it seems to me, the attitude of the common mind toward the paragraph. “A paragraph,” this lad said blunderingly, when called upon to define, “why, a paragraph – a paragraph – it’s – it’s a gob of sentences!” I fancy that most teachers have encountered plenty of pupils who think of a paragraph as merely a “gob” of sentences, – a lump accidentally broken off from the rest of the composition, but possessed of no structural qualities of its own.
The analysis of sentences
In this chapter and the next three I am so greatly indebted to Professor Barrett Wendell’s “English Composition” that this part of my book might almost be called a summary of his, although I have of course omitted much and have introduced some things upon which he has barely touched.