Composition-Rhetoric Part 9

6. Couple, pair.

7. Balance, rest, remainder.

(Have you made clear the correct use of the words under discussion? Can you give examples which do not follow the dictionaries so closely as do the ill.u.s.trative reports above?)

NOTE.--Lists of words suitable for exercises similar to the above are given in the Appendix. The teacher will a.s.sign them to such an extent and at such times as seems desirable. One such lesson a week will be found profitable.

+36. Sentence Relations.+--What we read or hear usually consists of several sentences written or spoken together. The meaning of any particular sentence may depend upon the sentence or sentences preceding.

In order to determine accurately the meaning of the whole, we must understand the relation in thought that each sentence bears to the others.

Notice the two sentences: "Guns are dangerous. Boys should not use them."

Though the last sentence is independent, it gets its meaning from the first.

In the following selection consider each sentence apart from the others.

Notice that the meaning of the whole becomes intelligible only when the sentences are considered in their relations to each other.

Once upon a time, a notion was started, that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten years. Some thousand s.h.i.+ploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came, everybody had his ears so wide open, to hear the universal e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of Boo,--the word agreed upon,--that n.o.body spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fiji Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation.--Holmes.

Gutenberg did a great deal of his work in secret, for he thought it was much better that his neighbors should know nothing of what he was doing.

So he looked for a workshop where no one would be likely to find him. He was now living in Strasburg, and there was in that city a ruined old building where, long before his time, a number of monks had lived. There was one room in the building which needed only a little repairing to make it fit to be used. So he got the right to repair the room and use it as his workshop.

In all good writing we find a similar dependence in thought. Each sentence takes a meaning because of its relation to some other. The personal p.r.o.nouns and p.r.o.nominal adjectives, adverbial phrases indicating time or place, conjunctions, and such expressions as _certainly, however, on the other hand_, etc., are used to indicate more or less directly a relation in thought between the phrase or sentence in which they occur and some preceding one. If the reader cannot readily determine to what they refer, the meaning becomes obscure or ambiguous. The p.r.o.nominal adjectives and the personal p.r.o.nouns are especially likely to be used in such a way as to cause ambiguity. Care must be taken to use them so as to keep the meaning clear, and your own good sense will help you in this more than rules.

Notice in your reading how frequently expressions similar to those mentioned above are used.

+Theme XVII.+--_Write a theme suggested by one of the following subjects:_--

1. The last quarter.

2. An excursion with the physical geography cla.s.s.

3. What I saw while riding to town.

4. The broken bicycle.

5. An hour in the study hall.

6. Seen from my study window.

(Are your sentences so arranged that the relation in thought is clear? Are the personal p.r.o.nouns and p.r.o.nominal adjectives used so as to avoid ambiguity? Does your story relate real events or imaginary ones? If imaginary events are related, have you made them seem probable?)

+37. Getting the Main Thought.+--In many cases the relation in thought is not directly indicated, and we are left to determine it from the context, just as we decide upon the meaning of a word because of what precedes or follows it. In this case the meaning of a particular sentence may be made clear if we have in mind the main topic under discussion. Many pupils fail in recitations because they do not distinguish that which is more important from that which is less so. If a dozen pages of history are a.s.signed, they cannot master the lesson because it is too long to be memorized, and they are not able to select the three or four things of importance with which it is really concerned. Thirty or forty minor details are jumbled together without any clear knowledge of the relations that they bear either to one another or to the main thoughts of the lesson.

In the following selection but three things are discussed. Determine what they are, but not what is said about them.

In all the ages the extent and value of flood plains have been increased by artificial means. Dikes or levees are built to regulate the spread and flow of the water and to protect the land from destructive floods. Dams and reservoirs are constructed for the storage of water, which is led by a system of ca.n.a.ls and ditches to irrigate large tracts of land which would be otherwise worthless. By means of irrigation, the farmer has control of his water supply and is able to get larger returns than are possible where he depends upon the irregular and uncertain rainfall. It is estimated that in the arid regions of western United States there are 150,000 square miles of land which may be made available for agriculture by irrigation.

Perhaps in the future the valley of the lower Colorado may become as productive as that of the Nile.

Streams are the easiest routes of travel and commerce. A river usually furnishes from its mouth well up toward its source a smooth, graded highway, upon which a cargo may be transported with much less effort than overland. If obstructions occur in the form of rapids or falls, boat and cargo are carried around them. It is often easy to pa.s.s by a short portage or "carry" from one stream system across the divide to another. In regions which are not very level the easiest grades in every direction are found along the streams, and the main routes of land travel follow the stream valleys. In traversing a mountainous region, a railroad follows the windings of some river up to the crest of the divide, which it crosses through a pa.s.s, or often by a tunnel, and descends the valley of some stream on the other side.

Man is largely indebted to streams for the variety and beauty of scenery.

Running water itself is attractive to young and old. A landscape without water lacks its chief charm. A child instinctively finds its way to the brook, and the man seeks beside the river the pleasure and recreation which no other place affords. Streams have carved the surface of the land into an endless variety of beautiful forms, and a land where stream valleys are few or shallow is monotonous and tiresome. The most common as well as the most celebrated beauty of scenery in the world, from the tiny meanders of a meadow brook to the unequaled grandeur of the Colorado canyons, is largely due to the presence and action of streams.

--Dryer: _Lessons in Physical Geography_.

In the above selection we find that each group of sentences is related to some main topic. A more extended observation of good writing will give the same result. Men naturally think in sentence groups. A group of sentences related to each other and to the central idea is called a +paragraph.+

+38. Topic Statement.+--In the three paragraphs of the selection on page 67, notice that the first sentence in each tells what the paragraph is about. In a well-written paragraph it is possible to select the phrase or sentence that states the main thought. If such a sentence does not occur in the paragraph itself, one can be framed that will express clearly and concisely the chief idea of the paragraph. This brief, comprehensive summary of the contents of a paragraph is called the topic statement.

In order to master the thought of what we read we must be able to select or to make the successive topic statements, and in order to express our own thoughts clearly we must write our paragraphs so that our readers may easily grasp the topic statement of each.

When expressed in the paragraph, the topic statement may be a part of a sentence, a whole sentence, or it may extend through two sentences. It is usual to place the topic statement first, but it may be preceded by one or more introductory sentences, or even withheld until the end of the paragraph. For emphasis it may be repeated, though usually in a slightly different form.

EXERCISES

Determine the topic statements of the following paragraphs. If one is not expressed, make one.

1. No less valuable is the mental stimulus of play. The child is trained by it to quick perception, rapid judgment, prompt decision. His imagination cunningly suggests a thousand things to be done, and then trains the will and every power of body and mind in the effort to do them.

The sports of childhood are admirably adapted to quicken the senses and sharpen the wits. Nature has effective ways in her school of securing the exercise which is needed to develop every mental and every bodily power.

She fills the activity brimful of enjoyment, and then gives her children freedom, a.s.sured that they will be their own best teachers.

--Bradley

2. Our Common Law comes from England, and originated there in custom. It is often called the unwritten law, because unwritten in origin, though there are now many books describing it. Its principles originated as habits of the people, five hundred, eight hundred, years ago, perhaps some of them back in the time when the half-savage Saxons landed on the sh.o.r.es of England. When the time came that the government, through its courts, punished the breach of a custom, from that time the custom was a law. And so the English people acquired these laws, one after another, just as they were acquiring at the same time the habits of making roads, using forks at table, manufacturing, meeting in Parliament, using firearms, and all the other habits of civilization. When the colonists came to America, they brought the English Common Law with them, not in a book, but in their minds, a part of their life, like their religion.

--Clark: _The Government_.

3. Accuracy is always to be striven for but it can never be attained. This fact is only fully realized by scientific workers. The banker can be accurate because he only counts or weighs ma.s.ses of metal which he a.s.sumes to be exactly equal. The Master of the Mint knows that two coins are never exactly equal in weight, although he strives by improving machinery and processes to make the differences as small as possible. When the utmost care is taken, the finest balances which have been constructed can weigh 1 lb. of a metal with an uncertainty less than the hundredth part of a grain. In other words, the weight is not accurate, but the inaccuracy is very small. No person is so stupid as not to feel sure that the height of a man he sees is between 3 ft. and 9 ft.; some are able by the eye to estimate the height as between 5 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 8 in.; measurement may show it to be between 5 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 7 in., but to go closer than that requires many precautions. Training in observation and the use of delicate instruments thus narrow the limits of approximation. Similarly with regard to s.p.a.ce and time, there are instruments with which one millionth of an inch, or of a second, can be measured, but even this approximation, although far closer than is ever practically necessary, is not accuracy. In the statement of measurements there is no meaning in more than six significant figures, and only the most careful observations can be trusted so far. The height of Mount Everest is given as 29,002 feet; but here the fifth figure is meaningless, the height of that mountain not being known so accurately that two feet more or less would be detected.

Similarly, the radius of the earth is sometimes given as 3963.295833 miles, whereas no observation can get nearer the truth than 3963.30 miles.

--Mill: _The Realm of Nature_. (Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner's Sons.)

4. The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in pa.s.sing from place to place. Of all the inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial prejudices, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family. In the seventeenth century the inhabitants of London were for almost every practical purpose farther from Reading than they are now from Edinburgh, and farther from Edinburgh than they are now from Vienna.

--Macaulay: _History of England_.

5. He touched New England at every point. He was born a frontiersman. He was bred a farmer. He was a fisherman in the mountain brooks and off the sh.o.r.e. He never forgot his origin, and he never was ashamed of it. Amid all the care and honor of his great place here he was homesick for the company of his old neighbors and friends. Whether he stood in Was.h.i.+ngton, the unchallenged prince and chief in the Senate, or in foreign lands, the kingliest man of his time in the presence of kings, his heart was in New England. When the spring came, he heard far off the fife bird and the bobolink calling him to his New Hamps.h.i.+re mountains, or of the waves on the sh.o.r.e at Marshfield alluring him with a sweeter than siren's voice to his home by the summer sea.

--George F. h.o.a.r: _Daniel Webster_.