George R. Carpenter

“ In literary description your aim was to make your reader see the picture you saw. In exposition your aim is always and forever to make him understand, and no matter how well written, your explanation is a failure if he does not understand. You will often find it difficult to realize that some people know nothing whatever of some process or principle with which you are very familiar, and a good device is to imagine that you are [201] addressing your explanation to a foreigner ignorant of our life, or to some one younger than you. ”

“ In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer. 2. He beheld the lights in the houses, shining like stars in the dusk and mist of the evening. 3. Hearty and hale was he, an oak that is covered with snowflakes. 4. Their lives glide on like rivers that water the woodland. 5. Their hearts leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman. 6. Life is a sheet of paper white. ”

“ We drove on through pleasant fields and vineyards, catching [184] sight now and then of the distant sea, and, suddenly coming to an open space through the trees, we saw before us the great memorial church of Batalha, the Battle Abbey of Portugal, its pinnacles and the delicate lace work of its roof standing out against the clear blue sky. It stands quite alone, except for the handful of red-tiled houses that form the village, and from its roof you look down, not on the smoke and turmoil of human habitations, but on green fields and slopes and olive trees ”

“ We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things—whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision. Wherever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.... We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its specific features. I thought I knew exactly the form of the leaf of the tulip tree, until one day a lady asked me to draw the outlines of one.... ”

“ To write real poetry is, therefore, out of the reach of most of us, but to write verse is not so difficult as it is usually thought, and it is an excellent exercise in learning control of words. Verse making gives skill in manipulating language and, because of the need for ingenuity and flexibility in sentence construction and for variety in the choice of words, it helps in writing prose. ”

“ General Principles.—There is perhaps no other form of composition which is so generally in use as exposition or explanation. If you observe your own conversation and that of the people about you, you will find that a great deal of it is explanation. Every time you say in answer to some question about a remark you have just made, "Why, I mean that—," you are explaining the first remark. In almost all the recitations you make in school you are explaining something—a principle in arithmetic, or in physics, the construction of something in manual training, the meaning of a word, etc. ”

“ A wily fox, attracted by the delicious smell, came to the foot of the tree and said to the crow, "How splendid you look up there, with your fine black feathers glistening in the sun! I wish I had feathers instead of fur. It is really not fair that you should have all the gifts, beauty and skill, and perhaps even talent. ”

“ Not only should you refrain from using anything you cannot see from the point where you have placed yourself, but you should not use all the things you can see. In the exercises on scientific description you have been observing, as completely as you possibly could, a given subject, and putting into your composition all the facts you could see or learn about. In literary description the process is quite different. You must train yourself to leave out a great many details, and to select those you use with great care for their value in aiding you to give your reader a lifelike picture. ”

“ Petitions.—A petition is a form of open letter, asking a favor, and addressed by a number of people to an authority who can grant the request. There is a form fixed by tradition for the opening of a petition, but the content is varied according to the conditions, and the wording of a petition needs the greatest care. As in any literary exercise, the first thought should be of the essential points you wish to cover, and a brief outline should be made, comprising an exact statement of the concession you wish granted and the best reasons you can give for the granting of it. ”

“ Words may be combined so as to express thoughts well or to express them badly. Composition is the subject that has to do with the best expression of thought by language.
But how, then, does composition differ from grammar? Grammar is really a part—a small part—of composition. Each language has certain customs with regard to the forms which words have under various circumstances, and to the order in which the parts of a sentence are placed, as well as a system of names for [3] different kinds of words and sentences and parts of sentences. This body of customs or rules we call grammar. ”

“ The notice you put up on the blackboard in your class room, the slip of paper you post on the walls of your schoolhouse, to announce an entertainment, an examination, or a meeting of one of your clubs, is the modern town crier. ”

“ Exercise 95.—Find out all you can about the life of any older member of your family. See if you can pick out the natural divisions into which these facts fall, and write a brief biography. Do not divide in a conventional way, as into childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, but try to select periods which are separated from each other by some feature peculiar to the individual life you are relating. Sometimes divisions are naturally made by change in residence, sometimes by change in occupation, and sometimes simply by the general character of a life between certain dates. ”

“ The King of Scotland acted as chief mourner, all the Royal Household followed; the knights wore black armor and black plumes of feathers, crowds of men bore torches, making the night as light as day; and the widowed Princess followed last of all. At Calais there was a fleet of ships to bring the funeral host to Dover; and so, by way of London Bridge, where the service for the dead was chanted as it passed along, they brought the body to Westminster Abbey, and there buried it with great respect.—Charles Dickens: A Child's History of England. ”

“ We look out from the railway carriage on level meadows, purple with vipers' bugloss, bordering the Mondego, and then across a bend of the river where it is broadest we see Coimbra, the Oxford of Portugal, an ancient and beautiful city, beautifully set on a hillside. Bare-headed, black-robed students fill the streets, and swarm in and out of the doors of the university. ”

“ The soil is hot and dry; the wind comes across the lazily murmuring leaves laden with a warm, sickening smell drawn from the rapidly growing, broad-flung banners of the corn. The sun, nearly vertical, drops a flood of dazzling light and heat upon the field, over which the cool shadows run, only to make the heat seem the more intense.—Hamlin Garland: Main-traveled Roads. ”

“ Most of them are very small—much less than half the size of a robin—and are not only short, but slender. Active as the chickadee or kinglet, they flit about the trees and undergrowth after insects, without charity for the observer who is trying to make out their markings. Unlike the waxwing, whose quiet ways are matched by its subdued tints, the warblers are dashed with all the glories of the rainbow, a flock of them looking as if a painter's palette had been thrown at them. ”

“ The Essentials of a Good Narrative.—In a diary you set down things that happen, for your own information. In letters you try to report events so that they will be understood by the person to whom you are writing and, more than this, so that they will be interesting. In a good narration you write an account of a series of connected events, so that it can be understood by any one at all, and will interest and please the greater number of your readers. ”

“ Exercise 114.—As a class exercise, try writing on some one subject and comparing the results. See who has been able to produce the clearest impression and why his description is successful. The subjects should be only those of which the whole class has an equal knowledge, e.g. description of some public person who has addressed the school; of the walk to school on a snowy, rainy, or hot day, of the playground at recess time, of the aspect of the halls directly after school is dismissed, of the schoolroom, of any incident which all the pupils saw, a fire in the neighborhood, etc. ”

“ We could scarcely avoid learning rapidly the names which the people who speak our language have given to the multitude of actual things which we see and touch, and the common words which are customary to express our feelings and thoughts with regard to these objects. As we grow older and wiser, and particularly if we associate with persons of intelligence and information, and read widely in books of all sorts, we become rapidly acquainted also with a great mass of words that have grown up to express the most abstract thoughts and the most delicate shades of feeling. ”

“ On every side but one, the land rose straight up out of the deep sea to meet the feet of craggy hills and mountains crowned with woods. Between the heights were many narrow dells green with orchards, while the gentler slopes were covered with vineyards, and the steeps above them gave pasturage to flocks of long-wooled sheep and mountain-climbing goats.—James Baldwin: A Story of the Golden Age.
[Here the first sentence shows that the paragraph is to be about the beauty of the island.] ”

“ But there may be times when you find that you can say what you mean better in a few words of verse than in many of ordinary prose, that you can express some aspect of out of doors, or some sensation, more vividly in verse than in any other way. You will notice that words seem often to have a greater force and life in poetry than in prose, and if you make use of this quality, you will be writing real poetry. ”

“ See if you cannot show how much more valuable is an instinctive feeling like this than any amount of mere knowledge of what we owe to him, illustrating by the affection a child feels for a relative—a cousin or an aunt—whom he has [219] always known, compared with his affection for a relative whom he learns to know after he has grown up.
A second reason to prove the advisability of granting a holiday to honor the memory of a great man is based on one of the most universally acceptable of proofs. It is good to do a thing when other people do it and always have done it. ”

“ Exercise 91.—As a class exercise, take any one of the following topics, limit the number of words used to two or three hundred, and see who can write the most practical and attractive advertisement. Your aim is to state as forcibly as possible all the favorable aspects of your topic, so that they will appeal most surely to the people you wish to reach. Study the advertisements you like best and see their method. Note that you are attracted by those that seem honest and moderate, and that you are repelled by extravagant overstatements. ”

“ For instance, the first of the three endings given above would lose most of its value if you did not, in writing the story, describe the lonely house at twilight, the two dreadfully frightened children, and the shapeless white mass looming up through the dusk. Their relief at finding it to be only a cow is neither amusing nor even interesting unless you have shown by a lively description how terribly alarmed they were. ”

“ The habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing; not by a first, casual glance, but by a steady, deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind.—John Burroughs: Locusts and Wild Honey.
Description by means of writing is often compared to the work of an artist, since the aim of both artist and writer is to present a visual image of their subject. ”

“ What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, the hero, the wise, the good, or the great man, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light.—Joseph Addison: The Spectator. ”

“ Pupils sometimes ask whether they should use long sentences or short sentences. This question is really answered in the preceding paragraph, for a simple sentence is usually shorter than a complex or a compound sentence. The fact is that what we like is variety. Until you are more experienced in composition, it will be well for you, in general, to use comparatively short sentences,—that is, sentences of not more than twenty-five or thirty words. ”

“ There is always somebody ready for a tramp whenever you want to go out, and in the evenings it is like being at a party all the time.
On Christmas eve we hung up our stockings, even the grown-ups. That was for the little children, who still think there is a Santa Claus. There was hardly room enough along the mantelpiece for them all, and the next morning, when they were all full and knobby, they actually overlapped. Christmas morning we were all up ever so early. Before it was really light, my big cousin was around knocking at the doors, calling us to breakfast and shouting, "Merry Christmas!" ”

“ A good story is the shortest distance between a good beginning and a good ending. By that you are not to understand actually the shortest statement you can make of the facts involved, but the shortest treatment of your theme which still slights none of the features necessary to make your ending most effective. ”

“ Accuracy in the Use of Words.—Accuracy in the use of words comes from practice. It is better to blunder by using a word without a complete knowledge of its meaning than to be afraid to use any but the commonest words. Some words sound very much alike and yet have very different meanings, and some words are so nearly alike in meaning that it is almost or quite impossible to define the difference between them, though we may perhaps feel it. ”

“ The front of your school building, your home, an old barn, the handsomest house in your neighborhood, a country church, the kitchen of your home, your own room, a hen house with the hens just going to roost, a dovecot, any public monument you may know, the inside of a public library, the post office, a drug store, a carpenter's shop, a blacksmith's, an iron foundry, a milliner's shop, a beehive, a crow's nest, an ant-hill, a spider's web, an aquarium, a farmhouse, a tall office building, an ocean steamer, a sailboat, any curious house you may have seen. ”

“ If a boy be born in the lowest stratum of life, it is almost impossible for him to rise through the hard crust [80] into the higher ranks; but in this country it is not so. The strata of our society resemble rather the ocean, where every drop, even the lowest, is free to mingle with all others, and may shine at last on the crest of the highest wave. This is the glory of our country, and you need not fear that there are any obstacles which will prove too great for any brave heart.
Exercise 71.—Expand into a paragraph such of the following statements as your teacher may indicate ”

“ An account of almost any happening, custom, or festival must be told in this way, with an eye both to stating facts clearly and at the same time to making them seem lifelike.
This sort of exercise is harder than anything you have yet tried, for you must be at once complete and full in your account and yet must continue to go on in the sort of picture making you have been practicing. In a way, this is almost a return to some of the exercises in narrative which you have had, since a description of several happenings in order of time is really a narrative. ”

“ The Use of the Paragraph.—Composition is the combining or grouping of words. We group our words in sentences. We also group our sentences in paragraphs.
A paragraph is a group of sentences which together express an important thought. In a way, of course, every sentence expresses a thought—a small thought, so to speak. But experience has shown that the educated mind can best understand written language if it can take in several of these smaller thoughts, in as many sentences, in rapid succession, provided only that these smaller thoughts, when taken together, make up a larger thought. ”