Paraphrase

“ Hear, therefore, one alone, for that is best, in sooth,
And simply take your master's words for truth.
On words let your attention centre!
Then through the safest gate you'll enter
The temple-halls of Certainty.
STUDENT
Yet in the word must some idea be.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Of course! But only shun too over-sharp a tension,
For just where fails the comprehension,
A word steps promptly in as deputy.
With words 'tis excellent disputing;
Systems to words 'tis easy suiting;
On words 'tis excellent believing;
No word can ever lose a jot from thieving. ”

“ As, also, a GUTTURAL emphasis may be applied to express anger, scorn, or loathing. These are some of the different meanings which may be given to this sentence of four words by the voice. A good reader, or speaker, then, ought not only to be able to sound every word correctly; he ought to know, always, the EXACT meaning of what he reads, and feel the sentiment he utters, and also to know HOW to give the intended meaning and emotion, when he knows them. ”

“ Then, again, we have discovered that often we are made to feel most deeply, not by detailed statement, but by suggestion: in the case of a speaker, perhaps by a momentary gesture, or play of features, by a sudden inflection of the voice, or a pause in speech, and the occasional accent of a word or sentence; in the case of a writer, often as much by what he leaves unsaid, by the thought that is veiled behind the statement, by the choice and emphasis of certain features of his record. Further, we may have learned to find occasional value even in uncertainty or indecision. ”

“ Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume
Do not write verse until you fail to express yourself in prose. Verse should glide full-winged over the surface of the waters where the spirit of God lies sleeping. It should deal carelessly with poor things like prepositions and pronouns. They are but the spray-bubbles beaten back by its wings. Your smaller words are staffs falling as regularly and heavily as a tread on a board walk. Your phrases march; they do not fly. ”

“ Our patriots would have died on the gallows, their children would have been deprived of their inheritance, and no cruelty would have been too great for the conquering nation to have inflicted upon her rebellious colonies.
What good is to be derived from paraphrasing?
It trains the mind through the exercising of the power of mental concentration that is necessary in order to hold on to the thought; it helps to form the habit of constructing a framework; it aids in making a speaker arrange his thoughts consecutively; it improves the speaker’s style, and it enlarges his vocabulary. ”

“ He employs [p. 2] the series, the contrasts (single, double, and triple) , the conditional, the negative, the positive, and, in fact, all the known forms of arranging words so as to make them best express the orator’s meaning. Here is an effective concluding series he uses: “A city is adorned by good citizenship, the body by beauty, the soul by wisdom, acts by virtue, and speech by truthfulness,” and he follows this sentence with the following one: “But the opposites of these virtues are a disgrace.” ”

“ They may not, at first, be the best possible words, but words that will answer the purpose of carrying the thought to the mind of the listener will flow freely, and with study and practice the vocabulary will become larger and more effective.
[p. 105] Paraphrasing helps to develop the imaginative quality by cultivating the power of producing mental images, seeing with the mind’s eye, as it were. If a speaker will hold on to his picture or his theme, he will have no trouble in drawing the one or developing the other. ”

“ We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. ”

“ To be compelled to shape the course of remark so as to suit a sentence which is by and by to come, or to introduce certain expressions which are waiting for their place, is a check to the natural current of thought. ”

“ O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. ”

“ Eloquence is, I have sometimes thought, the rarest quality that may be embraced in the essentials of style. We need not quibble over definitions. “Eloquence,” said Dean Farrar, “is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely felt”; and it is sufficient for our purposes. The term is applied commonly and uncritically in oratory. I have not myself found the reading of the speeches of great orators profitable, charmed they never so marvelously in their own day. ”

“ All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself ”

“ Having pointed out the importance of correct grammar and the right choice of language, I wish now to furnish you with some practical suggestions for the construction of sentences. Remember that a good thought often suffers from a weak and faulty expression of it.
Your sentences will certainly shape themselves after the structure of your own mind. If your thoughts are vivid and definite, so will be your language; if dreamy and hazy, so will your composition be obscure. Your speech, whether oral or written, can be but the expression of yourself; and what you are, that speech will be. ”

“ Now, if these lines were written in prose, the words would stand in the following order: "O my God! when my rising soul surveys all thy mercies, I'm transported with the view of them, and lost in wonder, love and praise."
16. And now that I have explained to you a few of the points in which verse differs from prose, I will only add, that when you read verse, you must not stop at the end of every line, unless there is a pause or mark there; and that you must avoid reading it as if you were singing it to a tune. [Pg 121]
LESSON XXXII. God Present Everywhere. ”

“ Through lack of such discernment, gross faults are very often committed. For neither to all ranks, fortunes, and ages, nor to every time, place, and auditory, can the same style either of language or of sentiment be adapted. In every part of a discourse, as in every part of life, we must consider what is suitable and decent; and this must be determined with reference both to the matter in question, and to the personal character of those who speak and those who hear."—CICERO, Orator ad Brutum. ”

“ Provide yourself rather with speech worthy of the thoughts you draw from philosophy, and the more noble your thoughts, the more impressive will your utterance be. Nay, lift yourself up and stand upright, and shake off with your strong top those tree-twisters who are bending you down, like a fir or stately alder, and lowering you to the level of stunted bushes, and make trial whether you have anywhere swerved from the right way. But summon Eloquence, the handmaid of philosophy, and cast away those crooked, twisted modes of speech . ”

“ A carrying out of this principle will enable an extempore speaker to form his matter with perfect ease, and this is one reason why paraphrasing is beneficial to the student of public speaking. It is a valuable stepping stone that should be used by all in attempting to attain proficiency in the art of expressing thought by means of the spoken word. ”

“ In the justifying of the paradox, in the extricating of the real truth from the apparent falsehood of the statement, in the answer to the appeal made here to the imagination,—an appeal and challenge which, unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain unintelligible to us,—in all this there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried on with a pleasurable excitement. ”

“ The proverb forms as it were the middle point of this sphere. In the form of their execution, that is to say, proverbs lean at one time in the direction of the fable, at another to that of the apologue. They give us a particular case selected for the most part from the daily walk of mankind, which, however, is to be interpreted universally. Take the example, "One hand washes the other," or those others, "Every one wheels before his own door," "Who digs a grave for another, falls into it himself," "Bake a pudding for me and I will staunch your thirst," and others like them. ”

“ His phraseology rolls ever in solemn and majestic periods, in which every substantive marches ceremoniously accompanied by its epithet; grand pompous words peal like an organ; every proposition is set forth balanced by a proposition of equal length; thought is developed with the compressed regularity and official splendour of a procession. ”

“ Notice another example of this willingness to dispense with inflection, of this endeavour on the part of the speakers of a language to reduce its forms to the fewest possible, consistent with the accurate communication of thought. Of our adjectives in ‘en’, formed on substantives, and expressing the material or substance of a thing, some have gone, others are going, out of use; while we content ourselves with the bare juxtaposition of the substantive itself, as sufficiently expressing our meaning. ”

“ But, of all the means of adorning and enlivening a discourse by words, which are infinite, and perpetually grow upon us, as our knowledge of the tongue, in which we write, and our skill in adapting it to the ends of poetry, increases, there is none that pleases more, than figurative expression. ”

“ This much of truth they who made the assertion certainly had; namely, that the employment of the concrete instead of the abstract is one of the most frequent means by which it obtains and keeps its popularity; [18] for so the proverb makes its appeal to the whole man—not to the intellectual faculties alone, but to the feelings, to the fancy, or even to the imagination, as well, stirring the whole man to pleasurable activity. ”

“ In a bad attack, she may go to bed young one night and rise next day with grey hairs in her head, and write a book about it; but then she recovers: and I think you are right about phrases, too. 'Syllables govern the world,' John Selden said; but 'phrases' would have been the better word. Phrases are the keynotes to life; they set the tune to which men insensibly shape their course, and so rule us for good and ill. ”

“ Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one there sate fifty men’. ”

“ The value of the figure of speech is chiefly in giving expression to feelings which cannot be set forth in abstract words, the whole of whose meaning can be defined: in the connotation of words—that indefinable part of their meaning which consists in their associations, implications, and general emotional coloring—lies their power to clothe thought with the rich color of feeling which is the life. ”

“ He possessed it as every one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charméd for charm’d, and thousands of others. ”

“ What a miserable instrumentality is language! A tone of satiny flesh, a luminous shadow on a bare shoulder, a flickering light on floating silk, attract, recall, and retain the eye for a long time, and yet there is but a vague phrase with which to express the charm.... ”

“ The most proper words always will be those which are best expressive of the ideas in our mind, and which produce in the ideas of the judges the effect we desire. Such undoubtedly will make a speech both admirable and pleasing, but not so admirable as are prodigies, nor pleasing by a vicious and unseemly pleasure, but a pleasure reflecting dignity with praise. ”

“ No formal correctness, no perfection of epithet or propriety of diction, can atone for the sacrifice of the intangible qualities which in the original form express the mood of the writer, and are to a composition what the personality is to a human being. ”

“ They shall understand a proverb, even the interpretation, without which the proverb is a nut uncracked; when they hear a wise saying, though it be figurative, they shall take the sense of it, and know how to make use of it. ”

“ When the tongue is well controlled and wisely subdued; when selfish impulses and unworthy thoughts no longer rush to the tongue demanding utterance; when the speech has become harmless, pure, gentle, gracious, and purposeful, and no word is uttered but in sincerity and truth,—then are the five steps in virtuous speech accomplished, then is the second great lesson in Truth learned and mastered. ”

“ You will understand, of course, that there is no magic or virtue in the words themselves—that is, in the grouping of the letters forming the words, or the sounds of the words—the virtue resting in the idea of which the words are the expression. ”

“ At the same time, as it is the very character of proverbs to look at matters all round, there are others to remind us that even this very giving itself shall be with forethought and discretion; with selection of right objects, and in right proportion to each. ”