directions contained in § 18. You are certain to find that you have overlooked several of the divisions of the subject; which, however, will seem perfectly natural and obvious directly they are presented to your attention. Some of these principal paragraphs may admit of sub-division. For instance, in the Essay upon Discipline, a particular form of punishment which attained a special prominence in the Navy is properly allotted a paragraph to itself. It This preliminary division of the subject into paragraphs is the most important and difficult part of the whole matter. is the framework of the fabric. Unless the parts are properly discriminated, you cannot present a coherent and intelligible whole. You will run one thing into another; you will leave out some things and needlessly repeat others; you will create only muddle and confusion; and you will get bad marks. § 7. WRITING TO THE POINT Nothing is easier than to wander from the question. Very often, for instance, you make use of some epithet which insidiously introduces a side issue. You employ some word whose connotation, to use a phrase of logic, runs away with you. It has been well said that the adjective is the enemy of the noun. Some new notion is implied in the adjective, and you insensibly slip off on a false scent. It is an exceedingly subtle snare, often very difficult to detect; but you can guard against this and others like it by unswerving obedience to Rule 7. § 8. FLIPPANCY I recollect one of the most learned and popular of Oxford lecturers, when he had elucidated a passage of Herodotus with a certain graceful humour in which he excelled, looking up from his manuscript as the ripple of appreciative laughter died away, and sedately observing: "I do not advise you, gentlemen, to repeat that joke in your examination; because what passes for wit in a learned professor might be taken for flippancy in an examinee." There is a place for everything; but an Essay of the kind which you are called upon to compose is not the place for humour. You must not give the examiner cause to suppose that you are chaffing him. He is, for the time being, your superior; and it can never be proper or in good taste to chaff your superior. a Avoid levity. Treat your subject in a decorous spirit. Pay your subject the compliment of taking it seriously. On the other hand, do not moralise or preach sermons: trick to which schoolboys are addicted. Give your subject its proper weight; and write about it soberly and straightforwardly in a business-like manner. § 9. HIGH-FLOWN WRITING (Rule 9) In writing an Essay, you have to use language somewhat more formal and dignified than that which you are in the habit of using in ordinary life. You must cease to be conversational, and you must cease to use slang, of which a great part of your conversation is probably made up. In an Essay, you must use the best language at your command. Do not, however, strain this too far. Remember that it is not the absolutely best language that you can hope to use, but the best at your command. You must have control over it. Do not indulge in rhetorical questions or exclamations. Do not say: "Does it not seem strange that . ." or "How strange it seems that . . ." but say simply "It seems strange that.. Do not use words of which you do not understand the meaning. Do not aspire to gorgeous metaphor, elaborate antithesis or complicated simile; do not ape Gibbon or Ruskin or Johnson; but try to discuss your subject in a sensible, simple and manly way, as if you were explaining it to a dispassionate, cool-headed, clear-minded man of the world some ten years your senior. § 10. ROUGH COPY (Rule 11) No good prose, as a rule, is ever produced without being written several times over and corrected again and again. You may write your rough copy with freedom, but you must criticise and correct it with the utmost care. The standard at which you are to aim for the present is simply to be free from faults. It is a high standard enough; for "faultless" would be a handsome word to apply to the work of any man. § 11. FINAL CORRECTIONS (Rule 11) If you write an ordinary letter and read it through, as you ought always to do, before you fasten it up, you will almost invariably find that words or stops have been left out or require correction. Much more is this the case with a composition of greater length than a letter and aiming at a higher standard of completeness. Read the final copy of your Essay through with a hostile mind; and make sure that it can defy criticism. § 12. PUNCTUATION You will best acquire a knowledge of the rules for punctuation, such as they are, by noticing how the stops are managed in the Essays contained in the second part of this book. A complete set of formal rules is often misleading, because rules cannot in all cases be strictly applied. Certain cases, however, are tolerably clear. The full stop requires no explanation. Do not, however, forget it altogether. The comma is the commonest of the stops. It obeys certain rules, but in some cases the decision seems almost to depend upon the eye. In series, its use for you is clear. "He was to be assailed at once by Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Sweden and the Germanic body." A comma is placed after each item of a series, but the word "and" takes the place of the comma between the last item but one and the last: a usage almost peculiar to the English language. A comma is generally to be placed, also, after the adverbial clause which often begins a sentence. "On the day after his accession to the throne, Frederick disbanded his father's regiment of giants." Adverbial clauses in the middle of a sentence are generally placed between commas. The reason for this is that they are virtually parenthetical: that is, they are apart from the construction of the main sentence, and the commas act as a sort of modified bracket. "The authorities of the town, since no intimation had reached them of any effort for their relief, were at their wits' end." Another tolerably well-ascertained use of the comma is in the case of ordinary apposition. "Napoleon, the conqueror of Austria, the conqueror of Prussia, the conqueror of Europe, could not conquer Winter." These three uses of the comma, firstly in series, secondly in marking off adverbial clauses, thirdly in appositions, are well-established; although there is scarcely a general rule that can be laid down about stops which is not violated by firstrate authors or their printers in particular instances. You will do well to note thé practice of good writers. The semi-colon is a sort of weak full stop. Its most useful employment is to connect a string of small sentences which combine to express one somewhat unwieldy idea. "The victory of Rosbach was, in a military point of view, less honourable than that of Leuthen; for it was gained over an incapable general and a disorganised army; but the moral effect which it produced was immense." It is obvious that the three sentences which compose this aggregate might equally well have been written separately. "The victory of Rosbach was, in a military point of view, less honourable than that of Leuthen. It was gained over an incapable general and a disorganised army. But the moral effect which it produced was immense." The three sentences are, however, not worth separating; for the whole idea sought to be conveyed is merely that the victory of Rosbach, for given reasons, produced an immense moral effect. The question of the use of the full stop or the semi-colon in a string of short sentences must in every case be to some extent a matter of taste and judgment. There are other uses of the semi-colon in which it seems to serve as a strengthened comma, as for instance in a string of subject or object clauses. "He admitted that he had misunderstood the Right Honourable gentleman's motives; that he had not given him credit for an unbiassed or impartial mind; that he had conceived him to be actuated rather by personal ambition than by unselfish desire for the welfare of his country; that . . ." Take also the following instance from Ruskin : "I should think the reader cannot but feel the kind of harmony there is in this composition; the entire purpose of the painter to give us the impression of wild, yet gentle, country life, monotonous as the succession of the noiseless waves, patient and enduring as the rocks; but peaceful and full of health and quiet hope, and sanctified by the pure mountain air and baptismal dew of heaven, falling softly between days of toil and nights of innocence." Take also this quotation from the same author: "Turner's sense of beauty was perfect; deeper, therefore, far than Byron's; only that of Keats and Tennyson being comparable with it.” Like the colon also, the semi-colon is sometimes used in unwieldy appositions. The two chief uses of the semi-colon for you at this stage are the two first mentioned. Of the less important stops, the colon is often used in introducing a quotation; or, as an alternative to the comma, in cases of apposition where the apposition clause is of considerable length; or sometimes instead of the semi-colon in a string. The exclamation stop follows an exclamation, and the question stop follows a question, and you had better have as little as possible to do with either, unless, of course, they occur in some quotation which you introduce. The hyphen is largely employed by modern writers, |