Elements of Rhetoric: A Course in Plain Prose Composition

From the PREFACE. This book differs from most treatises upon rhetoric and composition in two particulars-arrangement, and proportion. The common order is reversed, and the study of words, instead of being put first, is put last, while at the outset attention is centred upon methods of gathering and ordering material. The reason for this should be plain. Composition must begin with ideas. Diction is the very last consideration in the process of constructing an essay- it may even be reserved until revision. If words be thrust first upon the attention, the student naturally supposes that words, instead of the ideas behind them, are his raw material. Composition becomes to him wholly an artificial thing. Freshness, independence, naturalness, ease, are put far from him, perhaps never to be attained. It is a matter of history that, excepting here and there a Pater and a Stevenson, our masters of letters have not come into their kingdom through wrestling with words. Such I offer as the main defense of this book, and reason for its being. The proportion of parts has been determined both by the foregoing consideration and by experience. The bulk of matter in our rhetorics is traditionary and, except for higher, critical purposes, useless. Good writing depends chiefly on half a dozen things-on managing properly the few words that represent the germ ideas, on keeping sentences from being submerged by the weight of their own clauses, on attending to the articulation (the relation-words of all kinds, the pronouns), on logical arrangement and proportionate emphasis of ideas. These few things are emphasized here. Discussion of barbarisms, provincialisms, tropes, etc., is for the most part avoided. The ground is nearly always unsafe. Judgment is difficult, legislation well-nigh impossible. Besides, it is in these matters that individuality of style chiefly lies, and that is a thing that teacher and text-book alike must touch sacredly. Hence the slight treatment accorded to diction, to words and phrases as such: the sentence, the paragraph, and the whole composition are more easily reduced to law. Hence, too, the subordination of narration and description, on which point see further Section Five. In short, I have kept in view constructive or applied rhetoric, rather than critical, the art rather than the science, enlarging upon whatever bears directly on practice, and reducing to a minimum all else. Discussion of obsolete words, for example, is, in a rhetoric, only dead matter. No student ever writes obsolete words. By leaving the study of them to those courses in English classics which all our schools now provide, and in which the study becomes a vital thing, rhetoric is relieved of a useless burden. Perhaps an exception should be made in the case of figures of speech, which would be without systematic treatment if our rhetorics did not give it. Besides, some figures are mechanical and may be artificially employed....