It is very frequently

ing material for a short essay. employed by experienced writers, and young writers should be familiar with it and use it. It is this: state in the first paragraph what the general subject is and what the heads are under which you will take it up; take up the heads in that order, giving to each a paragraph or a group of paragraphs; in a concluding paragraph show what light you have thrown on the subject.

EXERCISE 61

I. Draw up a plan for a composition of about a thousand words, in at least five paragraphs, adding the details under each head. Write the first paragraph, the last paragraph, and the first sentence of each of the other paragraphs.

II. Criticise the plan of a composition by one of your classmates.

CHAPTER XIV

CLEARNESS

145. THE QUALITIES OF STYLE. 146. HOW TO SECURE CLEARNESS. 147. CLEARNESS IS NOT PRECISION. 148. DEVICES FOR SECURING CLEARNESS. -149. FIGURES OF SPEECH FOR THE SAKE OF CLEARNESS. EXERCISE 62. — 150. LACK OF CLEARNESS. — EXERCISE 63.

145. The Qualities of Style. We have studied the word, the sentence, the paragraph, and the whole composition, and noticed how the lesser units may be most effectually combined. We must now go a step farther, and ask ourselves what, in general, are the ways in which we most desire to affect a reader, or, in other words, what the qualities are which a good style should have.

First of all, evidently, it is indispensable that the writer should so express himself that the reader shall understand him; second, the writer must hold the reader's attention, and in one way or another interest and move him; third, the reader must find himself pleased or satisfied, so far as his taste is concerned, with what he reads. A style, then, should have, first, clearness the quality of being comprehensible; second, force the quality of interesting or moving; third, elegance - the quality of pleasing or satisfying The student will observe that clearness is

the taste.

a matter of the intellect; we may understand without being moved. Force appeals to the emotions. Writing that is strong, forcible, sometimes moves us when we do not fully understand it. Elegance appeals to the taste. Writing that is beautifully polished may also please us when it is not wholly clear to us and does not move us deeply. It is, therefore, not necessary that good writing shall possess all three of these qualities at the same time. We shall treat them separately.

146. How to Secure Clearness. Obviously, the first thing necessary to make others understand what we mean is to understand ourselves what we mean. Until we have first mastered our own thoughts there is little chance that we can express them clearly. We should distrust, therefore, our knowledge of any matter, simple or complex in nature, unless we are able to give to ourselves or to others a plain and straightforward account of it. We must cultivate at all hazards the habit of looking for the gist, or what we roughly call "the long and short," of a matter, and practise ourselves in all our work in expressing simply and naturally the substance of the information we have acquired.

We must be care

147. Clearness is not Precision. ful, however, to distinguish clearness from precision or technical accuracy. A dressmaker's description of a new gown would perhaps puzzle a man as much as his account of a base-ball game or a yachting race might bewilder a woman. An engineer's tech

nical description of a machine might be perfectly clear to one man and absolutely obscure to another, though both were equally intelligent and equally well educated. Obviously, clearness is a relative matter, depending upon the audience or the reader which the speaker or the writer addresses. To write clearly, then, we must never lose sight of those for whom we are writing. A man with special knowledge must be able to communicate with those who share his knowledge, in such technical language that they will be in no doubt concerning the smallest detail. He should, on the other hand, be able to communicate with men expert in other arts or sciences, but unskilled in his. In either case the manner of procedure is different: in the one, precise and technical; in the other, more general, largely untechnical. Both methods we should cultivate; but a great deal of our success in writing depends on never confusing them.

The following extracts illustrate (a) precision as distinguished from (b) clearness in treating subjects which can be approached from both points of view:

a ship's

(a) "In my time it sometimes took all hands company of thirty souls - to close reef the fore and main topsails one after the other. I have seen the whole watch 'tailing on' to the reef tackles, and scarcely able to make 'two blocks' of them. I have seen the topsail with the yard on the cap blowing up bladder-shaped, hard as cast iron, with men on the cloths dancing and stamping to bring the reef-band down to the grip of the fellows on the yard, with a seaman at the weather earing shrieking to the captain

on the poop to luff and shake it out of her, the captain meanwhile, with a sullen nod, 'holding on all,' fearing not only the weight of a green sea aboard, but the loss of half the men off the yard should he put the helm down by a spoke or two. As with the studding-sail so with the single topsail; the age of reefing in the full old sense of that word is over; and let those who contemplate the ocean as a career be thankful that it is so."

- W. CLARK RUSSELL: The Life of the Merchant Sailor.

(b) "We all know that if we 'burn' chalk, the result is quicklime. Chalk, in fact, is a compound of carbonic-acid gas and lime; and when you make it very hot, the carbonic acid flies away and the lime is left. By this method of procedure we see the lime, but we do not see the carbonic acid. If, on the other hand, you were to powder a little chalk and drop it into a good deal of vinegar, there would be a great bubbling and fizzing, and finally a clear liquid, in which no sign of chalk would appear. Here you see the carbonic acid in the bubbles; the lime, dissolved in the vinegar, vanishes from sight. There are a great many other ways of showing that chalk is essentially nothing but carbonic acid and quicklime. Chemists enunciate the result of all the experiments which prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly composed of 'carbonate of lime.'” - HUXLEY: On a Piece of Chalk.

148. Devices for Securing Clearness. If being clear merely means that we succeed in making the person or persons for whom we write understand what we mean, and if, as is evident, we address in almost all our writing a certain fiction called the average man, we have yet to see what devices we can, in general, use in a task which, though often difficult, may well