LESSON LXXV.
A composition in which the subject is explained, interpreted, discussed, proved, or illustrated, is called exposition.
This division of prose composition includes essays, speeches, sermons, lectures, and debates.
In narrative and descriptive composition, the materials are obtained through the senses, but in exposition they are derived from general and abstract thought. Since the manner in which two minds will approach the treatment of any subject will be as diverse as the minds themselves, no definite rules can be laid down for the guidance of the learner, but the following hints may be given:—
(1) Having selected his subject, the pupil should think over the exact force and meaning of the terms in which the subject is proposed, so as to have a clear conception of the ground it covers.
(2) In the next place, he should determine the mode in which he will treat his subject. He may commence with the general statement and proceed to prove and illustrate it, or he may commence with the examination of particulars, and proceed to the general truth.
(3) The pupil’s attention must now be given to the division of his subject. The logical order of the several parts should be preserved.
(4) Having decided on his plan or frame-work, the pupil has now to obtain the necessary information under each head. This he may derive from reflection, from conversation, and from reading. As thoughts are obtained he should note them down.
(5) After the composition is written out, the pupil should review it carefully to see if his thoughts have been expressed in the proper place, and in the most suitable manner. After a careful criticism by himself, he should write out his composition again.
I. PERSEVERANCE.
Experience amply shows that nothing valuable is to be attained without labor. Exceptional cases apart, the rule of life is that what costs us nothing is little worth, and that what is esteemed among men is the prize of effort and self-denial. The rich harvest which rewards the husbandman is the fitting sequel to a year of watchful and provident exertion; the successful merchant reaches his envied fortune by the closest vigilance combined with the most skilful calculation; whilst the splendid structure of knowledge which the student aspires to rear is only built up by long years of patient and sustained devotion.
Yet it is possible that labor may end in disappointment. Mere capacity of working carries with it no guarantee of ultimate success. For one may be always working, and yet may achieve little. “One thing to-day, another to-morrow,” indicates a fickleness of temper which has rendered many an active life well-nigh useless. Labor to be effective must be steady. Energy must be under the guidance of purpose. It is the resolute concentration, and not the fitful ebullition of effort, which surmounts all obstacles. The fabled contest of speed between the hare and the tortoise expresses in a homely way the truth which is patent to general observation, that the cause of failure in any pursuit is more commonly to be found in want of perseverance than in want of ability.
Most readers are familiar with the incident in the life of Robert Bruce, strongly illustrative of the virtue of perseverance. The King, almost despairing of success in his efforts to restore freedom to his country, was lying one day in his little cabin, when his attention was caught by a spider. The little animal, hanging at the end of a long thread of its own spinning, was trying to swing itself from one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line for its web. Not till the seventh attempt did it succeed; but its success encouraged the King to make one effort more. His perseverance met with its reward; for, as he had never before gained a victory, so he never afterwards suffered any serious defeat.
If, then, perseverance is the secret of success in life, it is surely worth while for all to cultivate this virtue. The effort may be trying and painful at first, but repetition gradually makes it easy, and even pleasant. We should enter on the path of effort betimes, too, before habits of self-indulgence have been acquired, which renders perseverance impossible. Nothing is more certain than that this virtue is amongst the most precious legacies which maturer years can inherit from a laborious and well-spent youth.—James Currie.
II. ADDRESS TO STUDENTS.
Advices, I believe, to young men—and to all men—are very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of advising and very little faithful performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether. I would not therefore go much into advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare say; but I must, nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not—namely, that above all things the interest of your own life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day, in this place where you have come to get education.
Diligent! That includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I mean to include in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so verily it is the seed-time of life, in which if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at, indeed, little, while in the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers—and among many counsellors there is wisdom—you will bitterly repent when it is too late.
At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence, I mean among other things—and very chiefly—honesty in all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavor to do that. Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence.
There is such a thing as a man endeavoring to persuade himself, and endeavoring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them, and he goes flourishing about with them. There is also a process called cramming—that is, getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about. Avoid all that as entirely unworthy of an honorable habit.
Be modest and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right way, as far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real; and it would be greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters. That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of generations of which we are the latest.
One remark about your reading. I do not know whether it has been sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books. When a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of books—in all books, if you take it in a wide sense—you will find that there is a division of good books and bad books—there is a good kind of book and a bad kind of book. I am not to assume that you are all ill-acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a very important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the idea that people have that if they are reading any book—that if an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all. I entirely call that in question. I even venture to deny it. It would be much safer and better, would he have no concern with books at all than with some of them. There are a number, an increasing number, of books that are decidedly to him not useful. But he will learn also that a certain number of books were written by a supreme, noble kind of people—not a very great number—but a great number adhere more or less to that side of things. In short, as I have written it down somewhere else, I conceive that books are like men’s souls—divided into sheep and goats. Some of them are calculated to be of very great advantage in teaching—in forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others are going down, down, doing more and more, wilder and wilder mischief.
And for the rest, in regard to all your studies here, and whatever you may learn, you are to remember that the object is not particular knowledge—that you are going to get higher in technical perfections, and all that sort of thing. There is a higher aim lies at the rear of all that, especially among those who are intended for literary, for speaking pursuits—the sacred profession. You are ever to bear in mind that there lies behind that, the acquisition, of what may be called wisdom—namely, sound appreciation and just decision as to all the objects that come round about you, and the habit of behaving with justice and wisdom. In short, great is wisdom—great is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated. The highest achievement of man—“Blessed is he that getteth understanding.” And that, I believe, occasionally may be missed very easily; but never more easily than now, I think. If that is a failure, all is a failure.—Carlyle.
Examine carefully the foregoing expositions. Notice the definite plan on which each is constructed.
EXERCISE II.
Write an expository composition on one of the following subjects:—
| 1. | Commerce. | |
| 2. | The Pleasures of Conversation. | |
| 3. | The Value of Time. | |
| 4. | Friendship. | |
| 5. | The Power of Conscience. | |
| 6. | Peace and War. | |
| 7. | Patriotism. | |
| 8. | Advantages of Travel. | |
| 9. | A Taste for Reading. | |
| 10. | Punctuality. |
A plan for the first subject:—
| Introduction | {Definition of commerce. | |
| {Origin of commerce. (Tell who were the first to engage in it and when). | ||
| Discussion. | {Its history. (Show the growth in the means of transportation). | |
| {Great discoveries of other lands that have extended commerce. | ||
| Conclusion. | {Advantages arising from commerce. (Distributes the productions of the earth, helps to educate and to civilize). |
Adjectives, [7]
classes of, [36]-38
clauses, [98]
comparison of, [39]
Adverbs, [9]
classes of, [74]
clauses, [98]
comparison of, [75]
parsing of, [76]
Adverbial objective, [83]
Analysis, [2], [93], [94], [100], [101], [102], [103]
exercises for, [94], [95], [96], [97], [104], [105], [106], [107]
Apposition, [83]
Auxiliary verbs, [58]-67
Capitals, [108]
Case, [23]
Colon, [110]
Composition, [108]-155
Compound sentence, [98]
Complex sentence, [98]
Complement, [94]
Conditional verb-phrases, [66]
Conjugations of the verb, [53]
weak or new, [53]-56
Conjunctions, [12]
classes of, [78]
parsing of, [79]
Dash, [110]
Defective verbs, [58]
Different values of words, [14], [15]
Different kinds of sentences, [1]
Description, [139]
models of, [139]-147
exercises in, [141], [142], [148]
Emphatic verb-phrases, [63]
Exclamatory sentences, [1], [2]
Exclamation mark, [109]
Exposition, [149]
models of, [150]-154
exercises in, [154]-155
Figurative language, [115]
Gender, [18]
Gender-nouns, [18], [19], [20]
Hyphen, [110]
Imperative mode, [46]
Indicative mode, [46]
Interjections, [13]
parsing of, [80]
Interrogation mark, [109]
Irregularities of conjugation, [54], [55]
Letters, models, [121]-127
Letter-writing, [119]-120
exercises in, [128]
Mode, [46]
Narration, [128]
models of, [129]-138
exercises in, [130]-131, [134]-135, [138]
Nominatives, different kinds of, [25]
Nouns, [4]-5
classes of, [16]-18
clauses, [97]
parsing of, [26]-27
predicate, [83]
Number, [20]-21
Object, [23]
direct, [26]
indirect, [26]
retained, [83]
Objective predicate, [84]
Obligative verb-phrases, [66]
Order of words, [89]
Paragraph, [113]
principles of, [113]
Parts of speech, [4]-14
Participles, [49]-50
Parenthesis, [110]
Period, [109]
Person, [28]
Potential verb-phrases, [66]
Predicate, [2]
complete, [44]
incomplete, [44]
parsing of, [77]
Progressive verb-phrases, [72]
Pronouns, [5]-6
classes of, [27]-34
Prose, varieties of, [119]
Punctuation, [109]
Quotation marks, [110]
Relations of the noun, [82]-84
“ “ pronoun, [84]-85
“ “ adjective, [86]
“ “ verb, [87]
“ “ adverb, [88]
Representative subject, [94]
Semicolon, [110]
Sentences, [1]
simple, [93]-96
compound, [102]-107
complex, [101]-107
loose, [112]
balanced, [112]
periodic, [112]
short and long, [112]
emphatic places of, [113]
Style, [116]-117
Subjunctive mode, [46]
Syntax, [82]-89
Use of words, [111]
Verbs, [8]-9
classes of, [4]-43
tense of, [50]-52
voice of, [44]-45
mode of, [46]-47
person of, [52]
number of, [52]
conjugation of, [53]-58
of complete predication, [43]
of incomplete predication, [44]
parsing of, [73]-74
Verbal nouns, [18]
Punctuation has been corrected without note. Other errors have been corrected as noted below.
Page 30, Added [Third Person.] to bottom of first column of table.
Page 159, abverb, 88 ==> [adverb], 88