WRITING AND REWRITING
Chapter I
WHY LEARN TO WRITE
The four main reasons for learning to write are:
1. Writing is one of the best ways to make other persons think or feel as you do.
2. Every educated person is judged frequently and severely by the correctness and skill displayed in his writing.
3. The more you learn about writing the more you will enjoy reading.
4. Good writing gives pleasure, not only to the reader but also to the writer.
1. The ability to write clearly and convincingly will be of great help to you after you leave college. Whatever your field of activity, your ultimate success will depend in some degree on your ability to make other persons think or feel as you do. Writing is one of the best ways to attain this end.
Many professional men and women find that success depends not only on their knowledge, but even more on the skill and clearness with which they can present their knowledge. Lawyers write briefs and arguments. Judges write opinions. Clergymen write sermons. Teachers, doctors, and engineers get their new ideas before members of their professions by writing papers for publications of various kinds. The results of their experiments and researches are almost invariably presented to their colleagues in writing.
To attain eminence in one of the learned professions it is necessary for a man’s colleagues to think highly of his professional knowledge and attainments. It is not always possible for the leaders in your profession to know you personally, but if you can write they soon know what manner of man you are. The scholarly articles that a young professional man gets printed correspond to the home runs that are knocked by a bush league baseball player, but there is this difference. The sand lot baseball player may have made his impressive looking records against sand lot pitching and may fail dismally when he faces better opposition, but if a young professional man has the mental ability and the skill to produce contributions to knowledge in his field it makes no difference where he lives or under what conditions he has done his work. As he moves up to his big league he finds conditions more and more favorable for his continued growth and development.
College graduates everywhere are being expected more and more to assume positions of leadership in all matters that pertain to community betterment. Sometimes they are candidates for office; more often they are directors of the chamber of commerce of their city, or of some similar civic enterprise. Written statements, annual reports, appeals for public support for a worthy cause, letters to newspapers, circulars, and bulletins are almost the only way a public spirited citizen can get his ideas before the other members of the community. If he can write clearly and convincingly he gets things done that would not be done if he expressed himself haltingly and incoherently when he took pen in hand.
Up-to-date farmers and business men use printed and typewritten matter to get new business, to hold and increase old business, to adjust complaints, and to collect money. Every salesman has to write reports to his firm. Formal bids for all kinds of business are submitted in writing. Most busy executives prefer to receive the ideas of their subordinates in writing, and the subordinate who submits the largest number of good ideas in this way is the one who is likely to be promoted most rapidly. Many executives have to depend on letters and bulletins in directing large numbers of subordinates or in directing subordinates who cannot frequently be brought together. If you want to be paid for what you know rather than for what you do, learn to write.
Other things being anywhere nearly equal the man who can write gets ahead fastest in the business, political, or professional world. The man with a new idea—whether it is a new type of automobile engine or a plan for insuring hogs—can make a success of it far more quickly if he can write clearly and convincingly. The next time you see a copy of Who’s Who in America note the list of publications that follows the name of the successful man. The ability to write has dollar and cents value whether or not you ever wish to sell any of your manuscripts. You must be able to write to get to the top.
2. Why do you suppose that almost every help wanted advertisement that offers a salary of more than $1200 or $1500 a year contains the phrase, “Apply by letter only”? The answer is that from one hundred letters it is easy to select the half dozen or so that come from persons qualified for a position rather than for a job. Applicants who write poor letters are never considered for good positions.
The activities of the social world continually call for letters—letters of invitation, of acceptance or declination, letters to a hostess thanking her for her hospitality, letters of congratulation and of condolence. Any new person to whom you write will judge what sort of man or woman you are from your first letter. Uneducated persons may have well furnished houses in the exclusive residential districts of the city, and they may wear thousand-dollar fur coats, but their written words betray the fact that they are not accustomed to associating with educated persons.
Students who can write get better grades in college courses than do students who cannot express themselves with pen, pencil, or typewriter. Written reports, term papers, and examinations all call for ability to write. It is essential not only to have the information that should be included in such compositions but also to be able to express your knowledge so that the instructor involved will know that you know.
3. The better you write the more you will enjoy reading. You can actually know personally only a few persons, and they will for the most part be your neighbors and business associates. A love for good reading is the best friend you can have. Reading will make you intimate with all the great men and women who are now alive or who have ever lived. These great ones of earth—the clever, the entertaining, the thoughtful, the lovable, the brilliant, the courageous—have set down in books a permanent record of what they observed, thought, and dreamed. To get the fullest flavor and greatest benefit from the words they have put on paper you need to be something of a writer yourself. The writer best appreciates the good writing of others, just as the amateur musician gets more pleasure from a symphony concert than does the average person in the audience. The football player sees fine points in a football game that are lost on the spectator who never tried to box a tackle or elude an end. The girl who makes her own clothes can see distinctions in gowns that all look alike to her brother. It takes the craftsman in any field of endeavor to appreciate the work of a master.
4. Your mother has, at the bottom of a trunk or bureau drawer, a bundle of letters that your father wrote to her when they were young. Every little while she reads them all again. She also keeps the letters he writes her now when he is away from home. Your letters to your mother will not be destroyed either. The better you write, the more pleasure you will give to the persons you love. Letters of commendation, congratulation, or condolence when done well are treasured for years, and are a never failing source of pleasure to those who receive them. It is worth something to give pleasure of this sort.
But the greatest pleasure of all in writing is the pleasure that comes to you yourself. To get real enjoyment from writing you should write on a subject you know thoroughly or on one that interests you—preferably both. Write without reserve; call things by their right names. Use care in selecting the exact word to express your meaning. Write clearly, concisely, and vividly. Be definite and particular rather than indefinite and general. Use incidents freely to illustrate your points. Be forceful and picturesque. Write so that anyone who knows you could pick your written creation out of a thousand written by others on the same subject.
Write something you are proud of and you will get more pleasure from it than from almost anything else you ever did. Even though you may not yet have realized it, writing is a great deal more fun than going to the theater, dancing, or watching a football game. The greatest thrill in life comes from seeing one whom you love create something. The next greatest comes from creating something yourself. Create something in writing that truly represents you and you too will experience this joy.
Chapter II
HOW TO WRITE
The successive steps in writing are:
1. Have a subject that appeals to you, and write for an actual reader.
2. Gather all the material your subject demands.
3. Arrange your material in the most effective order.
4. Write as fast as you can.
5. Revise, recast, rewrite what you have written.
1. Write on a subject which interests you and one that you know something about. Good writing will not result merely from trying to satisfy an instructor. You can write well only if you have a compelling reason for writing; if you desire to convince, inform, or entertain a definite reader.
Know the state of mind you want your reader to be in when he finishes reading your composition. Write for a definite reader such as a college freshman, a high school student, an automobile owner, a ten-year-old boy, a proprietor of a retail store in a town of from 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. It will often be helpful if, after you choose the general class to whom your writing is addressed, you select one individual you know and keep him constantly in mind while you write. Thus instead of writing for a ten-year-old boy write for your brother Robert.
Choose a subject that can be covered in the number of words at your disposal. If you are writing a four-hundred-word theme, “The American High School” is a poor subject. It would take a series of volumes to exhaust the possibilities in that title. Even eliminating a large portion of it by taking the topic “High School Newspapers,” “High School Debating,” “High School Dramatics,” or “High School Athletics,” helps but little. Narrowing any one of these subjects so that it applies only to your own high school still leaves you with more material than can well be put into a short theme. Good subjects for such themes are “The First Time I Faced an Audience,” “The Best Play I Ever Made,” “How I Felt When My Story Appeared in the School Paper,” and “The Most Exciting Play I Ever Saw in a Baseball Game.”
To take another example, “Cooking” is a subject broad enough for a Mrs. Ralston, a Mrs. Lincoln, or a Miss Farmer. “Making Desserts” is too comprehensive for any but an exhaustive treatise. “Making Ice Cream” requires at least a booklet. Good short theme subjects would be “How I Make My Favorite Sherbet,” “How to Make Chocolate Ice Cream without Cream,” or “How to Make Ice Cream Roll with a Frozen Whipped Cream Center.”
2. Reflect, read, ask questions, observe in order to gather material which will enable you to carry out your design. Gather, as applied to material for writing, implies a go-and-get-it attitude. Gathering material requires a physical as well as a mental search. Do not expect material to come to you; go after it. Talk with persons who know. Read what they have written. Good writing is most likely to result when the writer fuses his own experience and observation with the experience and observation of others. Gather all the material possible without trying to decide, while you are getting it, what is important and what is not. Keep your mind, your eyes, and your ears wide open. Get details and get plenty of them. Steep, saturate yourself in your subject.
3. After you have gathered the material, discard everything that will not help you to produce the effect you are trying for. Then if there are any gaps in your composition, gather more material to fill them up. Some writers get the best results by putting a plan on paper before starting to write; others let a plan take more or less definite shape in their minds, but do not try to set down any hard and fast outline. The reason for not making a hard and fast outline is that a curious thing often happens to any writer who has written much. He finds—on occasion—that his composition seems to write itself. The characters he thought he had created have minds of their own and refuse to let him treat them like puppets. His thoughts seem to be alive and to exist apart from him. They insist on expressing themselves in their own way. An experienced writer does some of his best work when he seems to be merely the medium through which ideas are seeking to translate themselves from whatever world it is they inhabit to this one. If, on the other hand, a writer is continually consulting a plan, his ideas and characters never take things into their own hands.
Write for someone to read. Put yourself in that reader’s place and see if your writing is producing the desired effect. Begin your composition with the details that will most effectively attract his attention and arouse his interest. Continue writing so that you will retain his attention and interest. Stop when you have said all you have to say.
4. Write rapidly and at white heat. If pertinent ideas keep coming to you forget about your plan. Get your inspiration on paper before it cools. If you finally find a system—or even a lack of one—that enables you to write fast and at the same time to feel that you are creating something, do not let anyone talk you into trying some other plan. Stick to your own.
5. Revise at leisure, but ruthlessly, in cold blood, and continue to revise, rearrange, and rewrite indefinitely until the finished product satisfies you.
Make the final draft absolutely correct. Avoid especially the common faults that denote the semi-illiterate man or woman. If you make errors that would not be made by a twelve-year-old child, your composition will get scant consideration from an intelligent reader. While revising, question everything, spelling, grammar, choice of words, punctuation; question the usefulness of each idea, and the arrangement of the parts of the completed composition.
Start writing soon enough to give yourself ample time for revision. Let the first draft get cold before you look at it again. If you wait several days after the first draft is finished you can approach your own writing as objectively as if it had been done by someone else. It will then be much easier to question every letter, every word, every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph, every idea, besides the whole composition and each of its parts.
Make everything in your composition justify itself. Whenever you are satisfied to do mediocre work the rest of the world is satisfied with the valuation you have set on yourself. Be your own severest critic. Show your own writing no mercy. Some of the world’s most successful writers of advertisements as well as of novels have rewritten their best work time and again before giving it to the public. What reads smoothly takes hours of toil to produce.
Many good instructors insist on receiving two copies of every composition from each student; one a rough, lead pencil draft, and the other the finished manuscript.
Chapter III
IDEAS FOR COMPOSITIONS
My first play, circus, funeral, visit to a dentist’s, dance, county fair, Fourth of July, airplane ride, sleigh ride, or meal in a sorority house.
Extracts from the real diary of a real freshman.
My favorite newspaper artist, cartoon, or comic strip.
Earning money while going to college or during the summer.
Write the chapter of your autobiography that will be headed “Early Years.”
My hobbies or aversions.
How I won a prize or competed at a county or state fair.
What is the well-dressed young man or woman wearing this season?
My favorite magazine.
My favorite recipe.
Write an account of a student mass meeting.
How does any organization to which you belong compare with rival organizations?
How does it feel to belong to a fraternity or how does it feel not to belong?
Write an article for your high school paper telling why your college is the best.
Write a letter home asking for money.
Write a history of your reading.
Describe some locality you know intimately such as your neighborhood or your home town.
Where I eat.
When I made my big mistake.
Taking a psychological intelligence test.
The secret of making good fudge.
How I spend my spare time.
Give directions for making something such as a radio receiving set, an apron out of an old shirt, or anything that you can make that most persons can not.
The joys of hunting, camping out, canoeing, going to the theater, dancing, sitting around and talking, or anything else that you enjoy doing.
How I learned to swim or how I taught someone to swim.
An embarrassing situation.
When the joke was on me.
My nicest compliment.
Freshman registration.
My favorite movie star.
What is the best outdoor sport?
My most hated instructor.
A railroad station at train time.
Men or women I have worked for.
Running a high school paper, athletic team, or annual.
What will you do when you leave college?
An exciting moment.
What is one important thing that ought to be changed in the way your college is conducted?
If you were the principal of the high school from which you were graduated, what changes would you make?
How does it feel to be red-headed, left-handed, bald, or fat?
Why I am or am not a church member?
Describe how to give a dinner party for eight persons.
Are prices here higher than they are at home?
The most interesting person I know.
The perfect roommate.
The happiest person I know.
My idea of a good time.
Go to church Sunday and write an account of the sermon.
Write an account of the next athletic contest, banquet, or public lecture you attend.
Write an account of an interesting recitation.
One of your instructors this week will spend part of the class time discussing a problem of college, city, state, nation, or world interest. Write an account of what he says.
What do you think of dogs, cats, or rabbits for pets?
A day’s fishing.
Why should anyone study Latin, Greek, mathematics, or any subject you like or dislike?
What is the matter with the college paper?
What do you think of the country, the city, or the small town as a place in which to live?
How should a living room be furnished?
How could you decrease your expenses one-fourth?
Draw a rough floor plan of the sort of house in which you would like to live and explain its advantages.
How to distinguish fifteen kinds of trees, birds, or automobiles.
What is your pet extravagance or economy?
Tell how to dress on $100, on $200, and on $500 a year.
An automobile camping trip.
A backyard garden.
A Sunday school picnic.
Who are the half dozen greatest men or women who have ever lived?
How should a kitchen be laid out?
What are the tests of a good national fraternity?
How could more students be interested in debating?
Write an account of an interesting college tradition for your high school paper.
If you were Santa Claus, what would you give your home city for Christmas?
Pick a football team from the heroes of fiction or of history.
Write a good sized advertisement that could be sold to some merchant who does not advertise in one of the college publications.
What are the ten leading colleges in the country?
What is an educated man?
My alarm clock.
Write a plea to induce young men and women to stay on the farm or in the community where they were reared.
Should the higher grade go to the student who does well in his daily work or to the student who does well in an examination?
A woman’s place is in the home.
How much money will it take to satisfy you five or ten years after graduation?
Do college athletes get too much publicity?
If you could arrange it, would you have your brother or sister earn some, all, or none of his or her expenses while going through college?
Every high school graduate should earn his own living for at least one year before he is allowed to enter college.
Describe the conditions under which your father and mother started housekeeping.
Recommend ten books for a classmate who has never been accustomed to read for pleasure.
What do college students read in the newspapers?
Rules of etiquette undergraduates ought to follow.
If you were a vocational adviser, what vocations would you advise the ten classmates you know best to follow?
If you could spend the summer in travel, where would you go?
What advice would you give to a boy or a girl who is going to enter your college next fall?
Being afraid.
A gloomy holiday.
How to furnish and decorate a north room.
What are the advantages of a small or of a large college?
Buying a new car.
What should be considered in criticizing an amateur dramatic performance or a speech?
What is the leading honor an undergraduate can win at your college?
How many things will you buy before you buy a car?
If you had an assured income for the rest of your life, how would you spend your time?
Should a washing machine be in every home?
What is a gentleman?
What are the tests of a good town?
Describe some eccentric person you know.
Describe the appearance of a friend so well that a stranger could pick him out of a crowd.
Write a short story based on a movie.
Write a movie based on a short story.
How do the fraternity chapters at your college compare with one another?
Write a letter to your mother to reach her on Mother’s Day.
Write a letter to your father inviting him to attend Homecoming.
My mother’s flower garden.
Our bird shelf.
How to keep cool in hot weather.
Pick an “all” team from the football players you have seen this fall.
Sounds that keep me awake at night.
Taking care of the baby.
The tribulations of a landlady.
Describe a scale by which students could rate their professors.
What are the advantages of making your own clothes?
Write in play form an account of a family quarrel or an account of what happens between the halves of a close football or basketball game.
In praise of idleness.
Take three small boys to a soda fountain and have an ice cream eating contest.
Children should be seen and not heard.
Tell why your father, mother, brother, or sister ought to be chosen mayor, superintendent of schools, cashier of the bank, or anything else.
How would it be possible for you to be elected president of your class, win a letter in athletics, make Phi Beta Kappa, run 100 miles in 48 hours total time, earn $2,000 within the next year, or something else that now looks improbable?
What would happen if you could see a copy of a newspaper that would not be printed for another month?
What would you say if called on to speak at a college mass meeting?
Tipping ought to be abolished.
What will ten of your most intimate friends be doing ten years from now?
Chapter IV
THE WHOLE COMPOSITION
“Whole composition” is the name given to a completed piece of writing.