WHAT TO DO, AND HOW TO DO IT.
Study carefully the lessons contained in the following pages. They will be of great benefit, as they show you what to do and how to do it.
These lessons are quite simple at first, and are followed by others that are more advanced. All of them have been carefully prepared for the purpose of furnishing just such helps as you need. You can study them by yourself; if you can obtain the assistance of a competent teacher, so much the better. I predict that you will be surprised at the rapid progress you are making. Perhaps you will become fascinated with your study; at least, it is to be hoped you will, and become enthusiastic in your noble work.
Be content to take one step at a time. Do not get the mistaken impression that you will be able to write a good composition before you have learned how to do it. Many persons are too eager to achieve success immediately, without patient and earnest endeavor to overcome all difficulties.
Choose a subject for your composition that is adapted to your capacity. You cannot write on a subject that you know nothing about. Having selected your theme, think upon it, and, if possible, read what others have written about it, not for the purpose of stealing their thoughts, but to stimulate your own, and store your mind with information. Then you will be able to express in writing what you know.
The Treatment of the Subject.
The principal reason why many persons make such hard work of the art of composition is that they have so few thoughts, and consequently so little to say, upon the subjects they endeavor to treat. The same rule must be followed in writing a composition as in building a house—you must first get your materials.
I said something about stealing the thoughts of others, but must qualify this by saying that while you are learning to write, you are quite at liberty in your practice to make use of the thoughts of others, writing them from memory after you have read a page or a paragraph from some standard author. It is better that you should remember only a part of the language employed by the writer whose thoughts you are reproducing, using as far as possible words of your own, yet in each instance wherein you remember his language you need not hesitate to use it. Such an exercise is a valuable aid to all who wish to perfect themselves in the delightful art of composition.
Take any writer of good English—J. G. Holland, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Irving, Cooper, or the articles in our best magazines—and read half a page twice or thrice; close the book, and write, in your own words, what you have read; borrowing, nevertheless, from the author so much as you can remember. Compare what you have written with the original, sentence by sentence, and word by word, and observe how far you have fallen short of the skilful author.
A Frequent Change of Authors.
You will thus not only find out your own faults, but you will discover where they lie, and how they may be mended. Repeat the lesson with the same passages twice or thrice, if your memory is not filled with the words of the author, and observe, at each trial, the progress you have made, not merely by comparison with the original, but by comparison with the previous exercises.
Do this day after day, changing your author for the purpose of varying the style, and continue to do so long after you have passed on to the second and more advanced stages of your training. Preserve all your exercises, and occasionally compare the latest with the earliest, and so ascertain what progress you have made.
Give especial attention to the words, which, to my mind, are of greater importance than the sentences. Take your nouns first, and compare them with the nouns used by your author. You will probably find your words to be very much bigger than his, more sounding, more far-fetched, more classical, or more poetical. All young writers and speakers fancy that they cannot sufficiently revel in fine words. Comparison with the great masters of English will rebuke this pomposity of inexperience, and chasten and improve your style.
You will discover, to your surprise, that our best writers eschew big words and do not aim to dazzle their readers with fine words. Where there is a choice, they prefer the pure, plain, simple English noun—the name by which the thing is known to everybody, and which, therefore, is instantly understood by all readers. These great authors call a spade “a spade;” only small scribblers term it “an implement of husbandry.” If there is a choice of names, good writers prefer the one best known, while an inexperienced writer is apt to select the most uncommon.
The example of the masters of the English tongue should teach you that commonness (if I may be allowed to coin a word to express that for which I can find no precise equivalent) and vulgarity are not the same in substance. Vulgarity is shown in assumption and affectation of language quite as much as in dress and manners, and it is never vulgar to be natural. Your object is to be understood. To be successful, you must write and talk in a language that everybody can understand; and such is the natural vigor, picturesqueness and music of our tongue, that you could not possess yourself of a more powerful or effective instrument for expression.
Right Choice of Words.
It is well for you to be assured that while, by this choice of plain English for the embodying of your thoughts, you secure the ears of ordinary people, you will at the same time please the most highly educated and refined. The words that have won the applause of a political meeting are equally successful in securing a hearing in Congress, provided that the thoughts expressed and the manner of their expression be adapted to the changed audience.
Then for the sentences. Look closely at their construction, comparing it with that of your author; I mean, note how you have put your words together. The placing of words is next in importance to the choice of them. The best writers preserve the natural order of thought. They sedulously shun obscurities and perplexities. They avoid long and involved sentences. Their rule is, that one sentence should express one thought, and they will not venture on the introduction of two or three thoughts, if they can help it.
Obscure Sentences.
Undoubtedly this is extremely difficult—sometimes impossible. If you want to qualify an assertion, you must do so on the instant; but the rule should never be forgotten, that a long and involved sentence is to be avoided, wherever it is practicable to do so.
Another lesson you will doubtless learn from the comparison of your composition with that of your model author. You will see a wonderful number of adjectives in your own writing, and very few in his. It is the besetting sin of young writers to indulge in adjectives, and precisely as a man gains experience do his adjectives diminish in number. It seems to be supposed by all unpracticed scribblers that the multiplication of epithets gives force. The nouns are never left to speak for themselves.
It is curious to take up any newspaper and read the paragraphs of news, to open the books of nine-tenths of our authors of the third and downward ranks. You will rarely see a noun standing alone, without one or more adjectives prefixed. Be assured that this is a mistake. An adjective should never be used unless it is essential to correct description. As a general rule adjectives add little strength to the noun they are set to prop, and a multiplication of them is always enfeebling. The vast majority of nouns convey to the mind a much more accurate picture of the thing they signify than you can possibly paint by attaching epithets to them.
Yet do not push to the extreme what has just been said. Adjectives are a very important part of language, and we could not well do without them. You do not need to say a “flowing river;” every river flows, but you might wish to say a “swollen river,” and you could not convey the idea you desire to express without using the adjective “swollen.” What I wish to caution you against is the needless multiplication of adjectives, which only serve to overload and weaken the expression of your thought.
Express Your Own Ideas.
When you have repeated your lesson many times, and find that you can write with some approach to the purity of your author, you should attempt an original composition. In the beginning it would be prudent, perhaps, to borrow the ideas, but to put them into your own language. The difficulty of this consists in the tendency of the mind to mistake memory for invention, and thus, unconsciously to copy the language as well as the thoughts of the author.
The best way to avoid this is to translate poetry into prose; to take, for instance, a page of narrative in verse and relate the same story in plain prose; or to peruse a page of didactic poetry, and set down the argument in a plain, unpoetical fashion. This will make you familiar with the art of composition, only to be acquired by practice; and the advantage, at this early stage of your education in the arts of writing and speaking, of putting into proper language the thoughts of others rather than your own is, that you are better able to discover your faults. Your fatherly love for your own ideas is such that you are really incompetent to form a judgment of their worth, or of the correctness of the language in which they are embodied.
The critics witness this hallucination every day. Books continually come to them, written by men who are not mad, who probably are sufficiently sensible in the ordinary business of life, who see clearly enough the faults of other books, who would have laughed aloud over the same pages, if placed in their hands by another writer, but who, nevertheless, are utterly unable to recognize the absurdities of their own handiwork. The reader is surprised that any man of common intelligence could indite such a maze of nonsense where the right word is never to be found in its right place, and this with such utter unconsciousness of incapacity on the part of the author.
Write Exactly What You Mean.
Still more is he amazed that, even if a sensible man could so write, a sane man could read that composition in print, and not with shame throw it into the fire. But the explanation is, that the writer knew what he intended to say; his mind is full of that, and he reads from the manuscript or the type, not so much what is there set down, as what was already floating in his own mind. To criticise yourself you must, to some extent, forget yourself. This is impracticable to many persons, and, lest it may be so with you, I advise you to begin by putting the thoughts of others into your own language, before you attempt to give formal expression to your own thoughts.
You must habitually place your thoughts upon paper—first, that you may do so rapidly; and, secondly, that you may do so correctly. When you come to write your reflections, you will be surprised to find how loose and inaccurate the most vivid of them have been, what terrible flaws there are in your best arguments.
You are thus enabled to correct them, and to compare the matured sentence with the rude conception of it. You are thus trained to weigh your words and assure yourself that they precisely embody the idea you desire to convey. You can trace uncouthness in the sentences, and dislocations of thought, of which you had not been conscious before. It is far better to learn your lesson thus upon paper, which you can throw into the fire unknown to any human being, than to be taught it by readers who are not always very lenient critics and are quick to detect any faults that appear in your production.