EXERCISES

  1. Select the words and phrases in the selection from Pulvis et Umbra which immediately help to accomplish the controlling purpose of the essay.
  2. From what grade in the intellectual and social world does Stevenson select his examples in the paragraph beginning: If the first view of this creature, etc.? Why? From what grade would you select examples for a similar paragraph if you intended the creation of despair as your controlling purpose? What common qualities are found in all Stevenson's examples through the selection? Why does he strive for this quality?
  3. Make an outline of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee," using the material which now appears, but placing the accent of the essay upon the difficulty of obtaining the honey, instead of upon the pleasures of the hunt, as it is now placed—in other words, outline the essay with change of controlling purpose.
  4. Write the first paragraph of the essay, and the last one, as you would wish them to appear if your intention were to make difficulty rather than joy the controlling purpose.
    1. Make an outline for "Solemn-Looking Blokes" with the controlling purpose of bringing out the romantic nature of the presence of American troops in England.
    2. Make an outline such as would suit the expression of an American who had been living in England since the declaration of war in 1914 and had been taunted with the apathy of the United States government, and now was supremely proud to see United States troops in England.
  6. Write a final paragraph of "Solemn-Looking Blokes" to express any of the following controlling purposes:
    1. Joy at the union of the old and the new worlds in a common cause.
    2. Heartache at the awfulness of soldiers' sailing 3000 miles to die because an autocratic government precipitated war.
    3. The pride of an American resident in London over the physique of the United States soldiers.
    4. The astonishment of a London school-boy who has just read in his history how the American colonies rebelled.
    5. The apprehension of a British Tory lest aristocracy be doomed when the troops of a great democracy appear so far away from home to battle against autocracy.
  7. Write outlines and themes on any of the following subjects to accomplish the different controlling purposes:
    1. The Scientific Reduction of Noise.
      1. To show the social duty of engineers.
      2. To show the wonder of man's analytical powers.
      3. To show the seriousness of the difficulties that must be faced.
    2. The Growing Appreciation of Good Architecture in America.
      1. To show the good educative work of our architects.
      2. To show the influence of European travel.
      3. To show the effect of the general rise in standards of education.
    3. The Popular Magazines.
      1. To show the general looseness of thinking.
      2. To show the senseless duplication of material and ideas.
      3. To show the opportunity for a host of authors.
    4. The Effects of the Big Mail-Order Houses.
      1. To show how they ruin the small country store.
      2. To show how they increase the opportunities of the small buyers.
      3. To show how they help give employment in the large cities.
    5. Is Religion Declining?
      1. To show the shifting of responsibility from creeds to deeds.
      2. To show the changed status of the church.
      3. To show the effect of increased education on religion.
    6. "Best Sellers."
      1. To show the relation of their immediate popularity to their final valuation.
      2. To indicate the qualities necessary to a "best seller."
      3. To show the effect upon the thinking of a nation that has many "best sellers."
    7. Results of the Farm Credit Legislation.
      1. To show the relief gained for the farmers.
      2. To show the effect on increased production.
      3. To show the fairer economic distribution.
    8. The Use of Concrete.
      1. To show the general economic value.
      2. To show the general lightening of toil that it may have caused.
      3. To show the variety of its service.
    9. The American Spirit.
      1. To show its idealism.
      2. To show its indebtedness to England, or France, or Germany.
      3. To show how it may help the world.
    10. Beethoven's Piano-forte Sonatas.
      1. To show them as the culmination of the sonata development.
      2. To show their romantic nature.
      3. To show the development of Beethoven's genius as he matured.
    11. Heredity in Plants.
      1. To show the similarity to heredity in man.
      2. To show how knowledge of heredity in plants may serve an economic purpose.
      3. To show the wonderful consistency of the laws of heredity in plants.
    12. Glacial Action in the Mississippi Valley.
      1. To show the economic result.
      2. To indicate the sweep of time consumed in the formation.
      3. To show the picturesque qualities in the gradual action.
  8. What is the controlling purpose in the following selection? Point out the influence upon the writer of knowing that Bostonians would read his words. Indicate how the selection would differ if the controlling object were to be bitter jealousy expressed by a resident in a newer, larger, envious city.
  9. Boston has a rather old-fashioned habit of speaking the English language. It came upon us rather suddenly one day as we journeyed out Huntington Avenue to the smart new gray and red opera house. The very coloring of the foyer of that house—soft and simple—bespoke the refinement of the Boston of to-day.
  10. In the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in every other one of the glib opera houses that are springing up mushroom-fashion across the land, our ears would have been assailed by "Librettos! Get your Librettos!" Not so in Boston. At the Boston Opera House the young woman back of the foyer stand calmly announced at clocklike intervals:
    1. What is the Primary Function of a Successful Novel?
    2. The Philosophy of Woman Suffrage.
    3. Lynch Law and Law Reform.
    4. The Conservatism of the American College Student.
    5. Intellectual Bravery.
    6. A Mediæval Free City.
    7. Mr. Roosevelt's Career as an Index of the American Character.
    8. Practical Efficiency as an Enemy to "Sweetness and Light."
    9. The Æsthetics of the Skyscraper.
    10. Possibilities for the Small Farmer in America.
    11. The Future of Civil Engineering.
    12. Housekeeping as an Exact Science.
    1. The Intelligence of the Average Voter.
      1. For a woman who eagerly desires woman suffrage.
      2. For a refined but narrow aristocrat, descendant of an old family.
      3. For an agitating member of the I.W.W.
    2. The Value of Courses in Literature for the Technical Student.
      1. For a hard-headed civil engineer.
      2. For a white-haired, kindly old professor of Greek, who resents the intrusion of science and labor.
      3. For a mother who wants her son to "get everything good from his technical course."
    3. The Delights of Fishing.
      1. For a woman who cannot understand why her husband wants to be always going on silly fishing trips.
      2. For a group of city men who are devotees of the sport.
      3. For a small boy who hopes some day to go with "Dad" on his trips.
    4. The Value of the Civic Center.
      1. For a man who resents the extra taxation that would be necessary to make one in his city.
      2. For a prominent, public-spirited architect.
      3. For a young woman graduate from college who eagerly desires to "do something" for her city.
    5. The Spirit of the "Middle West," the "Old South" or any other section of the country.
      1. For a proud resident.
      2. For a sniffy resident of another section.
      3. For a person who has never thought of such a thing.
  12. "Translations. Translations."
  13. And the head usher, whom the older Bostonians grasped by the hand and seemed to regard as a long-lost friend, did not sip out, "Checks, please."
  14. "Locations," he requested, as he condescended to the hand-grasps of the socially elect.
  15. "The nearer door for those stepping out," announces the guard upon the elevated train, and as for the surface and trolley-cars, those wonderful green perambulators laden down with more signs than nine ordinary trolley-cars would carry at one time, they do not speak of the newest type in Boston as "Pay-as-you-enter-cars," after the fashion of less cultured communities. In the Hub they are known as Prepayment cars—its precision is unrelenting.[10]
  16. What is the controlling purpose in the following selection from Mr. John Masefield's volume of Gallipoli? Analyze this controlling purpose as to the subject itself, the author's personal reaction, and the intended readers—largely perhaps, the American people.
  17. Let the reader imagine himself to be facing three miles of any very rough broken sloping ground known to him, ground for the most part gorse-thyme-and-scrub-covered, being poor soil, but in some places beautiful with flowers (especially a "spiked yellow flower with a whitish leaf") and on others green from cultivation. Let him say to himself that he and an army of his friends are about to advance up the slope towards the top, and that as they will be advancing in a line, along the whole length of the three miles, he will only see the advance of those comparatively near to him, since folds or dips in the ground will hide the others. Let him, before he advances, look earnestly along the line of the hill, as it shows up clear, in blazing sunlight only a mile from him, to see his tactical objective, one little clump of pines, three hundred yards away, across what seem to be fields. Let him see in the whole length of the hill no single human being, nothing but scrub, earth, a few scattered buildings, of the Levantine type (dirty white with roofs of dirty red) and some patches of dark Scotch pine, growing as the pine loves, on bleak crests. Let him imagine himself to be more weary than he has ever been in his life before, and dirtier than he has ever believed it possible to be, and parched with thirst, nervous, wild-eyed and rather lousy. Let him think that he has not slept for more than a few minutes together for eleven days and nights, and that in all his waking hours he has been fighting for his life, often hand to hand in the dark with a fierce enemy, and that after each fight he has had to dig himself a hole in the ground, often with his hands, and then walk three or four roadless miles to bring up heavy boxes under fire. Let him think, too, that in all those eleven days he has never for an instant been out of the thunder of cannon, that waking or sleeping their devastating crash has been blasting the air across within a mile or two, and this from an artillery so terrible that each discharge beats as it were a wedge of shock between the skull-bone and the brain. Let him think too that never, for an instant, in all that time, has he been free or even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden and savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, already too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to be done, will be gone the same way, and that he himself may reckon that he has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved his last, and that in a few minutes more may be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still alive, unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain, in a place where none will find him, or be able to help him, a place where he will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing is left of him but a few rags and a few remnants and a little identification-disc flapping on his bones in the wind. Then let him hear the intermittent crash and rattle of the fire augment suddenly and awfully in a roaring, blasting roll, unspeakable and unthinkable, while the air above, that has long been whining and whistling, becomes filled with the scream of shells passing like great cats of death in the air; let him see the slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into the white, yellow, and black smokes of great explosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of white puffs marking the hill in streaks where the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking in his head, let him pull himself together with his friends, and clamber up out of the trench, to go forward against an invisible enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting him.[11]
  18. What light does the following paragraph which appears at the beginning of the book throw upon the controlling purpose?
  19. Later, when there was leisure, I began to consider the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human effort, which came, more than once, very near to triumph, achieved the impossible many times, and failed, in the end, as many great deeds of arms have failed, from something which had nothing to do with arms nor with the men who bore them. That the effort failed is not against it; much that is most splendid in military history failed, many great things and noble men have failed. To myself, this failure is the second grand event of the war; the first was Belgium's answer to the German ultimatum.[12]
  20. Explain what would be your controlling purpose in a theme on any of the following subjects, and how you would arrange your material to accomplish this purpose.
  21. Indicate what your controlling purpose would be in writing of the following subjects, if you chose your purpose from the subject-matter alone. Then show how the purpose might be affected by the different sets of readers as they are indicated in the subheadings.

[CHAPTER III]
DEFINITION

Definition is the process of explaining a subject by setting bounds to it, enclosing it within its limits, showing its extent. The ocean is properly defined by the shore; a continent or island is defined by its coastline: shores set limits to the ocean; coastlines bound the island or continent. So, when a child asks, "What is Switzerland?" you show on the map the pink or yellow or green space that is included within certain definite boundaries. These boundaries set a limit to the extent of that country; in other words, they define it. As soon as a traveler steps beyond the limit of that country, he is at once in another realm, has become identified with a quite different set of conditions and circumstances—he is, in fact, in a country that has a different definition from that of Switzerland. In the same way, when some one asks what truth is, or nickel steel, or a grand piano, or humanism, or art, or rotation of crops, or a rocking chair, or the forward pass, you attempt, in your reply, to set bounds to the thing in question, to restrict it, to fence it off, to state the line beyond which if it goes it ceases to be one thing and becomes another. It is by no means always an easy task to find this line. Many a child has come to grief in his attempts to keep safely within the limits of truth and yet be close up to the realm of desirable falsehood. Likewise many witnesses in court have been beguiled or browbeaten into crossing the line without knowing that they were getting into the country of the enemy. But though the quest for the line may be difficult, a true definition must set off the thing being defined from other things, must set bounds to it, enclose it within its limits, show its extent.