The danger to be avoided in endeavoring to secure effective massing of compositions is that of artificiality. This is especially obvious in the construction of sentences. In an uninflected language, like English, wherein the relative places of words are necessarily fixed more or less absolutely, it is not easy to re-order the arrangement without giving to the style an appearance of artifice. Dexterously to overcome this difficulty is one of the things which the student has to learn, and perhaps more upon the success with which he is able to do so than upon any other single thing will depend the effectiveness of what he writes.
The third principle of structure, Coherence, is one of which the lack is easily perceptible, but the securing of which is often difficult. The rule is that words closely related by their share in the thought to be conveyed shall be kept together,—and so stated is simple enough. No one, however, is likely to have written even a page upon any subject at all intricate without having to pause to rearrange the clauses of some involved sentence or of some confused paragraph. A great hindrance in the struggle for Coherence, it should be added, is a want of clear perception of what one wishes to say. The position of words is often determined by the choice of shades of expression which are extremely delicate, and unless the writer has an accurate and acute perception of these he cannot be sure of the order of his words and clauses.
It is easy enough to see how the phrases are misplaced in the stock examples of incoherence which are given in the books of rhetoric. Any novice could improve a sentence of this sort:—
He left off his old coat to marry a lady with a large Roman nose which had been worn continuously for ten years.
It takes only a little thought to see the error in the phrase:—
The crowd turns, departs, disintegrates;
where it is evident that the connection is between “turns” and “disintegrates,” and that the crowd departs after it has broken up. Not less obvious, when attention is called to it, is the fault here:—
Lothair was unaffectedly gratified at not only receiving his friends at his own castle, but under these circumstances of intimacy.[2]
It is not hard to see the difference of meaning between these two sentences:—