1. Choosing a Subject. Select an incident that has come within the circle of your own observation; that has never, as far as you know, been described in print; and that is sufficiently unique to present a good contrast to the usual course of events.
  2. Collecting Material. Get as many concrete details as possible. Generalities never glitter. They are useful only to cure insomnia.
  3. Arranging Material. Look out for the “Four W’s.” Make a framework that is definite. It should be determined, in the last analysis, not by the model but by the material.
  4. Oral Composition. Rehearse your article to your mother or to any other person whom you can induce to listen.
  5. Written Composition. “Festinâ lente.” “Hasten slowly.” When a French student takes his college entrance examinations, he is plucked if he misspells one word, misplaces one capital letter, or makes a single mistake in punctuation. Lord Bacon somewhere says: “Let us proceed slowly that we may sooner make an end.” Sheridan wrote:
  6. “You write with ease to show your breeding,
    But easy writing’s curst hard reading.”
  7. Care in No. 5 will eliminate No. 6.
  8. Revision and rewriting.

“You write with ease to show your breeding,
But easy writing’s curst hard reading.”

VI. Suggested Reading

Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

VII. Memorize

MUSIC

Let me go where’er I will,
I hear a sky-born music still:
It sounds from all things old,
It sounds from all things young,
From all that’s fair, from all that’s foul,
Peals out a cheerful song.

It is not only in the rose,
It is not only in the bird,
Not only where the rainbow glows,
Nor in the song of woman heard,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There alway, alway something sings.

’Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cup of budding flowers,
Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

To Teachers. At this point a review of Chapter XII, “Vade Mecum, or Catechism,” of Practical English Composition, Book I, will be found an invaluable exercise.
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CHAPTER VIII
THRILLERS

“’Tis strange, but true; for truth is always strange,
Stranger than fiction.”

Byron.