An author's organization of subject-matter is frequently poor. But whether it be poor or good, some hard work on the part of the student is necessary before the proper grouping of ideas can take place in his own mind. The danger is that there will be practically no arrangement of his thoughts, as is well illustrated in the following letter from an eight-year-old boy.
DEAR UNCLE CHARLIE:
Will you please buy some of my 24 package of my Bluine, if you will please buy one package it will help me a lot. One Saturday we played ball against the east side and beat twelve to 1. I will get a baseball suit if I can sell 24 packages of Bluine. We had quite a blizzard here to-day. For one package it costs ten cents. When we played ball against the east side we only had 6 boys and they had twelve. We have a base ball team, and I am Captain, so you see I need a suit. Gretchen and Mother are playing backgammon with one dice. I catch sometimes when our real catcher is not there. When he is there I play first Base. Your loving nephew, JAMES.
There is one prominent idea in this letter, touching the sale of Bluine, with reasons; and parts of two others, concerning the weather and the occupation of mother and sister. The first is the most fully treated; but, as might be expected from an eight-year-old child, no one idea is supported by sufficient detail to round it out and make it strong.
In avoiding such defects two things are necessary: First, the student must decide what points he desires to make. They should be so definitely conceived that they can be easily distinguished from one another and can even be counted. Then, in the second place, all the details that bear upon a central idea should be collected and presented together in sequence under the point concerned. By this massing of all supporting statements under their proper heads, overlapping or duplicating is avoided, and clearness is gained. Also, force is secured by the cumulative effect of intimately related facts, just as it is secured by the concerted attack by the divisions of an army.
Even the better students often stop with finding the main thoughts alone. And the temptation to do no more is strong, since teachers seldom require a forceful presentation of ideas in recitation; they are thankful to get a halting statement of the principal facts. But the student should remember that he is studying for his own good, not merely to keep teachers contented; and he should not deceive himself by his own fluency of speech. He should form the habit of often asking himself, "What is my point?" also, "What facts have I offered for its support, and have I massed them all as I should?" He must thus form the habit of arranging his ideas into points if he wishes to be pointed.
Precautions against inaccuracy in the grouping of facts into points.
The dangers of inaccuracy in this kind of study are numerous. First the individual statements must be carefully interpreted. A certain very intelligent ten-year-old girl studying arithmetic read the problem, "What is the interest on $500 at six per cent for one year?" Then, probably under the influence of some preceding problem, she found four per cent of the principal, and added the amount to the principal for her answer, thus showing two mistakes in reading. Perhaps half of the mistakes that children make in the solution of problems is due to such careless reading. A certain fifth-year class in history read a very short paragraph about the three ships that were secured for Columbus's first voyage, the paragraph ending with the statement, "On board the three [ships] were exactly ninety men." When they were asked later how many men accompanied Columbus the common answer was, "Two hundred and seventy, since there were ninety men on each ship."
These mistakes are typical of those that are common, even among adults, as in the reading of examination questions, for instance. I have more than once asked graduate students in a university to state the one principal thought obtained from the extended study of an article on education, and have received a paper with a threefold answer, (a), (b), (c). Such responses are due to extreme carelessness in reading the questions asked, as well as to a desire to be obliging and allow an instructor some freedom of choice. Thus the meaning of the individual statements that constitute the material out of which larger truths are derived, must be carefully watched if the final interpretation of an author's thought is to be accurate.
The tendency toward error is greater still when it comes to finding the central thought for a portion of text. This was once amusingly illustrated by a class composed only of the principals and high-school teachers in a county institute, some seventy-five persons in all. The text under discussion was the first chapter of Professor James's well- known book, Talks to Teachers. The title of the chapter is "Psychology and the Teaching Art"; and Professor James, fearing that teachers might be expecting too much from his field, sets to work to discourage the idea that psychology can be a panacea for all of a teacher's ills. The larger portion of the twelve pages is devoted to this object, although the explicit statement is made, on the third page, that "psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help." But so little space is given to this declaration that, in spite of its definiteness and positive character, the class as a whole reached the conclusion that he was advising teachers not to study psychology at all. In other words, they had failed to balance up one part of the chapter against the other; and their failure left them in the ridiculous position of assuming that an author of a book for teachers was dissuading teachers from reading his book.