Exercise:
- We boarded the train, after having bought our tickets and checked our baggage.
- War brings famine, death, disease after it.
- They have broken up our homes, enslaved our children, and stolen our property.
- In the old story, the drunken man, carried into the duke's palace, sees himself surrounded with luxury, and imagines himself a true prince, after waking up.
- The becalmed mariners were famished, hungry.
[The Balanced Sentence]
45. Two ideas similar or opposite in thought gain in emphasis when set off, one against the other, in similar constructions.
- Weak and straggling: This paper, like many others, has many bad features, but in some ways it is very good. The news articles are far better than the editorials, which are feeble.
- Balanced structure: This paper is in some respects good; in other respects very poor. The news articles are impressive, the editorials are feeble.
- Weak and complicated: From the East a man who lives in the West can learn a great deal, and an Easterner ought to be able to understand the West.
- Balanced: A Westerner can learn much from the East, and an Easterner needs to understand the West.
- Weak: Both Mill and Macaulay influenced the younger writers. Mill taught some of them to reason, but many more of them learned from Macaulay only a superficial eloquence.
- Balanced: Both Mill and Macaulay influenced the younger writers. If Mill taught some of them to reason, Macaulay tempted many more of them to declaim.
[Note.]—Although excessive use of balance is artificial, occasional use of it is powerful. It can give to writing either dignity (as in an oration) or point (as in an epigram). Observe how many proverbs are in balanced structure. "Seeing is believing.—Nothing venture, nothing have.—For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.—You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.—An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Note the effective use of balance in Emerson's Essays, particularly in Compensation; and in the Old Testament, particularly in Psalms and Proverbs.
Exercise:
- Machinery is of course labor-saving, but countless men are thrown out of work.
- There is a difference between success in business and in acquiring culture.
- I attend concerts for the pleasure of it, and to get an understanding of music.
- The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet; but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterward, caught in the thicket, he was destroyed by his horns.
- We do not see the stars at evening, sometimes because there are clouds intervening, but oftener because there are glimmerings of light; thus many truths escape us from the obscurity we stand in, and many more from the state of mind which induces us to sit down satisfied with our imaginations and of our knowledge unsuspicious. [This sentence is correctly balanced, except at the end.]
[The Weak Effect of the Passive Voice]
46. Use the active voice unless there is a reason for doing otherwise. The passive voice is, as the name implies, not emphatic.