Having accustomed yourself to express, in plain words, and in clear, precise and straightforward sentences, the ideas of others, you should proceed to express your own thoughts in the same fashion. You will now see more distinctly the advantage of having first studied composition by the process I have recommended, for you are in a condition to discover the deficiencies in the flow of your own ideas. You will be surprised to find, when you come to put them into words, how many of your thoughts were shapeless, hazy and dreamy, slipping from your grasp when you try to seize them, resolving themselves, like the witches in Macbeth,
Into the air: and what seemed corporal melted
As breath into the wind.
What You Should Read.
Thus, after you have learned how to write, you will need a good deal of education before you will learn what to write. I cannot much assist you in this part of the business. Two words convey the whole lesson—Read and think. What should you read? Everything. What think about? All subjects that present themselves. The writer and orator must be a man of very varied knowledge. Indeed, for all the purposes of practical life, you cannot know too much. No learning is quite useless. But a speaker, especially if an advocate, cannot anticipate the subjects on which he may be required to talk. Law is the least part of his discourse. For once that he is called upon to argue a point of law, he is compelled to treat matters of fact twenty times.
And the range of topics is very wide; it embraces science and art, history and philosophy; above all, the knowledge of human nature that teaches how the mind he addresses is to be convinced and persuaded, and how a willing ear is to be won to his discourse. No limited range of reading will suffice for so large a requirement. The elements of the sciences must be mastered; the foundations of philosophy must be learned; the principles of art must be acquired; the broad facts of history must be stamped upon the memory; poetry and fiction must not be slighted or neglected.
Our Great Writers.
You must cultivate frequent and intimate intercourse with the genius of all ages and of all countries, not merely as standards by which to measure your own progress, or as fountains from which you may draw unlimited ideas for your own use, but because they are peculiarly suggestive. This is the characteristic of genius, that, conveying one thought to the reader’s mind, it kindles in him many other thoughts. The value of this to speaker and writer will be obvious to you.
Never, therefore, permit a day to pass without reading more or less—if it be but a single page—from some one of our great writers. Besides the service I have described in the multiplication of your ideas, it will render you the scarcely lesser service of preserving purity of style and language, and preventing you from falling into the conventional affectations and slang of social dialogue.
For the same reason, without reference to any higher motive, but simply to fill our mind with the purest English, read daily some portion of the Bible; for which exercise there is another reason also, that its phraseology is more familiar to all kinds of audiences than any other, is more readily understood, and, therefore, is more sufficient in securing their attention.