In writing nothing should be allowed to interfere with the stream of thought. Some can write in the midst of noise. Others must seek silence and solitude. Gifted men like Horace Greeley can write in the cars, upon the knee, anywhere. Habit has much to do with the art of composing. In any event, the stream of thought must be kept flowing. In so far as the rules of grammar, logic, rhetoric have become unconscious guiding principles, they do not interfere with the evolution of thought. In so far as they absorb the attention and hinder the flow of thought, they should be cast to the winds during the first glow of writing. Better think of these during the process of rewriting, polishing, and correcting.
So great a thinker and successful a writer as Charles Darwin makes the following suggestive statement concerning his own methods of composing:
How Darwin composed.
“There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind, leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form. Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words; and then correct deliberately. Sentences thus scribbled down are often better ones than I could have written deliberately.”[41]
No one should speak as he writes, nor should any one write as he speaks. Few men are satisfied with the stenographic report of a speech, exactly true to the language at the time of delivery. A reporter who cannot make a speech read better, without changing the line of thought, than if it were printed exactly as spoken is not a master of the art of reporting. Written discourse abounds in longer sentences, in more involved constructions, in forms of diction which please the eye, but are too cumbersome for the voice and the ear. The public speaker is prone to use short, simple sentences in which the subject of the sentence does not pass out of the mind before the predicate is reached. His style abounds in questions which arrest the attention of the hearer; if necessary, he indulges in colloquial expressions to which the ears of the hearer are accustomed, thereby bringing himself nearer the common people.
Fox’s opinion.
Written discourse.
Upon a speech delivered in the British Parliament high praise was bestowed in the hearing of Mr. Fox. “Does it read well?” he inquired. “Yes, grandly,” was the reply. “Then,” said he, “it was not a good speech.” It may be difficult to point out exactly wherein speaking differs from writing so far as the stream of thought is concerned; yet one feels the difference. Austin Phelps shows the difference by using an extract from an essay on the “End of God in Creation:”
“What was the final cause of creation? The transition from the unconditioned to the conditioned is incomprehensible by the human faculties. What that transition is, and how it could take place, and how it became an actualized occurrence, it is confessed on all hands are absolutely incomprehensible enigmas. We cannot reasonably imagine, then, that, if we are thus ignorant of the nature and mode of this stupendous fact, we can nevertheless comprehend its primitive ground, can explore its ultimate reasons, can define its final motive. Nor can we think to unveil the infinite soul at that moment when, according to our conceptions, the eternal uniformity was interrupted and a new mode of being, absolutely unintelligible to us, was first introduced. We cannot think to grasp all the views which were present to that soul, extending from the unbeginning past to the unending future, and to fathom all its purposes, and to analyze all its motives. If anywhere, we must here repel everything like dogmatic interpretation of the phenomena, and admit whatever is put forth only as conjectural in its nature, or, at all events, partial, and belonging far more to the surface than to the interior of the subject.”
Example of spoken discourse.