5. A baseball game furnishes abundant opportunity to exercise good judgment.
6. I remember well the first time that I visited a large city.
7. I shall never forget my first attempt at milking a cow.
8. The haunted house is a square, old-fashioned one of the colonial type.
9. A mouse suddenly entering the class room caused much disturbance.
10. A freshman's trials are numerous.
(Do the details bear upon the main idea? If the paragraph is long and rambling, condense by omitting the least important parts. By changing the order of the sentences, can you improve the paragraph?)
+46. Details Related in Time-Order.+—The experiences of daily life follow each other in time, and when we read of a series of events we at once think of them as having occurred in a certain time-order. To assist in establishing the correct time-order, the writer should generally state the details of his story in the order in which they occurred. The method of showing time relations for simultaneous events has been discussed in Section 11.
If the narrative is of considerable length, it may be divided into paragraphs, each dealing with some particular stage of its progress. The time relations among the sentences within the paragraph and among the paragraphs themselves should be such that the reader may readily follow the thread of the story to its main point. Narrative paragraphs often do not have topic sentences.
In the following selection from Black Beauty notice how the time relations give unity of thought both to the paragraphs and to the whole selection:—