Your hostess always wants twelve hours' notice of your departure, so that she can make out your bill—a very arduous, formidable undertaking. The bill is of prodigious dimensions, about the size of a sheet of foolscap paper, lined and cross-lined for a multitude of entries. When the account finally reaches you, it closely resembles a design for a cobweb factory. Any attempt to decipher the various hieroglyphics is useless—it can't be done. The only thing that can be done is to read the total at the foot of the page and pay it.
—Hotels in Scotland ("Kansas City Star").
+Theme XXXVII.+—Write a general description of one of the following:—
1. A bicycle. 2. A country hay barn. 3. A dog. 4. A summer cottage. 5. An Indian wigwam. 6. A Dutch windmill. 7. A muskrat's house. 8. A robin's nest. 9. A blacksmith's shop. 10. A chipmunk. 11. A threshing machine. 12. A sewing circle.
(The purpose is not to picture a particular object, but to give a general notion of a class of objects. Cross out everything in your theme that applies only to some particular object. Have you included enough to make your meaning clear?)
+Theme XXXVIII.+—Using the same title as for Theme XXXVII, write a specific description of some particular object.
(How does it differ from the general description? What elements have you introduced which you did not have in the other? Which sentence gives the general outline? Are your details arranged with regard to their proper position in space? Will the reader form a vivid picture—just the one you mean him to have?)
+68. General Narration.+—Explanations of a process of manufacture, methods of playing a game, and the like, often take the form of generalized narration. Just as we gain a notion of the appearance of a sod house from a general description, so may we gain a notion of a series of events from a general narration. Such a narration will not tell what some one actually did, but will relate the things that are characteristic of the process or action under discussion whenever it happens. Such general narration is really exposition.
EXERCISES
A. Notice that the selection below is a generalized narration, showing what a hare does when hunted. In it no incident peculiar to some special occasion is introduced.