A HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH COMPOSITION. PART I. CHAPTER I. INVENTION IN GENERAL. 1. THE general rules or principles of writing may be classified under the two heads of Invention and Expression. Invention, as a rhetorical process, is the art of putting together what one has to say upon a subject. If the composition is at all skilful, it will make upon the reader a clearly defined impression. Invention does not consist in finding out what to say. That is the office of life in general and of education in particular. Thus, the historian finds out what to say by studying documents and other records of the past; the botanist, by studying plants; the economist, by studying the phenomena of trade and exchange. Invention consists rather in putting our statements of fact, our observations upon men and things, our conclusions, our ideas, our feelings, into readable shape. Since invention, in its every-day sense, implies the production of something which did not previously exist-e. g. a new machine-the young writer is apt to infer that his invention also should produce something new. This is erroneous. He may offer something new, or he may not, according to the range of his knowledge and the maturity of his mind. But in either case his invention-i. e. the shaping of his thoughts-would be the same. In fact he may even, by the process called paraphrasing, re-state the writing of another in his own words and arrangement, without adding a single new thought or fact, and still be credited with invention in the rhetorical sense. This paraphrasing, if not abused, is an extremely useful exercise-perhaps the easiest for the beginner. The teacher of any subject, after explaining the contents of a section of the book studied, may require the scholar to write down his recollections of the contents in a short paragraph, and thereby test his powers of invention. Such paragraphwriting, in substance an off-hand examination, would also be in form an exercise in composition; although it need not be the final stage of training, it might and should be the initial. The various forms of prose writing * are classified as Narration, Description, Exposition, and Argument (with Persuasion). By this is meant that the aim of the writer is to narrate an event, or to describe an object, or to expound a general fact, or to convince the reader of the truth of a proposition.. Every one of the above forms may be exemplified in a single paragraph. The paragraph, therefore, by reason of its brevity, offers peculiar advantages for study and for practice. And since continuous writing is made up of individual paragraphs properly joined and grouped, the *The forms of writing are not to be confounded with the forms of literature. These latter are endless, including poetry and the drama, fiction (the novel), history and biography, book-reviews, criticism, books of travel, political and legal treatises, philosophic and scientific treatises. Any one literary forme. g. a drama, a novel, a book of travel, a history-may embody all the forms of writing in turn. assumption is a safe and practical one, that any person trained to write a good paragraph may be readily taught to frame a longer composition. Hence the prominence given to the paragraph in this book. A few rules or suggestions for the shaping of a composition of some length are given in Chapter XIII. CHAPTER II. THE PARAGRAPH IN GENERAL. 2. IN learning to compose, the first step is to get a clear understanding of the paragraph-what it is and how it should be constructed. The paragraph may be characterized as the unit of written discourse; it may be approximately defined to be a group of sentences closely connected and serving one common purpose. According to this purpose the paragraph may be of two kinds: either the writer takes up a simple, brief, independent subject, and disposes of it within the limits of the paragraph, which is then called an Isolated or Independent Paragraph, or he is developing successive portions of a longer general subject in successive paragraphs; these are called Connected or Related Paragraphs. In modern printing and writing every paragraph is marked off to the eye by the device known as indenting. In print the first letter of the paragraph is set back one em or two ems from the flush line of the column or page; in writing it is set back an inch or an inch and a half from the margin. A paragraph is sometimes comprised within the limits of a single line and sentence. Examples of isolated paragraphs of this sort are common in the news columns of the newspapers and magazines; they are justified on purely practical grounds. Occasionally even an author who is writing upon a continuous subject will give unusual prominence to an event or a saying by throwing it |