The Practical Elements of Rhetoric; with Illustrative Examples

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. COMPOSITION. Thus far the consideration of our subject has had to do mainly with the selection of material for style; for such is fundamentally the task recognized in choosing words and estimating figures of speech. As we have seen, this work of selection demands not only skill and judgment for the occasion, but also thorough general discipline in carefulness, patience, scholarship, and taste. We come now to the business of building this material together into literary forms, -- into phrases, sentences, paragraphs; and here the same discipline is required, only now the writer's attention is directed to combination. Out of the scattered elements at command is to be formed a structure of thought, which is to be no crude congeries jumbled together as it happens, but a unified, coherent, organic system. It is to such skilled combination alone that we can rightly apply the name style. This part of the writer's work has its distinctive problems. How words are related to one another grammatically; how they sound together; how they refer to what precedes or prepare for what follows; how their position is so to be determined as to give them force and distinction in themselves or make them a support to one another, -- such questions as these arise at every step, questions to be answered only by constant and studious attention to the logical relations of the thought. It is in composition, or what may be called thought-structure, that rhetoric shows its close relationship to grammar, and at the same time its fundamental advance beyond that science. Grammar discovers the facts of the language, from which it formulates the laws of correct expression; and these laws rhetoric must observe, because correctness lies necessarily at the...