The Essentials of Prose Composition

1. Definition.-What is a sentence? No thoroughly satisfactory definition is possible; all the definitions are merely approximations to the truth. For example, the following defi

nition, which is as good as any:

A sentence is such an assemblage of words as will make complete

sense.

99 66 No,

What is an assemblage of words? "Yes, deed," the ejaculations "O," "Oh," "Ah," and other single words, are regarded and printed as sentences; yet a single word can scarcely pass for an "assemblage."

Further, what is meant by "making complete sense"? To know readily and surely when the sense is complete, requiring the period or other punctuation-sign equivalent to the period (mark of interrogation or of exclamation), one must be trained in composition. Now to one thus trained any definition of a sentence is superfluous.

Instead of attempting a definition, then, we shall do better to consider the following practical points:

1. For the purpose of training in the art of writing we are to restrict our attention to such sentences as do contain "an assemblage of words," that is, words enough to call for care in the arrangement of them.

2. The sense is "complete" when any addition or omission, even of a single word, would either change the nature of the thought or give to it a different direction.

3. By "completeness" is here meant rhetorical completeness, not mere grammatical completeness. The distinction cannot be defined; it can, however, be illustrated. For example:

We came to our journey's end || at last, || with no small difficulty, || after much fatigue, || through deep roads || and bad weather.

The grammarian assures us that we might break off at any one of the points marked || and still have a complete sentence. True; yet such completeness would be only grammatical; whereas the rhetorician asserts that all the phrases cut off by || are necessary to the rhetorical completeness, for they are all intended by the writer to heighten the reader's impression of the discomfort of the journey. In truth, the sentence is a genuine unit; the unity is merely obscured by awkward arrangement. This awkwardness corrected, the unity becomes evident :

At last, after much fatigue, through deep roads and bad weather, we came, with no small difficulty, to our journey's end.

See the remarks on the Periodic Sentence, § 32.

4. The chief difficulty for the young is to perceive, on the one hand, when they have expressed the thought completely; on the other hand, when they are changing its nature or giving to it a new direction. The root of the evil is twofold. The young are not trained enough at school in writing sentences and are not corrected thoroughly for their faults in sentencestructure. Further, they are not trained enough in correct speech. They are suffered to utter almost any form of words from which the hearer can guess or puzzle out a meaning. Scarcely one student in the hundred is taught to speak wellconstructed sentences of a dozen or fifteen words. Hence it is only natural that the young, when set to write, should compose sentences as they speak, namely, at random.

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