cism, containing eighty-five words, has been already quoted (end of § 6).

Compare these with the following school-boy English:

* Milton was born in the year 1608. He died in 1674. He was born in London.

* Force used as a means of bringing the colonies to submission would be only temporary. Former cases had proved it. For example, Ireland. Another thing, force was uncertain. The uncertainty of using force was one of Burke's chief arguments. After force there remained nothing.

Or with the following bit of "journalese":

I unwittingly introduce the practice of arriving at the Hotel Rafael by the six-thirty from town.

One is expected by the five-ten.

Fashion travels at that hour, or something earlier, perhaps. But later,

never.

After the five-ten, the curfew.

Here not only is each sentence painfully abrupt, but each sentence is erected into the dignity of a paragraph (see § 54). The individual statements are clear in the sense that they are intelligible. Are they anything more? Is not the whole a manifestation of vulgarity trying to appear "smart"?

When it is asserted that modern style is opposed to long sentences, the assertion is true only to this extent: Modern cultured readers do object to the intolerable and shapeless sentences of the garrulous narrative writers of the sixteenth century, also to the excessively involved sentences of Milton and other controversialists of the seventeenth century, sentences more Ciceronian than English in their structure. Further, brisk narration should, as a matter of course, be in the form of short, crisp sentences. Only we are to bear in mind that narration is not always brisk; sometimes it is deliberate, sometimes even intentionally retarding, in order to introduce the element of suspense. In description, it is better to make sentences short rather than long; a long descriptive sentence, however, if not too involved, is always proper for summing up. Lastly, the use of short sentences is largely a matter of temperament; it is perhaps more a matter of temperament than

of deliberate choice. A man of quick wit or of incisive energy, urged along by the sense of many responsibilities, will instinctively express himself in short detached sentences. Even the early seventeenth century could exhibit such a man in the person of Bacon. A century later, Swift, the embodiment of nervous energy, wrote, when at his best, only short sentences; at least his long sentences are seldom perfectly happy in structure. Addison, also, was at his best only in short sentences, though from an impulse different from that which governed Swift; for Addison in writing wished merely to echo the manner of polite society, which tolerates nothing very long.

From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, again, long sentences, at least sentences of moderate length, became more common, e. g., in Johnson and Goldsmith, in Burke and Gibbon, in the historians, philosophers, essayists, and critics, in the prose of such poets as Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. In fact, the period from 1750-1850 is marked by artistic sense and moderation; sentences are not too long, nor are they too often long; above all, there is an agreeable alternation of long sentences and short.

Since 1850, however, a disposition to favor the short sentence is noticeable. This is due usually to the growth of the "journalistic" manner of looking at and treating everything. The young in school and in college should be trained on other lines. They should be taught, negatively, that they need not look upon themselves as embryonic reporters and editors; positively, that they are to become thinkers. Now, all thinking involves the two extremes: the ability to go to the point at a leap; the ability to pause, to look backward and forward, to survey and forecast. He who is unable to sum up and forecast in a clear, forcible, easy sentence of reasonable length, is not a good writer, for he is not a sound thinker. In the words of Coleridge, he affects

a style which an ancient critic would have deemed purposely invented

for persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for those to comprehend who labour under the more pitiable asthma of a shortwitted intellect.

There is a story to the effect that the English historian Freeman,' happening to visit an American class-room while an exercise in composition was going on, interrupted the teacher, who was trying to make a young woman understand how to render her English clearer. "Tell her," he exclaimed, "to write short sentences." Freeman might better have exclaimed Tell her to write correct sentences, whether long or short. When a long sentence is bad, the badness is not due to the length but to the lack of unity, to the misplacing of words and clauses. Such faults the good teacher will cure; the teacher who is unable to cure them is not good. The school that is able to produce only short sentences is on the road to decay. If the scholar wishes to learn how to compose long sentences, he must examine critically the sentence-length of the best writers.

53. Paragraph-Length.-This is even less determinable than sentence-length. By its very nature a paragraph represents a portion of the general subject. The length of the paragraph, then, will depend upon the significance of this particular portion compared with the other portions. What that significance may be, no general rule can determine. In truth, the question of paragraph-length belongs properly under Composition-Draughting. Still, a few suggestions will be of

service :

It

1. Make your paragraphs short rather than long. This is different from writing uniformly short sentences (see § 52). The paragraph is much more plastic than the sentence. can be expanded, it can also be divided. If you find that a paragraph is too short, you can expand by the insertion of additional items bearing directly on this particular portion of the subject. If you find that a paragraph is growing unwieldy, you can cut it in two, connecting the new paragraphs

1 See Hill, Foundations of Rhetoric, p. 288.

by some words of transition, to show that the two, though separated, are intimately connected.

The modern tendency is to keep the paragraph within the limits of the printed page. The eye, and with it the mind, likes to rest at least once in the page on the typographical break called the indentation (see § 41). We have become so accustomed to these rests that the sight of an unbroken page is apt to make us impatient.

Moreover, in modern printing, every speech spoken by one of the characters in a story, however short the speech may be, even if it contains only a word or two, is set up as a paragraph. If the speech is long, it may be set up in several paragraphs. Every novel of the day abounds in this dialogue-paragraphing.

Disregarding dialogue-paragraphing as something peculiar, and restricting ourselves to continuous composition, we may, in the most general terms, regard every paragraph as long, if it exceeds 300 words; as short, if it falls below 150.

A study of the first 25 paragraphs of Macaulay's second essay on Chatham 1 shows plainly that the great essayist seldom indulged in a long paragraph. The line-numbers of these 25 paragraphs run :

16, 8, 4, 22, 16, 25, 9, 12, 23, 23, 10, 17, 21, 50, 19, 6, 10, 4, 10, 23, 17, 13, 10, 9, 10.

The average line-length is 101⁄2 words. Thus we see that of these 25 paragraphs only one contains 500 words; seven contain between 200 and 300; the remaining 17 do not average 150 words. Of these 17 two contain exactly 39 and 38 words. The long 50-line paragraph describes the partition of powers between Pitt and Newcastle; it is shared almost evenly between the two statesmen. Though long, it is easily grasped.

2. A paragraph of 300 words, then, is long; one of 200 words begins to be long. These figures, however, apply only

1 The text here followed is that of O. A. Lester. New York: Maynard & Co. The line-numbers will differ somewhat, of course, in other texts, but his ratio of line to word will be available for any text.

to printed matter of permanent value. For the ephemeral written matter of school and college work they ought to be reduced considerably. The young writer ought never to attempt a paragraph of 500 words; he has neither matter enough nor skill enough. His long paragraph ought not to run much over 200 words, and his average paragraph-length ought to be under rather than over 100 words. His very short paragraphs, however, cannot of course fall below those of Macaulay; every paragraph of less than 40 words is decidedly short, whether written by Macaulay or by X. Y. Z.

On

This conception of paragraph-length may appear to some critics too mechanical. Undoubtedly it is mechanical. the other hand, we ought to admit very frankly that all school and college writing is necessarily more or less mechanical. This writing is not the spontaneous expression of a mind vitally interested in the subject; it is writing produced to order,—writing not for its own sake, but as a means to the mastery of the technique of written expression. Now the technique of writing, like the technique of other arts-like the technique of music or drawing-can be acquired only through the patient application of certain mechanical rules. To master the technique of paragraphing means to learn how to avoid tediousness-how to turn briskly from one portion of the subject to the next.

3. Contrast good paragraphing with poor. Contrast, for example, the manner of Macaulay with the manner of George Eliot. The latter, in Silas Marner, tells in one long paragraph, three pages in length, the sale and killing of Wildfire, Dunstan Cass's walk back to Raveloe, and his entering Marner's cottage. There is matter enough for eight or ten paragraphs. Contrast also Macaulay with De Quincey. The latter, in his Revolt of the Tartars, indulges in excessively long paragraphs. Two contain about 1000 words each, and a third is almost as long; several others are but little shorter. The average length is more than twice that of Macaulay.

54. The Link-Paragraph.—This is a paragraph-usually