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all the comparisons, all the particular incidents and descriptions that will develop the main divisions fully. Make the treatment generous in scale. In your memoranda, give the pith of each comparison, incident, or description.

§ 2. Unity of Thought in the Outline. - Unity in composition means finding and saying all that needs to be said on a given subject, and no more than needs to be said. Unity is often no easy achievement, though in the long run it saves labor both for writer and for reader, and of course adds to the value of the composition as subject matter.

The first condition of unity is a limited subject. In order to find all that needs to be said, it is necessary to get a subject that the writer can master in the time allowed. "Whether animals reason" is a topic beyond the powers of any student; not so the recording of personal observations that seem to bear on the subject. A room can be described in a hundredth part of the time required to master the subject of national expansion. The latter task would indeed test the student's mettle profitably, for little is to be expected of the youth who never burns to dispose of questions that vex trained

statesmen; but it would mean a month's work before even a preliminary paper could profitably be written.

so.

The second condition of unity is like the first. The subject chosen must be mastered. The practised describer goes repeatedly to the object and gazes at it until every tint and line is repeated in the camera of his mind. Then he writes from memory, grasping the subject better The practised expounder will not set pen to paper before he seems to have all the facts, and to have discovered the law that explains them all. For attaining this mastery of a subject most people find silent thought the best single method, but some are helped by conversing on the subject. Conversation is a prac

ticable method when all the members of a class are using the same topic. The preliminary work, whether carried on as one sits or walks, in silence or conversation, is thinking, and thinking is the hardest business in the world. Yet the thinking must be done. Otherwise, when you begin to write you will surely stray from your subject, under the delusion that you are keeping beautifully to the point; quite

1 Compare the "vocabulary" exercises in A First Manual of Composition.

possibly you may even leave unsaid the one important thing.

Yet the tendency to stray is not so bad a thing otherwise you would not have been urged in the preceding chapter to jot down in your theme-outlines everything that occurred to you as at all bearing on the subject. One half of unity consists in not overlooking whatever needs to be said. An eminent thinker1 has pointed out that the scatter-brained type of mind is often very effective, because it is full of notions; it is not barren. Its thoughts have the principle of growth in them. great prose writer of this very type, Thomas De Quincey, made much of the fact that a paragraph seems to grow under the hand of the writer.2 The mere contact of a soft pencil with a page of rough paper will often seem to start a stream of thought, as the pressure on the gold point starts the ink of a fountain pen.

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1 Professor William James. See A First Manual of Composition, Index.

2 A similar conception appears in Bosanquet's Logic, I, p. vii. Starting from Bosanquet's kinetic conception of judgment forms, Messrs. Scott and Denney have applied the idea of growth to the various forms of the isolated paragraph, in their admirable Composition-Rhetoric (Allyn and Bacon).

But the person who finds this experience true of himself is exactly the person who most profits by preliminary thinking about the unity of his work. His mind is stimulated to the right sort of invention by the effort to choose and reject among his thoughts. Gradually

what was a mere nebula of vague notions assumes a definite centre, a dominating principle, a pattern which will control the structure of the theme. What he finally produces will be like a vigorous but symmetrical tree, not a gadding vine full of waste and leafage. Or, again, it will be like a rose, developing in circle after circle of petals from the central bud, but never departing from the type of a

rose.

To come to practical measures, we must recognize in the Title the surest guide to making a unified outline. The Title should be made as narrow and definite as possible before any other writing is done.1 It is a dangerous thing to write a theme first and try to name it afterward.

Then we must recognize the Outline as the

1 In the preceding chapter, definite titles were assigned for the outlines; hence no practise in framing titles has been afforded as yet.

quickest way of testing the unity of that preliminary thinking which led to the title. Tedious as outline-making is, an outline is as essential to a composition as bones are to a bird. In the course of our preliminary thinking we may put down whatever thoughts occur to us: events, or descriptive details, or reasons, or proofs, as the case may be. When all seems to be done, it remains before writing to study the outline and ask: Is there, here, anything irrelevant to the subject as narrowed in the title? also, Is anything relevant to the subject missing? After the theme is written, we may scrutinize it by paragraphs and sentences, and strike out such of these smaller units as depart from the exact topic of the whole. For the larger matters of unity, forethought is the best recipe, the next best being revision of the outline; while for the smaller matters, the only recipe is revision.

EXERCISE 6. (Oral.) Study the following rough memoranda, drawn from an address by the late Phillips Brooks. Then unify the outline by inserting the word graduation in each division in such a way as to arrange all the thoughts around this one word.

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