The Mechanism of English Style (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Mechanism of English Style

This book is the result of a conviction that telling students how to write, lecturing at them or to them, giving them rules and principles and counselings will not make writers. Nothing but an intimate acquaintance with the work of those who have in some high degree mastered the problem of literary expression will materially help them to a like command of the resources of style. The problem is one of method. How shall a student be induced to focus his attention long enough and minutely enough upon the intricacies of written speech? How can he be led to turn sentences over and over until the rationale of their form and ordering settles into his consciousness as an almost instinc tive understanding?

There may be various satisfactory answers to these ques tions, but the answer of this volume is embodied primarily in Chapter IX and in the reference of the questions there to specific portions of the texts. This direct application of the questions will be found at the bottom of each page of the extracts. No doubt to many this method will seem some what mechanical. It has been developed as a system of pre cision, a system for achieving a degree of scholarly certitude in a subject in which such certitude is unusually difficult. By reason of that difficulty, ease and assurance in reaching this end cannot be expected through a method that is not fairly rigid. It will then inevitably be more or less me chamical. If the individual instructor feels that he has other and more adequate means of arriving at this result there is no reason for his not employing his own system.

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