Elements Of Prose

Author : W. A. Brockington
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781534748156
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (481 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Elements of Prose written by W. A. Brockington and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To a student pursuing the difficult and little recognised craft of writing, it is always agreeable to come upon any public recognition that such a craft does really exist. It is distinctly comforting to find a person with the many scholastic distinctions of Mr. Brockington declaring boldly, in English, that "in order to write well it is, first of all, necessary to dispossess one's self of the idea that by an intercourse merely casual or desultory, even with literature of the best, one may come by the secret of the craft"; that "our native speech is not native to us as a literary language "; and that "the possession of clear ideas does not necessarily involve clearness of expression "-all statements diametrically opposed to the average English belief, which agrees so far with that of Dogberry as to hold that writing, if not reading, comes by nature. Excellent, too, is the observation that "colloquial words are often vulgar, and more often vague." But when we advance from these generalities to points of definite precept there is room for a good deal of disagreement. In the chapter on "The Unity of the Sentence," for instance, Mr. Brockington harps upon a figure of speech in which the sentence is treated as a circle: "The second thought runs tangentially from the circumference, instead of radiating from the centre"; "the second proposition must radiate from the same central idea"; and so forth, the section concluding with: "Take care that the thoughts in all sentences be as radii from a given centre, and not as tangent* from the circumference." This section, it must be remarked, is one professing to deal, not with logical or rhetorical, but with grammatical unity. That the figurative method employed is likely to be confusing may be judged from the fact that several sentences cited as instances exhibiting defects of unity prove, upon inspection, to be grammatically correct; the faults are in the meaning. Thus: "A child trained in a good home, and surrounded by healthy home influences, generally grows up to honourable manhood; while, on the other hand, a child brought up in an untidy home is untidy and unmethodical when he becomes a man." On this the author's comment is: "Here, again, the two propositions do not run from the same centre; it is quite preposterous to oppose 'honourable manhood' to 'untidiness.'" It is preposterous, but not grammatically preposterous. The defect in co-ordination is one solely of signification. A true example of incorrect grammatical sequence presents itself in the following sentence from a recent business letter: "While in this particular case we should have liked to be charitable, we are not in a position to do so." Here, while the meaning is perfectly consecutive, the grammar is dislocated. In the example from "The Elements of Prose" the grammar was faultless, though not elegant; it was the significations which did not match. -The Academy and Literature, Volume 57