piano playing deters many from taking the time and trouble to develop greater effectiveness. So writing becomes a hodgepodge of composite authorship, this phrase taken from one source, that from another. When the hodgepodge gets all collected and jostled down into a sort of fixed mass, we say that it is a "style"; and if one writes without using the fetish phrases, he is likely to get his letters handed back for revision. In all likelihood, they will continue to be revised until all original phrasing, all dangerously clear sentences, and all deletions of normal padding are corrected. The end result will be a completely dehumanized document, apparently written by a machine-and a somewhat morose one at that.

With writing, then, in "a terrible state of chasis,” as O'Casey's Captain Boyle says, we have tried here to bring together material which will help you in your own program of improvement. As a correspondence course, it has certain limitations: There is no opportunity for that hearty giveand-take which classroom presentation permits. There is only limited opportunity for constructive criticism of independent writing-objective tests and quizzes must bear the brunt of taking your measure. There is lacking the strong motivational element of group work, the drive to excel others. And there is the limitation of the imagination of those who have prepared this course, the impossibility of anticipating every sort of question which may arise and every sort of circumstance in which the material will be applied.

This all means that a heavy burden of responsibility rests on you and your use of the materials. (How pleasant it is to say such things, looking stern and impressively pedagogical!) After a hard day's work-or perhaps in the midst of it-you must try to bring to your study real concentration and application. For, in the last analysis, no one can do anything about your writing but you.

Your writing is you, and no amount of mere reading about the subject, or even of hearing a competent person lecture on the subject, can of itself bring about improvement. Over the years your writing has fallen into certain patterns, has developed stylistic traits of which you are yourself probably unaware. Only by a real effort can you see your writing as it is, not as you rather assume it is. This takes, first of all, character and the desire to do even better a job which you already may be doing quite well, comparatively. It takes, too, a willingness to admit that your writing, though perhaps good, is not perfect; and that is a very personal matter. It is as if we were to admit freely that we ourselves, our person

alities and inner beings, are less than they should be. We sympathize with Oliver Cromwell, who once had a bit of trouble trying to convince a Puritan parliament that it was not divinely protected from error. "In the name of God, gentlemen," he once cried out, "try to conceive of the possibility of being wrong!"

All of these pious but entirely valid comments I address to myself as well as to you, of course. You and I share a problem. If we recognize it as a problem and work together at it, we will both end up writing better; and that is a worthy objective, aimed at the center of our status and activities as rational beings. It is an objective which serves, as well, perfectly selfish motives. Most people judge us largely or entirely by what we write. "Show me the writing and I will see the man." The report (or memorandum or letter) you write will be seen by dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of persons, each of whom will judge your grasp of facts, your capacity to think clearly, your common sense, even your general intelligence by one thing: the sentences on those pages. There is no opportunity to smooth over seeming discourtesy with a winning smile, to clarify an antithesis with a gesture, or to strengthen an argument with a vocal emphasis. We all know that a heart of gold may beat under the beggar's rags, but the rags are visible to the doorman of the hotel and the heart is not; so the beggar gets dumped out. So with writing. Behind the sentences may stand a man of clearest vision, deepest knowledge, richest experience (in short, there may stand we!). But if the sentences are ragged and ugly, the writer will never appear for what he truly is.

Now, to attempt to reform our writing style, the product of years of habit, is, as Winston Churchill said of Japan's attempt to defeat the United States and Great Britain, no small undertaking. Whether we realize it or not, a sentence is a very complicated contrivance. It is made up of many parts and it is subject to many rules and principles. It even appears, often, to have a life of its own. It will refuse to tell the reader what we know we have expressed in it, and it frequently delights in taking our most courteous thoughts and expressing them as if they were some species of raspberry, the sort so notably cultivated in Brooklyn. On the other hand, when well handled it may take a dull subject and make it seem interesting, an obscure subject and make it seem clear, an unpleasant subject and make it appear palatable. Above all, then, writing is flexible. There are an almost infinite number of ways to express almost anything, and the good writer has at least a fair mastery of many of those various ways. One of the reasons why dead, indirect, static jargon has gotten so popular is that it says the same thing in the same way every time. No one has to undertake the anguish of making up a new sentence for every thought-just use the old one.

This course, then, is designed to touch on many of the most effective principles for expressing ideas clearly and forcefully. It is not designed to suggest that there is only one right way to say something; rather, it is intended to describe and illustrate the various devices available, and then to leave their use up to you. No other approach is worthy either of writing as a profession or of you as an adult. For if writing is thought made visible (and it is), it is as dictatorial to specify style as to specify thought; and if the writer is a professional craftsman, it is unworthy to limit his own judicious use of every means available for making his thoughts clear and effective.

Perhaps you feel that describing the average writer in Government as a "professional craftsman" is stretching it a bit. But technically it is not. So long as people get paid for writing, they are professionals, although perhaps in no other area of learned endeavor is the title so easily and so unjustifiably obtained. Can we, with any hope of an affirmative answer, pick at random from our fellow employees and ask, "Does he have the qualifications of the professional writer? Is he a complete master of the technical side? Is he perfectly clear, for example, on the use of the participial phrase? Is he sound on conjunctive adverbs? Does he even know what one is?" These questions are similar in level to those we might put to a professional pianist: "Do you know what a piano is? Can you find middle C? Can you run a scale?" And yet many people who spend the larger part of every working day writing do not begin to qualify as professional writers even under the simplest standards.

This line of thought is not designed to be discouraging, still less to be ill tempered. It is designed to jog us a bit and make us realize that we are approaching a vast, challenging, important, even exciting, subject. We must come to it with determination not to turn back simply because the material seems to develop considerable bulk or because the burden of making independent judgments can be only very little eased by dogmatic rules.

At the merely mechanical level it is possible, pretty generally, to say that this is right, this wrong. But obedience to the mechanical rules can produce only correct writing; in this course, we are after effective writing, and that-like love, beauty, humor, and most of the other important things in life is not reducible to absolute measurements or rules. Indeed, we shall have to spend some time in discussing what we mean by "effective” writing, for people may honestly (and vehemently) disagree as to whether a given sentence is "bad" or "good." It is easy to find out merely whether it is correct or incorrect. A syntactical construction which is ideal for one situation may be inept in another, and it is as necessary to make sure

that a sentence is fitted to its own particular task as it is to select the right tool for a job. A hammer is fine for driving nails; not so good for smoothing the surface of a board. The average writer, however, has a pretty small tool kit, and tries to use one or two types of sentences to do all sorts of writing jobs.

Throughout your study, then, I solicit your independent judgment, your willingness to determine for yourself whether or not the principle under discussion is valid for your purposes. I think in most cases you will agree that it is, for the principles which produce good expository writing are pretty well established and have been used effectively by good writers for a number of centuries. At the same time, you alone can judge just how a principle is to be put to use in your context, or which of several which may be relevant in a given situation is to receive priority.

This need to exercise your own judgment on the basis of the established principles of good writing adds up to a point made earlier: You are a professional writer. The apprentice does what he is told without knowing why; the master craftsman is free to achieve the effects he desires by creatively using the tools at his command. Imitative writing, the stringing together of prefabricated strips of phrasing, the tacking on of sentences or whole paragraphs, whether they are understood or not, because "they always go in this sort of letter"-these characteristics of "apprentice" writing lie at the heart of the writing problem which we are trying to solve.

For this reason, then, the sample sentences of these lessons, whether used to show qualities or deficiencies, are not intended to be definitive but merely illustrative. This is particularly true of the "revised" or "good" versions. They are meant to illustrate an approach, the use of a principle, not to dictate a final phrasing. Our goal is not dehumanized writing; you will, and you should, have your own way of saying something.

Indeed, in many instances your way of saying something is your real contribution, for it reflects your own interpretation of that idea. We cannot separate how we say something from what we say. The "how" is the "what." The coach who says, "Conduct yourself in this game with maximum effort, and make it manifest that you have benefited from my instruction" is not saying the same thing, really, as "Get out and fight! Show 'em what I taught you." In technical terms, this is a difference between "form" and "content," and that distinction as it relates to effective writing we shall have to look into rather closely in one of the lessons to follow.

Essential Ingredients of a Writing Course

We have said that the success of such a course as this depends very heavily on your use of the materials provided. What, in general, is a writing course at this level, what are its essential elements, and how can you cooperate most effectively, with the course?

First, it may be helpful to imagine a writing course in the shape of a "pie chart," with three equal slices.

The first slice, the one placed at the top to signify its primacy, is Theory. The importance of understanding how various grammatical and syntactical devices work cannot be overemphasized. Such principles do not work because they are principles; they are principles because they work. The goal is not primarily "by-the-book" correctness but functional effectiveness. The rules did not come first; good writing did. And the rules have been devised as a result of observing what good writers regularly do to make their writing good. It is true that at the mechanical level these principles have become "rules" and the good writer obeys them; but at the level of this particular course, it is more important for you to comprehend fully the theory behind the principles than simply to memorize the principles themselves.

Furthermore, if one does not master the theoretical background of writing, he will be unable to perform his own diagnostic tests. He may sense that his writing is ineffective, but he will not know why. Some people buy a grammar book as they buy a dictionary, thinking that they can look up "bad writing" and get a diagnosis as easily as they can look up the definition of a word. Unfortunately there is no short cut, and a great deal of time can be wasted in hunting for one. Some degree of patience at the beginning, some willingness to think through a concept carefully before going on to the next, will pay handsomely in the end. The benefits will be indefinitely applicable and indefinitely useful.

The second of the three slices is Practice-and here we confront something of a difficulty. How can you arrange to do even the minimum amount of practice writing which is necessary to increased competence? For practice, and lots of it, is absolutely essential. Writing is a skill as