well as an art, and good principles must be taught our reflexes as well as our minds. As well for an aspirant musician to listen to lectures on his favorite instrument without trying to play it as for a writer to study writing without undergoing the discipline of directed practice. It is often said that a person need not be able to perform in order to criticize— that he need not lay an egg to tell when one is bad. True, but this course is designed to make you an even better performer than you now are, not a better critic, except as that is necessary to better performance. The necessity of practice may be met in several ways, but perhaps the most practical is to consider each of your normal writing jobs as an opportunity for practice. This device will work, however, only if it is used systematically. In the first place, only one principle, normally, should be concentrated on during any "practice" session. It is impossible, as a training technique, to apply everything at once. If you attempt to do so, you will quickly revert to writing as you normally do and will continue to engrave more deeply the very habits you are trying to change. But if you focus your attention on one or two principles at a time, obedience to them will soon become habitual; then you can move on to another principle. If, for example, one of the principles of your last lesson concerns the placement of modifiers, you should consider every sentence you write as a problem in modification. Each sentence should be examined to determine which units are modified, which terms perform the modfication, which locations for the modifiers are most effective, and which syntactical form is most appropriate. Such practice is designed not only to make good writing habits habitual, but also to develop a constantly alert critical sense. And this leads us to the third slice-Criticism. For our purposes, criticism is of two types: the objective criticism, which those who grade your quizzes and other written assignments will provide; and the subjective criticism which you will apply to your own writing, past and present. The first sort will, frankly, be in very limited supply. It has to be, in a correspondence course; but it will be provided to the fullest extent possible. The ideal, of course, is the old one: a student at one end of a log and a teacher at the other. That sort of personal, extended give and take is immensely helpful; but since it impossibly reduces the number of persons who can avail themselves of needed training or education, it is a luxury which we must deny ourselves when we teach or learn by correspondence. The second type of criticism, then-your own ability to diagnose and criticise your writing-must be stressed constantly in the course. It is a rare ability. At best, the average writer can tell when his writing is not effective, but precisely what ails it he does not know. At worst, of course, poor writing occasions no self-doubt in the writer's mind at all. His readers may groan over it, although very few of them will be able to explain the causes of its ineffectiveness. But, rare as the ability may be, it is up to us to develop it. To do so we must, among other things, be familiar with the technical terms of writing. It is utterly futile to identify the deficiency of writing by spotting those ideas that are unclear. That simply locates, the trouble; it does not diagnose it. Our task, then, must be to study the structure of the sentence, its parts, and mode of operation, so that it becomes for us a contrivance as well as an idea. Then when a sentence goes bad, we can identify its basic type, study the relationship of its parts, and come to some diagnostic conclusion. It will be good practice for you to look back over your previous writing, noting what sort of sentences you tend to write, how you handle the various constructions, what linkage you use, etc., until you have a pretty objective estimate of your own style. The estimate made, the diagnosis established, it remains only to select the remedy and, with practice, put it into effect. The Contents, Sequence, and Level of This Course For the training specialist, the writing problem falls pretty naturally into two parts: training in how to write correctly and training in how to write well. Other divisions are possible, of course. For one thing, writing ultimately becomes the adjustment of a means (writing) to a problem; and questions of format, organization, reader level, and a dozen other matters properly enter into the larger consideration. At the moment, however, we want to stress one point: This course assumes on your part a thorough familiarity with the basic mechanics of writing. If you do not have it, you should take the preliminary writing course. A sentence is a complicated artifact, and any discussion of its effective use demands acquaintance with its grammatical parts, their relationships with each other, and the rules which govern construction. We shall not, as a rule, have time in the progress of this course to define terms, and efficiency demands that we use a good many of them. So if you are a little vague as to what an "absolute" is or as to how a "finite" verb differs from a "nonfinite" one, you should, for your own well-being and peace of mind, familiarize yourself with basic grammar. As to contents, the materials here brought together are concerned with effective expository writing. The course is, therefore, aimed directly at, but is not exclusively applicable to, employees of the Internal Revenue Service. Exposition is the mode of writing which carries the weight of the world's business. Its skills, when once acquired, are as useful in one subject field as another, so that there is no such thing as "writing skill" which applies to only one area. One's superior knowledge of a subject area will, of course, give to his writing superior content, but it will not demonstrate greater writing skill. Few expository writers in this country can match Edmund Wilson, for example; yet any one of you could do a better informed job in your own area of specialty than he could do in it. But as soon as he had had a chance to gather the facts you know, his superior writing skill would make him spurt ahead like Man o' War. I am stressing this fact-that writing skill is quite independent of areas of special knowledge-because it is impossible in the examples used in these lessons always to pick a sentence whose subject matter lies within your own special interest. As a matter of fact, writing principles could be as well taught with nouns like "John" and "Mary" as with "joint Administration-Operations decisions" or "income tax law." It is just as clear to illustrate a dangling participle with the sentence, "After putting on my hat, the dog bit me" as with "Feeling the need for careful consideration, the two main decisions were postponed." But the psychological effect is different! Illustrations which use subject matter which we deal with day by day "engage" themselves with our attention; consequently, every effort has been made to pick illustrations from Internal Revenue Service material. Sometimes a bit of disguising has had to be done, for the honor of having their writing picked as horrible examples is not apparent to some individuals. One last comment on the content of this course: the principles selected for discussion are but some (the most important, I hope) of many. I hope very much that you will be stimulated to expand your reading and your study to include at least a few of the best books on the subject. Suggestions for additional reading will be made along the line. As to sequence, the course, generally speaking, progresses from the specific to the general. We discuss building materials, as it were, before discussing architecture. This is not the only way to go at it. Indeed, some who teach writing to adults successfully use the reverse approach, by which general organizational patterns, logical principles, adjustment of format to specific office operations, etc., are all discussed before specific problems of sentence construction. But in a good many scores of teaching programs at one time or another I have tried both methods, and my own experience is clear: work from the center out, from the building block to the structure, not the reverse. In one sense, our sequence is aimed at teaching how to create a good texture of writing, as if we were studying rug weaving. A well-made rug, durable, tightly woven, is the product of a skilled craftsman. Whether it is the right rug for a given room, whether the colors harmonize with the furniture this is another matter. And so with writing. Well-built sentences, tightly organized paragraphs, smooth linkage systems are produced by skilled writers. Whether the ideas are the ones needed by the reader, whether the format selected is the most effective one, whether the stylistic "colors" are pleasing in a particular context are questions which lie somewhat beyond our immediate concern. All things in due course. What is our concern is that we shall say better whatever it is that we wish to say. And thus, as Milton says in another connection, you have the purpose and nature of the course "ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree." I wish you good luck. Let's "clap hands, and a bargain"-or should we "shake hands and come out fighting"? |