Writing English Prose (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III NAKRATION, DESCRIPTION, AND EXPOSITION The general principles of composition expounded in the preceding chapter may now be more specially applied to various types of writing. Writing is classified in various ways, as into prose and verse, at one extreme, and, at the other, into that great variety of forms ? novels, histories, sonnets, short stories, leaders, reviews, news items, sermons, essays, speeches, etc., ? which do but name common occasions. For our present purposes we may, without apology, accept the ordinary rhetorical classes of narration, description, exposition, and argumentation as covering the whole field. The distinctions between these forms of discourse cannot be precisely stated. Practically, it is unimportant to do so, since these forms do not exist in a pure state, but merely represent general tendencies, and are crossing one another at all points. Popularly, too, we usually know that novels, books of travel, histories, newspaper items, are likely to be narration, or to contain a good deal of narrative; that society news, lost notices, advertisements, are likely to be descriptive; that cook-books, guide-books, treatises, many essays, are to a great degree expository; that sermons, editorial articles, controversial articles, debates, committees of the whole, are pretty sure to contain a good deal of argumentation. If the point may be pressed into a single sentence, we might say that each of these forms stands for a general kind of facts ? facts of past action, facts of past or present appearance, facts of constant status, and facts derived by comparison of other facts. These catch-terms are evidently used with much looseness: but what is meant will become clear as we proceed. The kind of composition, or the devices of writing which may b...