Elementary Composition · Part 12

Exercise 87.--1. Write a notice of a spelling match between two grades in your school, of an athletic contest of any kind, of a concert, of a play, of a school expedition to visit an historical monument, of the dates of a holiday, of a picnic, of a celebration of Washington's birthday, of a debate, of a celebration of Hallowe'en.

2. Write a notice stating that the skating is good on a pond near the school; that the pond is declared unsafe; that pupils are asked not to pass near a building that is being erected on the same street as the school on account of danger from falling timber; that pupils are requested to be very quiet in passing a house where some one lies seriously ill; that the city or village authorities have forbidden coasting down a certain street; that baseball is allowed on certain days in the park; that bonfires will be allowed in the streets in honor of some celebration; that the pupils of your school are expected to take part in the parade on Decoration Day, in any town celebration; that song birds are not to be killed; that a bridge near the school is unsafe; that all pupils must be vaccinated before a certain date.

52. Appeals.--When brief, these are in the nature of notices; when longer, they are like open letters. They aim to move people to take action benefiting some good cause, and should be as brief as is possible while giving a sufficiently full explanation of the necessity for action. Always state plainly and definitely how the action desired may be taken, to whom contributions may be sent, etc. The following is an example of a brief appeal. Like any such communication, it may be lengthened as much as is desirable, by dwelling on the good that a library would do under the conditions mentioned, by citing examples of successful school libraries elsewhere, etc. Such expansion is only necessary when the people to whom you make your appeal know little or nothing of the matter.

The public school which has just been completed near the iron foundries has no library of its own and there is no public library near it. Good reading matter is much needed there, and the pupils of other public schools in the city are earnestly requested to contribute books and magazines toward the formation of a school library. Anything in the way of interesting reading will be welcomed, in German as well as English, for there are a great many Germans among the pupils. Old magazines and old books will be of as much value in the beginning as new ones.

Contributions may be left in the office of the principal of any public school.

Exercise 88.--Write an appeal: (1) for old magazines to send to hospitals; (2) for pictures for your class room or for those of another school; (3) for books for your own library in your grade room; (4) for money for the fresh-air fund; (5) for pupils to join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; (6) for volunteers to aid in a benefit entertainment of some sort, drill, play, fair, etc.; (7) for old clothes and shoes for the very poor of the city who are suffering from the cold; (8) for examples of map making, penmanship, drawing, or some other school work to send away as models to a new school; (9) for pupils to hand in more material for the school paper.

53. Petitions.--A petition is a form of open letter, asking a favor, and addressed by a number of people to an authority who can grant the request. There is a form fixed by tradition for the opening of a petition, but the content is varied according to the conditions, and the wording of a petition needs the greatest care. As in any literary exercise, the first thought should be of the essential points you wish to cover, and a brief outline should be made, comprising an exact statement of the concession you wish granted and the best reasons you can give for the granting of it.

To the Mayor and Common Council of the city of Wakefield, Indiana, we, the undersigned, members of the Eighth Grade of Public School No. 12, respectfully petition that the west end of Elliott Park, above the driveway, be set apart for a school picnic on the afternoon of Tuesday, May the fourteenth, between two and six o'clock.

There is no other place suitable for a picnic within walking distance of the school and all the members of the Eighth are not able to pay carfare. If our petition is granted, we guarantee that no damage will be done to the trees or shrubs, that the park will be vacated promptly at six o'clock, and left in good condition.

Exercise 89.--1. Write a petition to the authorities of your city or town, asking for permission to use a certain street for coasting, for shinney, for baseball, etc.

2. Write a petition to the principal of your school, asking that a new study may be introduced into the school curriculum; that the weekly holiday be on another day; that school open later and close later, or vice versa; that punishment by staying after school be abolished; that the hours of schools be shorter and more work be done at home; that school be closed an hour earlier in order that the pupils may be present at a meeting or celebration of some kind; that your grade be allowed to use the assembly room for a debate; that you be permitted to flood a part of the playground to make a skating pond; that one of your studies be omitted from the course of study; that pupils be not marked tardy until ten minutes after the opening of school.

54. Advertisements.--The advertisement is an outgrowth of the notice, and in its simplest form is still a notice, as when the expense of printing causes the advertisement to be as brief as possible. It is then written on the same principle as the telegram, that is, using the fewest words possible to express clearly a given amount of information.

Exercise 90.--Write, after studying similar advertisements in the newspapers, advertisements for help of all kinds,--janitor, sewing girls, errand boys, maids, nurses, coachmen, farm hands, apple-pickers, telephone girls, stenographers, etc. Also advertisements for rented furnished rooms, for houses to rent, etc., giving all essential details in as few words as possible.

The above are virtually notices without having the real characteristic of the advertisement, which differs from the notice in that it not only gives information but seeks to do this in so attractive and pleasing a manner that people will be induced to buy the wares offered.

Exercise 91.--As a class exercise, take any one of the following topics, limit the number of words used to two or three hundred, and see who can write the most practical and attractive advertisement. Your aim is to state as forcibly as possible all the favorable aspects of your topic, so that they will appeal most surely to the people you wish to reach. Study the advertisements you like best and see their method. Note that you are attracted by those that seem honest and moderate, and that you are repelled by extravagant overstatements.

1. Write an advertisement for an amusement park which has been opened near your town.

2. For a country school for boys; for girls.

3. For a city school for boys; for girls.

4. For an excursion on a railroad or on a line of steamers.

5. For a summer resort in the North; for a winter resort in the South.

6. For a sanatorium in your town; for a skating rink; for a new hotel.

7. For an academy making a specialty of nature study; of modern languages; of athletics.

CHAPTER X

NARRATION

55. The Essentials of a Good Narrative.--In a diary you set down things that happen, for your own information. In letters you try to report events so that they will be understood by the person to whom you are writing and, more than this, so that they will be interesting. In a good narration you write an account of a series of connected events, so that it can be understood by any one at all, and will interest and please the greater number of your readers. It is of course much harder to address an audience whom you do not know than to try to interest people with whose peculiarities you are well acquainted; but, after all, people are very much the same in general likes and dislikes, and there are several broad, simple rules for constructing narrations, or stories, which apply to all readers.

The first thing that everybody wishes to have in a story is perfect clearness and good order. A story is a report of things as they happened, and every one wishes to learn the main events in the order in which they actually occurred. You have probably been annoyed by some one, who, in telling you a story, left out certain important steps, so that you could hardly understand how things came to happen as he related. Notice, for example, what has been left out in the following paragraph:--

As the soldiers were crossing the bridge, they noticed a man running down from a hill shouting to them and waving his arms. They could not hear what he was saying, because a strong wind was blowing away from them. As they were struggling in the water, one soldier noticed a large tree trunk floating down toward them and called to his fellows to try and save themselves by holding on to that.

Of course, so great an omission is rare; but in writing of one event following another, you must take care that your reader is never forced to stop and ask some such question as, "But you haven't told me how the soldiers came to be in the water," as he would on reading the paragraph above.

A well-told fable is often a model for clear and connected simple narration.

A crow sat on a tree, holding in his beak a large lump of cheese. A wily fox, attracted by the delicious smell, came to the foot of the tree and said to the crow, "How splendid you look up there, with your fine black feathers glistening in the sun! I wish I had feathers instead of fur. It is really not fair that you should have all the gifts, beauty and skill, and perhaps even talent. Do you sing as wonderfully as you fly?"

The crow was so pleased by this that he opened his beak wide to show off his voice. The cheese fell to the ground; the fox snapped it up and ate it, saying, "I never tasted such a delicious morsel!" He then ran off, laughing at the crow's vanity and calling over his shoulder, "Learn from this that a flatterer lives at the expense of those who listen to him."

Exercise 92.--Write simply and briefly some of the following fables, using as model the fable just given. Try to keep clear in your mind the exact order of events by imagining the whole story from beginning to end. There are in most of these subjects three or four separate little scenes, which you should try to bring visibly before your mind. It is a good plan to have an outline of the sequence of events, either written or in your head, and then develop each scene clearly and make it lifelike by conversation such as would naturally be used. The following is such an outline, by paragraphs, of a well-known fable:--

I. The old man has many sons who disturb him by quarreling among themselves.

II. On his death bed he calls them about him and gives them some small sticks, asking them if they can break them. The sons readily break them.

III. The old man ties them together tightly and asks his sons again to break them.

IV. They all try in every possible way, but cannot.

V. The old man says that if they will agree among themselves, they will be like the sticks bound together; but if they separate in quarrels, any one can injure them.

1. An ass laden with salt falls down in a stream; before he can rise the salt is dissolved away and his load is much lighter. The next time he crosses the stream he stumbles purposely and falls, but this time he is laden with sponges.

2. Two thieves who had stolen a horse fall to quarreling over who shall have the animal. While they are rolling in the dust fighting, a third thief comes along, jumps on the horse, and makes off with it.

3. An oak speaks contemptuously to a reed of its small size and yielding weakness, and boasts of its own strength and firmness. After a terrible storm the oak is blown down and the reed straightens itself unhurt.

4. A bat is caught by a weasel, who is about to devour it because it is so much like a mouse. The bat says, "I am not a mouse--you are mistaken--I am a bird. See my wings." Later the bat is caught again by a boy who wants to put it in a bird cage. "I am no bird--see my mouse's body." Thus the bat twice saves its life.

5. A cat was changed by magic to a woman. All went well until she saw a mouse run across the floor, when she ran after it and caught it.

6. A wolf in eating rapidly had swallowed a bone, which stuck in his throat. He went to the stork, who pulled it out with her beak, and then asked for pay for the service. The wolf said the stork could consider herself lucky that she had not had her head bitten off.

7. A weasel slipped into a barn through a small hole. There he ate so much grain that he was too fat to go out at the same hole, and was caught by the farmer.

8. The ass, seeing how much petting a little dog gets, tries to imitate its ways, prances about, and attempts to lie down at the feet of his mistress. He is driven back to the stable.

9. A sheep, going away for the day, cautions her little lambs not to open the door to any one, except to her, and she will say Mariati, so that they will recognize her. A wolf, hidden near, overhears the password, knocks on the door, and gives the right word; but the lambs, to be doubly sure, ask to see what color feet he has. They are black and betray him, so that the door is not opened.

56. Autobiography.--There is one form of narration where it is almost impossible to get the events of your story in the wrong order, and that is autobiography, for in this you are telling the facts of your own life as they occurred, from month to month or year to year. In this form, as in narration, however, there is an important principle to bear in mind. Your material must be well chosen; that is, you must select only the important events in your life. Trivial and uninteresting details must be left out. To do this you must use your judgment, and try to put yourself in the place of your reader, and think what he would like to know. (If your great-grandfather had written his autobiography when he was your age, what would you have liked to know of his life? If Pocohontas had written her autobiography, what would most interest you?)

Exercise 93.--I. Write your own autobiography up to the present date, and then continue in the same style, telling the story of your life as you would like best to have it.

II. Write an imaginary autobiography of:--

1. The starch-box after it was empty; a boy made a doll's wagon of it for his little sister. Forgotten in the street, it was picked up by two poor children, and taken home, where an invalid brother made it into a window box for flowers.

2. A gold dollar. Stamped in the mint, sent to the bank, given to a child for a birthday present, sent by her to the missionaries in Africa, lost there, and hung around the neck of a little black child.

3. A drop of rain--all its life from the cloud to the earth, to the brook, to the river, to the sea, back to the cloud again.

4. A knife. Made by Indian hunters, bought by white trappers, used on the plains, slipped into a package of furs sent to Paris to be made up into coats, and then used as a paper-cutter.

5. Similarly, invent stories for a handkerchief, a diamond, a doll, a knapsack, a book, a street car, a lamp, a sword, a tea kettle, a wagon, an old house, a dollar bill, a pencil, a mirror, an old apple tree, a thimble, a high tortoise-shell comb, a saddle, a suit of armor, a chair.

III. Write autobiographies of a cat, a dog, a horse, an elephant, a polar bear, a fox, a rabbit, a canary bird, a hen, a trained pig, a poodle, a mouse, a woodchuck, a squirrel.

IV. Write the account of the course of a river as told by itself, from the time it rises from a spring till it flows into the ocean.

V. Write the autobiography of any statue that you know, from the block of marble to its present place.

57. Biography.--In writing a biography it is not enough to select your facts with good judgment, and to arrange them in the order of their occurrence. A still more careful arrangement is needed, and this is usually provided for by grouping the facts of a life into several main divisions. For instance, in writing your mother's biography, you might make some such general division or outline as the following:--

I. Childhood in New England--village school; on a farm.

II. Boarding-school life. Studies--beginning of interest in history. Visits to school friends in the vacation. The old home is destroyed by fire.

III. Life in New York, as teacher of history in a private school. Summer abroad with several of the pupils.

IV. Early married life in New York; boarding-house, later a small apartment.

V. Removal to suburban town. Children of the family. General character of family life.

Under these various headings you can group all the stories you can induce your mother to tell you of her past life. Without such broad divisions into periods it is impossible to write all the varied facts of a biography in such a manner that your reader gets a clear and connected idea of the course of events.

Exercise 94.--Group into natural divisions the following facts:--

Henry Allen was married in 1875. His father was a lumber merchant. When he retired from business, he wrote an account of his life. As a boy he was fond of out-of-door life. He had three children. When he was a young man, he was sent up into Canada to look after some timber lands of his father's. He stayed there in the woods with the Indians for two years. He was born in 1840. He lived in Portland, Maine, until he was sixteen. When his father died in 1867, he carried on the lumber business. He went two years to Bowdoin College. He was once mayor of Hartford. He lived in Boston from 1856 to 1875. He died in 1900 in Hartford. He brought up his children to know the woods and fields better than schools. He was one of the first people to advocate nature study. He was a very successful business man. He founded a school of forestry. He married a Canadian girl whom he met on a second visit to the forest in 1870.