as the ride itself. And yet when you consider it as a
means to an end, as a subtle, elastic, and infinitely useful craft,
the method of writing is not uninteresting even to those who have to
learn and not to teach it. The technique of composition has to do with
words. We are most of us inapt with words; even when ideas begin to
come plentifully they too often remain vague, shapeless, ineffective,
for want of words to name them. And words can be taught--not merely
the words themselves, but their power, their suggestiveness, their
rightness or wrongness for the meaning sought. The technique of
writing has to do with sentences. Good thinking makes good sentences,
but the sentence must be flexible if it is to ease the thought. We can
learn its elasticity, we can practice the flow of clauses, until the
wooden declaration which leaves half unexpressed gives place to a
fluent and accurate transcript of the mind, form fitting substance as
the vase the water within it. This technique has to do with
paragraphs. The critic knows how few even among our professional
writers master their paragraphs. It is not a dead, fixed form that is
to be sought. It is rather a flexible development, which grows beneath
the reader's eye until the thought is opened with vigor and with
truth. It is interesting to search in the paragraph of an ineffective
editorial, an article, or theme, for the sentence that embodies the
thought; to find it dropped like a turkey's egg where the first
opportunity offers, or hidden by the rank growth of comment and
reflection about it. Such research is illuminating for those who do
not believe in the teaching of composition; and if it begins at home,
so much the better. And finally, the technique of writing has to do
with the whole, whether sonnet, or business letter, or report to a
board of directors. How to lead one thought into another; how to
exclude the irrelevant; how to weigh upon that which is important; how
to hold together the whole structure so that the subject, all the
subject, and nothing but the subject shall be laid before the reader;
this requires good thinking, but good thinking without technical skill
is like a strong arm in tennis without facility in the strokes.

The program I have outlined is simpler in theory than in practice. In
practice, it is easier to discover the disorder than the thought which
it confuses; in practice, technical skill must be forced upon
undergraduates unaccustomed to thoro