of
pupils from that school who have gone directly into mills or other work
of the kind, and if you describe vividly just what is meant by manual
training. If your description is in general terms they may grant you
your principle, and then out of mere inertia and a vague feeling against
change vote the other way.

A rough test for concreteness is your vocabulary: if your words are
mostly Anglo-Saxon you will usually be talking about concrete things; if
it is Latinate and polysyllabic it is probably abstract and general.
Most of the things and actions of everyday life, the individual things
like "walls" and "puppies," "summer" and "boys," "buying" and "selling,"
"praying" and "singing," have names belonging to the Anglo-Saxon part of
the language; and though there are many exceptions, like "tables," and
"telephones," and "professors," yet the more your vocabulary consists of
the non-Latinate words, the more likely it is to be concrete, and
therefore to keep your readers' attention and feelings alive. Use the
simple terms of everyday life, therefore, rather than the learned words
which would serve you if you were generalizing from many cases. Stick to
the single case before you and to the interests of the particular people
you are trying to win over. To touch their feelings remember that you
must talk about the things they have feelings about.

The use of similes and metaphors and other figurative language raises a
difficult question. On the whole, perhaps the best advice about using
them is, Don't unless you have to. In other words, where a figure of
speech is a necessity of expression, where you cannot make your thought
clear and impart to it the warmth of feeling with which it is clothed in
your own mind except by a touch of imaginative color, then use a figure
of speech, if one flashes itself on your mind. If you add it
deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note;
if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought
and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into
an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of
insincerity is fatal to the persuasiveness of an argument.

The value of the figure of speech is chiefly in giving expression to
feelings which cannot be set forth in abstract words, the whole of whose
meaning can be defined: in the connotation of words--that indefinable
part of their meaning which consists in their associ