must not
tarry for accessions of language. Stumble, flounder if you must, yea,
rearrange your ideas even as you present them, but press resolutely ahead,
comforting yourself with the assurance that in the heat and stress of
circumstances a man rarely does his work precisely as he wishes. When you
have finished the discussion, repeat it immediately--and with no more
loitering than before. You will find that your ideas have shifted and
enlarged, and that more appropriate words have become available. Further
repetitions will assist you the more. But the goal you should set
yourself, as you proceed from topic to topic, is the attainment of the
power to be at your best in the first discussion. You may never reach this
goal, but at least you may approach it.

That the assignments in this chapter may assist you in making your
vocabulary accurate, you should perform some of them in another way. When
you have selected a topic, you should first of all think it through. In
doing this, arrange your ideas as consistently and logically as you can,
and test them with your reason. Then set them forth in language which
shall be lucid and exact. Tolerate no slipshod diction, no vaguely
rendered general meanings. Send every sentence, every word like a skilful
drop-kick--straight above the crossbar. When you have done your best with
the topic, lay it by for a space. Time is a great revealer of hidden
defects, and you must not regard your labors as ended until your
achievement is the maturest possible for you. If the quantity of what you
accomplish is meager, suffer no distress on that account. The desideratum
now is not quantity, but quality.

The assignments in this chapter will do less toward making your vocabulary
wide than toward making it facile and precise. To be sure, they will now
and then set you to hunting for words that are new. Better still, they
will give you a mastery over some of your outlying words--words known to
your eyes or ears but not to your tongue. But these advantages will be
somewhat incidental. Means for the systematic extension of your verbal
domain into regions as yet unexplored by you, are reserved for the later
chapters of this book.

<2. A Vocabulary for Speech or for Writing?>

In the second place, are we to develop a vocabulary for oral discourse or
a vocabulary for writing? It may be that our chief impediment or our chief
ambition lies in one field rather than in the other. Nevertheless we
should st