Читать книгу Composition-Rhetoric - Stratton D. Brooks - Страница 21

Determine the topic statements of the following paragraphs. If one is not expressed, make one.

1. No less valuable is the mental stimulus of play. The child is trained by it to quick perception, rapid judgment, prompt decision. His imagination cunningly suggests a thousand things to be done, and then trains the will and every power of body and mind in the effort to do them. The sports of childhood are admirably adapted to quicken the senses and sharpen the wits. Nature has effective ways in her school of securing the exercise which is needed to develop every mental and every bodily power. She fills the activity brimful of enjoyment, and then gives her children freedom, assured that they will be their own best teachers.

—Bradley

2. Our Common Law comes from England, and originated there in custom. It is often called the unwritten law, because unwritten in origin, though there are now many books describing it. Its principles originated as habits of the people, five hundred, eight hundred, years ago, perhaps some of them back in the time when the half-savage Saxons landed on the shores of England. When the time came that the government, through its courts, punished the breach of a custom, from that time the custom was a law. And so the English people acquired these laws, one after another, just as they were acquiring at the same time the habits of making roads, using forks at table, manufacturing, meeting in Parliament, using firearms, and all the other habits of civilization. When the colonists came to America, they brought the English Common Law with them, not in a book, but in their minds, a part of their life, like their religion.

—Clark: The Government.

3. Accuracy is always to be striven for but it can never be attained. This fact is only fully realized by scientific workers. The banker can be accurate because he only counts or weighs masses of metal which he assumes to be exactly equal. The Master of the Mint knows that two coins are never exactly equal in weight, although he strives by improving machinery and processes to make the differences as small as possible. When the utmost care is taken, the finest balances which have been constructed can weigh 1 lb. of a metal with an uncertainty less than the hundredth part of a grain. In other words, the weight is not accurate, but the inaccuracy is very small. No person is so stupid as not to feel sure that the height of a man he sees is between 3 ft. and 9 ft.; some are able by the eye to estimate the height as between 5 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 8 in.; measurement may show it to be between 5 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 7 in., but to go closer than that requires many precautions. Training in observation and the use of delicate instruments thus narrow the limits of approximation. Similarly with regard to space and time, there are instruments with which one millionth of an inch, or of a second, can be measured, but even this approximation, although far closer than is ever practically necessary, is not accuracy. In the statement of measurements there is no meaning in more than six significant figures, and only the most careful observations can be trusted so far. The height of Mount Everest is given as 29,002 feet; but here the fifth figure is meaningless, the height of that mountain not being known so accurately that two feet more or less would be detected. Similarly, the radius of the earth is sometimes given as 3963.295833 miles, whereas no observation can get nearer the truth than 3963.30 miles.

—Mill: The Realm of Nature. (Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner's Sons.)

4. The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all the inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial prejudices, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family. In the seventeenth century the inhabitants of London were for almost every practical purpose farther from Reading than they are now from Edinburgh, and farther from Edinburgh than they are now from Vienna.

—Macaulay: History of England.

5. He touched New England at every point. He was born a frontiersman. He was bred a farmer. He was a fisherman in the mountain brooks and off the shore. He never forgot his origin, and he never was ashamed of it. Amid all the care and honor of his great place here he was homesick for the company of his old neighbors and friends. Whether he stood in Washington, the unchallenged prince and chief in the Senate, or in foreign lands, the kingliest man of his time in the presence of kings, his heart was in New England. When the spring came, he heard far off the fife bird and the bobolink calling him to his New Hampshire mountains, or of the waves on the shore at Marshfield alluring him with a sweeter than siren's voice to his home by the summer sea.

—George F. Hoar: Daniel Webster.

6. Nor must I forget the suddenly changing seasons of the northern clime. There is no long and lingering spring, unfolding leaf and blossom one by one; no long and lingering autumn, pompous with many-colored leaves and the glow of Indian summer. But winter and summer are wonderful, and pass into each other. The quail has hardly ceased piping in the corn when winter, from the folds of trailing clouds, sows broadcast over the land snow, icicles, and rattling hail. The days wane apace. Erelong the sun hardly rises above the horizon, or does not rise at all. The moon and the stars shine through the day; only at noon they are pale and wan, and in the southern sky a red, fiery glow, as of a sunset, burns along the horizon and then goes out. And pleasantly under the silver moon, and under the silent, solemn stars, ring the steel shoes of the skaters on the frozen sea, and voices, and the sound of bells.

—Longfellow: Rural Life in Sweden.

7. Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance, with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material amusement, and not one thought to rub against another while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox is empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright on a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.

—Robert Louis Stevenson. (Copyright, by Charles Scribner's Sons.)

B. Examine the themes which you have written. Does each paragraph have a topic statement? Have you introduced sentences which do not bear upon this topic statement? Are the paragraphs real ones treating of a single topic, or are they merely groups of sentences written together without any close connection in thought?

+Theme XVIII.+—State two or three advantages of public high schools over private boarding schools. Use each as a topic statement and develop it into a short paragraph.

(Add to each topic statement such sentences as will prove to a pupil of your own age that the topic statement states a real advantage. Include in each paragraph only that which bears upon the topic statement. Consider the definition of a paragraph on page 68. Does this definition apply to your paragraphs?)

+39. Reproduction of the Thought of a Paragraph.+—Our ability to reproduce the thought of what we read will depend largely upon our ability to select the topic statements. In preparing a lesson for recitation it is evident that we must first determine definitely the topic statement of each paragraph. These may bear upon one general subject or upon different subjects. The three paragraphs on page 67 are all concerned with one subject, the uses of rivers. A pupil preparing to recite them would have in mind, when he went to class, an outline about as follows:—

General subject: The uses of rivers.

First topic statement: The fertility of flood plains is improved by

irrigation.

Second topic statement: Streams are the easiest routes of travel and

commerce.

Third topic statement: Man is indebted to streams for beauty of scenery.

While such a clear statement is the first step toward a proper understanding of the lesson, it is not enough. In order to understand thoroughly a topic statement, we need explanation or illustration. The idea is not really our own until we have thought about it in its relations to other knowledge already in our possession. In order to know whether you understand the topic statements, the teacher will ask you to discuss them. This may be done by telling what the writer said about them, or by giving thoughts and illustrations of your own, but best of all, by doing both. It is necessary, then, to know in what way the writer develops each topic statement.

Read the following paragraph:—

The most productive lands in the world are flood plains. At every period of high water, a stream brings down mantle rock from the higher grounds, and deposits it as a layer of fine sediment over its flood plain. A soil thus frequently enriched and renewed is literally inexhaustible. In a rough, hilly, or mountainous country the finest farms and the densest population are found on the "bottom lands" along the streams. The flood plain most famous in history is that of the river Nile in Egypt. For a distance of 1500 miles above its mouth this river flows through a rainless desert, and has no tributary. The heavy spring rains which fall upon the highlands about its sources produce in summer a rise of the water, which overflows the valley on either side. Thus the lower Nile valley became one of the earliest centers of civilization, and has supported a dense population for 7000 years. The conditions in Mesopotamia, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, are similar to those along the lower Nile, and in ancient times this region was the seat of a civilization perhaps older than that of Egypt. The flood plains of the Ganges in India, and the Hoang in China, are the most extensive in the world, and in modern times the most populous. The alluvial valley of the Mississippi is extremely productive of corn, cotton, and sugar cane.

—Dryer: Lessons in Physical Geography.

Notice that the first sentence gives the topic statement, flood plains are productive. The second and third sentences tell why this is so, and the rest of the paragraph is given up to illustrations.

In preparing this paragraph for recitation the pupil should have in mind an outline about as follows:—

Topic statement: Flood plains are the most productive lands in the world.

1. Reasons.

2. Examples: (a) Bottom lands. (b) Nile. (c) Tigris and Euphrates. (d) Ganges. (e) Hoang. (f) Mississippi.

In order to make such an outline, the relative importance of the ideas in the paragraph must be mastered. A recitation that omitted the topic statement or the reasons would be defective, while one that omitted one or more of the examples might be perfect, especially if the pupil could furnish other examples from his own knowledge. The illustration about bottom lands is a general one, and should suggest specific cases that could be included in the recitation. The details in regard to the Nile might be included if they happened to be recalled at the time of the recitation, but even the omission of all mention of the Nile might not materially detract from the value of the recitation. The effort to remember minor details hinders real thought-getting power.

It is better not to write this outline. The use of notes or written outlines at the time of the recitation soon establishes a habit of dependence that renders real scholarship an impossibility. With such an analysis of the thought clearly in mind, the pupil need not attempt to remember the language of the writer.