The Prison Mirror

By Mr. J. A. K.

Introduction

Although almost everybody is a writer, and a poet, more or less, and though the best love letter can be written when its author begins without knowing just what he wants to write about, a few can put their thoughts on paper so that every ordinary reader at a glance may grasp or feel their meaning. People who cannot speak or place on paper their ideas clearly can do so if but they wish to learn to put in words exactly what they think and feel.

Now, at one time or another, all of us are eager to express our innermost ideas or emotions explicitly, emphatically, elegantly. There is nothing dearer than the power of self-expression. How can you acquire it?

From many years of earnest, patient study and practice, with the best of books, we undertake to outline here for you, MIRROR readers, what will help you understand much better how to write well, read well, or appreciate much more the gems of literature, which will broaden the horizon of your views toward the finest things that life can offer.

We can neither teach nor learn the art of self-expression in a few short lessons; but we can begin to master it when we have and know how to handle its tools. We give to you these tools; we undertake to state concisely and precisely the principles of composition.

This "Outline on Writing" will head a series of articles, as short and clear and to the point as possible; so that, by studying or keeping them for reference, you may learn not only all the principles of writing but also the book-treasures that will teach you and delight you.

Classification

All writing is the outcome of man's two most irresistible expressions: (1) thought and (2) feeling. The first is the literature of intellect; the second, the literature of emotion. One is dealing with such dry-cut facts as figures in arithmetic; the other, with so ever-fresh and vivid narratives as the best of poetry--Luke's second chapter of the New Testament. Both are related as a person's head and heart; both may be developed by the two methods deductive and inductive to be discussed later; and both form the four divisions of all written or oral expression: (1) exposition, (2) description, (3) narration, and (4) versification.

The last of these four classifications will receive the most extensive treatment, not because each reader is expected to become a finished poet, which would place the next poetical edition of The Mirror on the peak of poetry, nor so much because only the study and practice of verse has made and can make the authors of the ages, but because all readers need this knowledge to discover and appreciate the deeper truths and higher ideals of life.

I

EXPOSITION

Its Processes the Same as in DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION

I. Exposition is the clear-cut trail of thought that travels either over the field of facts or through the realm of fancy. Such an explanation of realities or of ideas is the outcome of the general material of all writing--experience.

To expound such concrete things as what our organs sense is fact; to find the meaning of a fact or facts, by rallying our wits with the abstract as the unseen objects, is interpretation. These two, being as the contrast of man and God, must be remembered; so the plan of any form of writing may be either deductive or inductive.

The first of the two preceding paragraphs is deductive, because it states something right out at the beginning to be proved by what there follows, which is not extensive here for the sake of brevity. The second paragraph declares two different truths and draws a third; this conclusion is inductive.

It is apparent, then, that to use these two methods advantageously, the writer select subject-matter for the thesis, theme, objective: the heart or kernel of the whole discourse. He should ask himself, "What do I want to say? How must I say it?" Then he must teach himself, "Your subject must be of intrinsic interest and value; waste no time and effort where you feel no challenge; choose only significant topics. Then learn to be master of your material; it is futile to try to make clear to others what is obscure to you."

And here we have the happy association of the two elements that bring about good writing: (1) Substance or subject-matter and (2) technique, or skill in expression.

The substance consists of facts, feelings, and ideas, which any one may store in one's experience-reservoir by observing, reading, reflecting, and recording useful material: experienced emotions recollected in tranquility from the substance of all art.

The technique depends upon the dictates of common sense, which any ordinary thinker plainly sees throughout the following processes in writing:

A. Determining the Subject is done by-
1. A preliminary summary; as, I intend to discuss: (a) Unity, the oneness and completeness of composition, (b) coherence, order and connection, and (c) Emphasis, position and proportion;
2. Careful selection of title, which here would be "The Three Chief Requisites of Composition";
3. Introduction and conclusion in a long theme, transitional devices from one sentence or paragraph to another, and evidences of unity in the form of references to the title. As the put-together parts can make an automobile; so the connection of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters form this unity, totality-this individuality in composition, which an earnest student finds in thorough treaties such as Composition for College Students ($2.00, from any bookstore) and volumes under "Literature" in the local library catalogue.

B. Adjusting the subject to space is the second step. One should always compose under definite specifications. A column in The Mirror must omit the details that might be needed for the same subject to fill three columns. The restrictive and specific subject-matter is more preferable.

C. Determining the thesis or objective means as much as, or more than, the choice of a title. In fact, the greatest masters use but titles condensed from the theses thereof. Thus a double force works where a single one would not impress the reader half as much as both do; as, for example, "Outline on Writing" is the core out of the heart to state concisely and precisely the principles of composition," about which the subject-matter of this and of the other sequent essays will revolve, accumulate, from one accretion, as an oyster's pearl-excretion round an irritating mote. These two things, then, one needs remember:
1. The entire energy of composition should be focused upon an objective or a goal;
2. There are two types of objectives: (a) single and indivisible and (b) a series of coördinated points headed by or based upon one point-the "point," exactly!

What time and pain readers and listeners would be spared if writers and speakers could but constantly spy and drive at that point! (Study such pointed works as Aesop's Fables, Plato's Dialogues, Darwin's The Origin of Species, and others that only the Bible can surpass.)

D. Determining the chief details is the fourth problem following, after the objective has been riveted in the eye of the mind, as naturally as information and resources for the first flight from New York to Paris were determined after Lindbergh had decided his historic goal. As he had to acquaint himself with more than merely steering, keeping awake, overcoming atmospheric dangers, such as sleet and fog, so the writer must familiarize himself with further data for a determined subject.

E. The next step is determining the plan. For a constructor's chosen site, an architect draws a clear design, as Lindbergh drew a careful plan toward his perilous project. In everything success depends upon a plan, the scheme of all creation, traceable everywhere, the latent order leading to an unmistakable purpose.

Often the plan is such by nature that the author must follow it faithfully, as in the manufacturing of any article, which requires the mechanical or enumerative treatment; or as in description, in which the details are contiguous in space, and whereon the describer must comply with the law of contiguity.

Then, too, there are suggested facts and ideas resembling or contrasting those considered by the writer; much of what is usually called originality and imagination depends on his facility in perceiving or remembering resemblances and differences and on his adroitness in making use of their similarity.

Another relationship determining the development and arrangement of a discourse is that of cause and effect: all narration, following the chronological order, or in such exposition as Palmer's "Self-Cultivation in English" or, reversed to effect and cause, in John Fiske's "Taxation and Government," John Ruskin's "The Bow of a Boat," and other similarly expository writings developed by a logical plan.

Thus the plan can be determined by-
1. The order of treatment: (a) mechanical enumerative, as telling step by step the making of something, (b) chronological, as narrating happenings, historic or fictitious events, and (c) logical, as expounding the unknown from the known or vice versa.

Each of these three methods of developing a subject predetermines what the plan must be--deductive or inductive. Thus premeditation of the entire theme leads to outlining the whole composition.

F. Making the outline, then, is like arraying marshalled armies into action. As a commander first assembles and arrays his armies and then orders them to charge, so an author gathers and arranges his material before he actually begins the writing of the whole premeditated plan; or else defeat is inevitable. It was strategy on the part of Pershing that the first All-American operation in the World War resulted in the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient, and it must be strategy by which the writer can arrive at his objective forcibly, victoriously. Having determined the subject, adjusted the subject to space, determined the objective, gathered the chief details, and decided upon the plan, the skillful writer takes the final preparatory step in making the outline, which may be topical, paragraphic, or analytical.

1. The topical outline is the simplest of the three types, useful in short composition about subject in which the writer is thoroughly familiar, as the local baseball reporter, who may jot on paper, or bear in mind, each played-game's principle topics and subdivisions indicated by words or phrases; as--
I. Score 22 to 11;
A. Plate crossed 14 times in first inning:
II. Musel's ankle injured;
III. Hits;
A. Errors plenty;
(Page 2, Col.4)
OUTLINE ON WRITING

(Continued from page 1)

IV. The M. S. P.'s on the winning side now.

The faults of this kind of outline are obvious. It does not take the trouble to explain as to who crossed the plate; where, why, or how badly the player's ankle was sprained; how many hits and errors and who made them—all of which may slip out of the writer's mind before he finishes the article.

2. The paragraphic outline avoids the faults of the topical outline, because it consists of a series of sentences, each embodying the topic or substance of a paragraph, like the following topics on the subject "Culture and Technique":

I. Those who are able thinkers possess culture; those who are apt actors possess technique.

II. The person who translates a foreign language gains for himself; the one who changes a spur-plug loses energy whereby only the automobile profits.

III. Culture is the child of experience, through many centuries, named "tradition"; technique is the offspring of science, which develops so amazingly in half a century, as in the U. S. A.

IV. Technique has never rendered obsolete old-fashioned culture, without which no civilization can endure.

V. Without traditional culture, youths of this machine age stagger, terrified at the emptiness of their minds and hearts, not knowing how to devote themselves, nor what to disavow; reflection drives them to despair.

VI. Sad, feeling futile at the first romantics, searching for Homeric visions, for Christian meditation, waiting for a millennium—emancipation, perhaps not far away, sobered humanity will take pity on its frantic factories and mad mechanics and set forth on a wild search for an ideal.

VII. All Greco-Latin civilization was based on culture; all European-American modernity is built on science—one spirit, the other skill: so culture will remain on the main, as it has always been; but technique, unable to survive alone, will re-embrace its mother culture, which will cease opposing, and the two united thus will hasten the millennium.

3. The analytical outline, the third and final, affords advantages far better than those of the preceding outline, which is too extensive here because the importance and the interest of the theme therein demands such an extensiveness. The analytical outline sets forth not only topical sentences, like those in the foregoing outline, but also sub-topical sentences so arranged as not to leave room for an error, for false commencing or concluding. Thus this third outline is the best of the three the writer should pursue.

No pattern of it needs be set upon these pages; since it is aptly illustrated by the whole of this "Outline on Writing," on which two or three text books may be based.

Such as these, then, are the characteristic processes in all forms of writing: exposition, description, narration, and versification—each of which will be explained in the succeeding series of these articles under "Outline on Writing."

(To Be Continued Next Week)