Composition-Rhetoric by Stratton D. Brooks
page 71 of 596 (11%)
page 71 of 596 (11%)
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occasion. When the time came, everybody had his ears so wide open, to hear
the universal ejaculation of Boo,--the word agreed upon,--that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fiji Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation.--Holmes. Gutenberg did a great deal of his work in secret, for he thought it was much better that his neighbors should know nothing of what he was doing. So he looked for a workshop where no one would be likely to find him. He was now living in Strasburg, and there was in that city a ruined old building where, long before his time, a number of monks had lived. There was one room in the building which needed only a little repairing to make it fit to be used. So he got the right to repair the room and use it as his workshop. In all good writing we find a similar dependence in thought. Each sentence takes a meaning because of its relation to some other. The personal pronouns and pronominal adjectives, adverbial phrases indicating time or place, conjunctions, and such expressions as _certainly, however, on the other hand_, etc., are used to indicate more or less directly a relation in thought between the phrase or sentence in which they occur and some preceding one. If the reader cannot readily determine to what they refer, the meaning becomes obscure or ambiguous. The pronominal adjectives and the personal pronouns are especially likely to be used in such a way as to cause ambiguity. Care must be taken to use them so as to keep the meaning clear, and your own good sense will help you in this more than rules. Notice in your reading how frequently expressions similar to those mentioned above are used. |
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