Note to teachers. - All the written exercises of the pupils should be inspected at intervals by the teacher, and a certain proportion of the original compositions should be carefully read and criticised by the teacher, who should note in the margin the points wherein the pupil is to correct or improve. There is a list of marks for criticism given in Appendix I. The teacher will at first have to use only such marks of criticism as the pupils are ready to profit by. As the study continues, more and more of the marks may be employed. The compositions that have been criticised by the teacher should be corrected by the pupil in red ink, between the lines, and then shown again to the teacher. If the changes made are satisfactory, and the composition is an important one, it should be rewritten in the same book.

An important aim with the teacher, however, should be to teach each pupil to criticise and improve his own work. As the study advances, the pupil should become more and more able, by the help of the text-book and the instructions of the teacher, to criticise his own writing with certainty, correctness, and even pleasure. Of course the points in which the pupil is to criticise his work should at first be few and simple. They may progressively increase in number and difficulty, but the teacher should always afford the pupils in this all possible guidance and assistance. Nor can the teacher's own direct criticism of some proportion of the compositions ever be entirely dispensed with, though the ideal to be worked toward is the pupil's well-instructed but independent and self-helping criticism.

CHAPTER III

PARAGRAPHING

WHEN we write descriptions, or other compositions of considerable length, they are often or generally clearer and easier to read if in some way it is made plain where one part or division ends and the next begins. For this reason, compositions are almost always divided into parts or sections called paragraphs. The beginning of a paragraph is marked by placing the first word of it a little to the right of where the lines of writing or print regularly begin. This setting of a word to the right of the other first words of the lines is called indention. The word "when" at the beginning of this paragraph is indented. If you turn to page 12 in this book, you will see the paragraphs all marked by indentions. The words "The," "Or," "Sometimes," "Then," and so on, are indented, because they begin new paragraphs.

Now, since each paragraph stands for a distinct part of the plan of a composition, it has a distinct subject of its own. This subject is called the topic of the paragraph.

In the following description there are, as the indentions show, five paragraphs. The topics of them may be stated and subdivided thus:

1. The scene in the garret (including "introduction” and “glance ”)

a. Dimness of the place (introduction)

b. The white-haired shoemaker (glance view)

2. The old man's voice

3. His appearance

a. Tools, etc., about him

b. His face

white beard and hair

hollow cheeks

unnaturally bright eyes

c. His clothing
shirt

other garments

4. Special features of the man

a. His thin hands.

b. His vacant gaze

c. His habit of wandering in attention

5. His absent-mindedness

a. Unconscious movements

b. Difficulty of arousing him.

The Shoemaker of the Bastille. (From A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, Ch. VI.)

The garret, built to be a dry depository for firewood and the like, was dim and dark. Such a scanty portion of light was admitted, that it was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything. Yet, with his back toward the door, and his face toward the window, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

When he spoke the faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made

and disuse.

long and long ago.

The half-opened door was opened a little farther and secured at that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman, with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labor. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.

Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on, in regular changes, without a moment's intermission. The task of recalling him from the vacancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or

endeavoring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.

A study of these, or of any well-constructed paragraphs, will show that paragraphs, like whole compositions, must have not only well-selected details, but also completeness, unity, and plan.

The planning of paragraphs we shall study later (Chapter VIII); but that a paragraph should be complete, and that it should be a unit, are points already clear, because each paragraph has its own subject or topic. The outline above given states the five topics in the last selection. If, in this selection, the writer had, in the second paragraph, which treats of the old man's voice, described in part his clothing, this paragraph would have lacked the unity it now has. Every sentence in that paragraph relates to the voice which is being described. Or if, in the next paragraph, any important or striking detail, necessary to a clear and vivid picture of the old man's appearance, had been omitted, that paragraph would have lacked completeness. Unity and completeness, in compositions and in paragraphs, seem perhaps very simple and plain matters to be spoken of so much, but careless and uninstructed writers so often fail to think of these qualities and to secure them, that their importance must be insisted upon frequently.

A carefully written piece of composition may always be outlined, paragraph by paragraph, much as the selection just given was outlined; and all school compositions should be so outlined before being writ