Even the humblest person should not open his mouth or take up his pen
voluntarily unless he can express himself clearly; and if he has any
thought to express that is worth expressing, and wants to express it,
he will sooner or later find a satisfactory way of expressing it.
The thing that most of us wish to find out is, how to write with force.
Force is attained in various ways, summarized as follows:
1. By using words which are in themselves expressive.
2. By placing those words in emphatic positions in the sentence.
3. By varying the length and form of successive sentences so that the
reader or hearer shall never be wearied by monotony.
4. By figures of speech, or constant comparison and illustration,
and making words suggest ten times as much as they say.
5. By keeping persistently at one idea, though from every possible
point of view and without repetition of any kind, till that idea has
sunk into the mind of the hearer and has been fully comprehended.
Force is destroyed by the---Vice of repetition with slight change or
addition; Vice of monotony in the words, sentences or paragraphs;
Vice of over-literalness and exactness; Vice of trying to emphasize more
than one thing at a time; Vice of using many words with little meaning;
or words barren of suggestiveness and destitute of figures of speech;
and its opposite, the Vice of overloading the style with so many figures
of speech and so much suggestion and variety as to disgust or confuse.
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