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An Introductory Course In Argumentation (1906)
An Introductory Course In Argumentation - 1906 Author:Frances Melville Perry Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PRESENTATION OF MATERIAL — THE FORENSIC THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FORENSIC When the brief is completed the problem of general structure is solved. The solutio... more »n is not necessarily unalterable. If the student in the heat of writing strikes a truer relationship of parts than he discovered in making the brief, he should not spare himself the trouble of readjusting the parts of the brief, even though his instructor has pronounced the brief acceptable. Revision resulting from such afterthoughts will not infrequently be necessary until the student has gained real proficiency in brief drawing. The student should not, however, begin to write with the expectation of making changes in structure. He should have worked over his brief till he feels that he has reached a unified, coherent, and emphatic arrangement of material. He is then able to concentrate his attention upon the problem of presenting what he has to say with as much force and charm of style as he can command. There is no peculiar law for argumentation of the highest order, — that is, argumentation addressed to an audience whose intelligence is assumed to be equal to the writer's, — no pattern to which all must conform. There is as much room for individuality here as in any field of literature. Given the same brief, we may have as many different developments of it as there are individuals to experiment with it, if only each writes naturally. But very often, at first, the writer feels all his pleasure and power in composition slipping away as he sits down toexpand his unyielding brief into a forensic. A statement of propositions and supporting evidence almost repellent in its formality and rigidness is apt to be the result when the student writes for the first time under the dominance of a brief. If he is not pleased with...« less