Literature Author:John Henry Newman 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: RHETORICAL STUDIES A. STRUCTURE For the student of composition the problem of structure is perhaps a more practical one than that of style. The secrets of ... more »an effective style cannot easily be communicated; they involve too much of the merely personal and temperamental to admit of precise and intelligible statement. We may feel the beauty of a lyric or a bit of prose, but we cannot often determine with any degree of confidence the precise technical processes, if any, to which the beauty of the lyric or the bit of prose is due. But it is otherwise with the element of structure. Here we have an element, organic, it is true, to the literary product, yet capable, as the scientists say, of isolation, and open to very searching and complete examination. It is a matter of no great difficulty, for example, to lay bare the framework of an essay, to investigate the size, functions and relations of the various parts and determine the suitableness of the framework to the body of thought and statement it is meant to support. The question of structure being at bottom one of order, regularity, method in the presentation of material is often a disagreeable one for the student of composition. To no discipline is the undeveloped mind more recalcitrant than to the discipline of orderly, coherent thinking. Young people will sometimes find the putting of their thoughts on paper a process of sheer delight; but to be told first to order their thoughts into a clear- cut and consistent plan is likely to cause them a sinking of the heart. Yet the principles, the technique of structure, must be mastered by the student sooner or later, and, what is important to note, they can be mastered and applied by him without detriment to freshness and spontaneity of expression. It is in this connection that N...« less