I. The function of the setting 2. The handling of the setting III. EFFECTIVENESS IN NARRATION T OF WRITING ENGLISH HAPTER I-INTRODUCTION THE FIELD OF COMPOSITION in learning to write will be determined very spirit in which we go about our work. This will depend in no small measure on the clearness e see how our ability to write is related to our remote well-being. If we attach no importance g, we shall probably drudge through the hours of slave would, cursing fate because of our hard lot, the labor wasted in a vain attempt to make useIf, on the other hand, we write with the full it unceasing practice will some time result advanshall find that learning to put thoughts on paper rum work and is not impossibly difficult. At the let us ask ourselves how skill in composition, and designed to develop that skill, may contribute to a COMPOSITION A KIND OF COMMUNICATION find our question partly answered as soon as we the essential character of writing. Writing is not s art that died with the Ancients, the Elizabethans, orians. Neither is it a magic skill that belongs exany specially favored class of people now living. mere educational device placed in the hands of r the purpose of forcing students to compare their T WRIT. ENG. - 2 17 own efforts with the masterpieces of a few literary giants whose fame is secure in the idealized past. Viewed rightly, it is only a very necessary means of communication which men have developed in order that they might be clearly and permanently understood on an endless variety of matters. Consequently, instead of being an activity in which only a few persons engage, or in which many of us engage only on exceptional occasions, it is one in which all of us must employ ourselves more or less habitually. A few who believe they have something to say which would be of much more than ordinary interest if said well, use writing for a special purpose; that is, they endeavor to write literature. An incomparably larger number of us use it only as an everyday tool; we employ it in writing letters, applying for positions, reporting investigations, recording transactions, or setting forth our opinions on public questions. Thus, whether our chief concern in life is to satisfy our own taste and that of other people by producing fine art in language, or whether it is merely to gain ordinary workaday comforts, we are confronted with the necessity of expressing ourselves in writing. B. THE NECESSITY OF MASTERING COMPOSITION This necessity, felt in some degree since the times when men began to write, is made exceedingly pressing to-day. A thousand inventions and discoveries have brought society into closer organization than ever before. Things which in our daily lives 'we regard as too ordinary to have any wide significance, the 'limited transcontinental trains, the trolley cars, the improved telegraph, the universally used telephone, rural mail delivery, and daily newspapers, - have drawn the world into such small compass that an entire continent is only a large neighborhood with all the intensity of neighborhood interests. At once we can see that such a condition necessarily brings about a more general and a more perfect diffusion of intelligence. Men and women in every corner of the country read daily about the |