WRITING BETTER ENGLISH, WEEK 7

PERSUASION: 

ETHOS – AUTHORITY, REPUTATION, ACHIEVEMENT, INSIGHT

LOGOS - REASON

PATHOS – EMOTION

 

- STRUNK AND WHITE, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

- EMERSON, “SELF-RELIANCE”

- FROST, POETRY, “Paul’s Wife” Excerpt

- WEEKLY SHORT ASSIGNMENT: Discuss “Paul’s Wife” Excerpt

 

LAST WEEK’S WRITING ASSIGNMENT: 150-250 WORDS ON: KIPLING’S “IF”

 

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, CONTINUED

IV. WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS COMMONLY MISUSED

Fact vs. opinion

Farther (distance) vs. further (time or amount)

Folks (too colloquial)

He is [a man who]

Imply (suggest) vs. infer (deduce)

Interesting [show rather than claim this]

 

 

ESSAY, "SELF-RELIANCE," RALPH WALDO EMERSON

LAST LINES from SEVENTH PARAGRAPH

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

EIGHTH PARAGRAPH (Broken into sentences):

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force.

It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,—under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.

And of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life.

But do your thing, and I shall know you.

Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.

I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church.

Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word?

Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing?

Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?

He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.

This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four: so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.

We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us.

The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, and make the most disagreeable sensation; a sensation of rebuke and warning which no brave young man will suffer twice.

 

Excerpt from Frost’s “Paul’s Wife”

To drive Paul out of any lumber camp
All that was needed was to say to him,
"How is the wife, Paul?"--and he'd disappear.

 

[The lumberjacks discuss whether Paul has a wife and later some see them together….]

 

Next evening Murphy and some other fellows
Got drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount,
From the bare top of which there is a view
To other hills across a kettle valley.
And there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it,
They saw Paul and his creature keeping house.
It was the only glimpse that anyone
Has had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them
Falling in love across the twilight millpond.
More than a mile across the wilderness
They sat together halfway up a cliff
In a small niche let into it, the girl
Brightly, as if a star played on the place,
Paul darkly, like her shadow. All the light
Was from the girl herself, though, not from a star,
As was apparent from what happened next.
All those great ruffians put their throats together,
And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle,
As a brute tribute of respect to beauty.
Of course the bottle fell short by a mile,
But the shout reached the girl and put her light out.
She went out like a firefly, and that was all.

So there were witnesses that Paul was married
And not to anyone to be ashamed of
Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul.
Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs
About his wife to keep her to himself.
Paul was what's called a terrible possessor.
Owning a wife with him meant owning her.
She wasn't anybody else's business,
Either to praise her or much as name her,
And he'd thank people not to think of her.
Murphy's idea was that a man like Paul
Wouldn't be spoken to about a wife
In any way the world knew how to speak.

 

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/735

 

REMINDER  / REVIEW

Chapter Titles from THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

 

WRITING ASSIGNMENT: 150-250 WORDS ON FROST’S “Paul’s Wife”