interest to you during the last week. Use correct letter forms, and try to avoid triteness in method and material. 2. Write a brief account of some lecture, address, or sermon. Assume that it is to be printed in the local paper. 3. In the form of secretary's minutes, report a meeting of your class, society, or whole school. Show that you understand how to keep permanent records. 4. Report orally, in a five-minute talk, some important current events in the United States. 5. Select clippings from papers to illustrate what you consider well-written news articles, an editorial on some timely subject, a review of some recent book or play, and a good biography of some prominent person. Be prepared to tell what each contains and why you think they are suitable. 6. Retell some personal incident, showing just how it influenced you. Here you combine description and narration. The titles below may suggest a subject. Some first impressions. My first whipping. First ideas of the big world. An interview with father. School fights. A bit of family tradition. How I felt when punished unjustly. Keeping clear of automobiles. How I escaped from a danger. 7. Let the members of the class prepare a newspaper something like that of a school or college. Divide the material among five or six departments, with some person in charge of each. Other members of the class may be assigned as the staff. The finished product may be read to the class or arranged in some attractive form so that all may look at it. Do not allow your paper to become a mere joke-sheet. 8. Relate a legend or some of the early history of your home town. Try to make it vivid. 9. Tell orally the substance of some chapter in a history you are now using or have recently read. 10. Briefly summarize in writing some portion of a history. 11. Read a portion in the biography of some famous personage and reduce the substance to the form of notes. Be careful to organize the parts carefully. 12. Make a full outline for a paper of five hundred words, using the biography of some author you have recently studied. 13. Write the paper for which an outline was prepared as directed in exercise 12. 14. Mention some author who is not recommended for reading in schools. Comment on his work, and try to show that he should be read more widely by young people. Assume that the one who reads your composition knows little of the author; then try to tell enough about his work so as to convey a full and correct impression of it. 15. Condense to table, or briefest form, the salient dates and events in the life of some great person. 16. Narrate the chief events of some trip, vacation, or visit to some important spot. Emphasize a few things only; exclude rigidly the inessentials. 17. Write an account of your own life. Do not dwell on dates or disconnected events. XVIII FICTION NARRATIVES 118. Fiction constitutes a second large class of narratives. In appealing freely to one's imagination, they differ from news stories, biographies, and histories. As divided usually into four minor classes, these fiction narratives include short anecdotes or mere jokes, tales and other moralized narratives (short by accident rather than by intention and art), unified and artistic short stories, and long novels and romances. 119. Anecdotes are short surprise stories which terminate in a distinct "point." Some are of very ancient origin, being used to instruct in the manner of fables. Always swift, direct, and vivid, they expose the whims, weakness, and countless little traits of humanity. Certain people have the story-telling gift; and no type is better suited than anecdotes to become a fit medium for narrative skill. To succeed with the short anecdote one must carefully center interest at the beginning, middle, and close. A fault at one point mars the whole narration. At the outset there is curiosity to arouse; to get somebody interested is the duty of the first few words. This initial curiosity must be sustained throughout, until the "point" comes suddenly at the end. The illumination must be swift and complete, with no subsequent need for more explaining. Any moralizing, further explaining, or comment at the close may spoil the effect of a good story. 120. Moralized tales form a considerable class of our narratives. During the Middle Ages they were often made a medium for religious instruction. Entertainment was made to assist priests and teachers. Books of story plots were chained to pulpits for the use of preachers, who might wish to drive home a lesson to an unlearned people by the use of vivid stories. Great collections of all sorts of stories came from the continent of Europe into England during the fifteenth and two succeeding centuries. For plots the Elizabethan drama drew upon them generously. The name apologue was given to designate a story told for moral instruction. More recently this name has been revived to classify a similar type of short fiction. The apologue centers interest in the moral rather than in the narrative, and often it has been used merely as a vehicle of religious instruction. Good modern apologues like Hawthorne's Ambitious Guest, Kipling's .007, Stevenson's Will o' the Mill, while containing much of the old manner, have added interest in characterization and plot. Two varieties of short narratives are the tale and the sketch. The tale emphasizes the plot, the sketch the place or background of action. Both are short by chance more than by a careful planning. Hundreds of these rambling stories originated in our literature, or were translated from other lands, between the time of Shakespeare and the rise of the modern short story proper about 1830. Succeeding the old moralized stories or tales of the Middle Ages, they were used toward the end of the eighteenth century by writers like Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth to convey moral observations in pleasing fictional form. Like the age in which they flourished, many of them were highly artificial and sentimental. Later, Sir Walter Scott contributed four interesting tales, one of which Wandering Willie's Tale in his novel Red - gauntlet is almost faultless in conception and technique, but the other three ramble about and are slow in getting to the point in the same degree as other tales of the period. Irving here in our own land, in a third of his short narratives, came quite near the art of the short story that we now admire. His Rip Van Winkle, interesting and significant though it may be to us now, suffers from a lack of interest on a central point and gives us hints of more than one unified plot. Undeveloped and only suggested roughly are the stories of Rip and his dog, of Rip and his domestic life, his adventures with the strange little men in their antique dress, and his life after his awakening from the sleep of twenty years. Lay the emphasis on any one of these elements, and you have a different story from the Rip Van Winkle we know. The short story, in fact, was an offshoot from older types of writing. As late as 1600 there was no line of cleavage between history, biography, criticism, sermonizing, and philosophy. All was grist for the same mill, which bolted it or sent it out finely ground, just as the mood of the author, not the nature of the material, dictated. Defoe may be given credit for centering interest on the adventure part of a narrative. Addison, too, in the Spectator printed a few rather interesting sketch stories, notably the series in which Sir Roger de Coverley is a humorous but lovable character. These and a few less significant authors bridge over from Shakespeare to the time of Hannah More and the highly sentimental tale. Not until the coming of Hawthorne and Poe did short fiction get its bearings. Drifting along, before 1830 it could be one thing or another at will. Poe was the first to lay down rigid principles covering the choice of material and the use of imagination in stories. He recognized the principle of excluding every word which does not contribute |