quality is at its highest, and this is particularly true of creative work—thought in its broadest sense.
For the integration of our thinking in a broad way and for making our opinions and ideas at once more coherent, more intensive, and more conscious, no method exceeds in usefulness that of writing definite articles or essays, each with some topic-title not too narrow. Obviously for learning purposes this is the often-hated "composition" of our early school-life—hated oftentimes just because its writing involved the completion of a certain definite amount of real mental activity in a definite time. This is a kind of debt to our education which may not be, like "Micawber's" note-debts, paid always with other notes, other promises to do. Writing, as Francis Bacon reminds us, "maketh an exact man," but writing, too, makes a boy or girl, as well as a man, not only consciously aware of what is known and thought in his more or less hidden mind, but makes that more precise and its relations round about more real. And also more numerous. In other words, writing much on set topics not too narrow, clarifies and extends our ideas and makes them also more dynamic. Nothing else, unless it be active oral debate, can do this either so economically or so well.
