THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS
and the art of writing. The inherited habit of composition in the form of oral verse and prose is vastly older than our modern practice of secluding ourselves and scratching down rows of little black symbols on a white expanse of paper, or still more incongruously tapping celluloid keys with the tips of our fingers. The whole advantage of the conversational method, however, has nowhere been more delightfully expressed than by Oliver Wendell Holmes, through the lips of the Autocrat:
I rough out my thoughts in talk, as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,—you can pat or coax, and spread and shave, and rub out and fill up, and stick on so easily, when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modeling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such.
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