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III – THE USE OF THE PEN
Says the census-taker once in ten years, “Can you write English?” We are a bit startled by the question: “Can we?” we ask ourselves humbly. It is the question I ask you freshmen.
The educated person has the implements of writing at hand and in order: his inkstand is filled and his pen does not scratch. The uneducated man searches for a penholder, and keeps the ink-bottle on the top shelf; and the difference signifies much in the lives of the two people.
You live pen in hand during your four years in college. You acquire the useful art of note-taking, – by itself no mean intellectual exercise. The untrained note-taker brings from a lecture a rare muddle of senseless, half-caught remarks. But a good mind soon shows itself in its taking of “points” and getting them quickly to paper. And who does not know that “a note taken on the spot is worth a cartload of recollections”?
That a notebook should be attractive and convenient for reference is its raison d’être. One secret of comfort in notebooks is variety in covers, that there may be no exasperating searches for the right one. “Buy only good-looking notebooks,” sounds like frivolous advice; but it is in the interests of scholarship that your notebooks should have an honorable place on your bookshelves. I would make a handsome page, with wide margins, large type, generous spacing. Paragraph freely, and drop a line often. Underline profusely, that you may catch the meaning quickly, and preserve the emphasis of the lecturer. Use parentheses, brackets, numerals, letters, and thus organize your matter as you go along and make it easy to glance at. Have divisions or pigeonholes at the back of your book, where you can put away and classify all sorts of memoranda.
With these mechanical devices, the use of the pen becomes the easier. It will be able to shape sentences on the wing, and capture the thought and much of the language of a lecturer in full flight. It is a strenuous exercise, and good mental athletics.
Yet for all education to be carried on in this way would not be well. There should be variety in the conduct of classes. That comes of itself, through the varied personality of teachers. The next man may make of his hour a quiz. Does anything remain of a quiz that can be written down? A good exercise for the pen to shape something out of the flying questions and answers!
You live pen in hand in the classroom, and also in the preparation of your work. Note-taking in a library is a fine process in education. Unless your book is a masterpiece of style, paraphrase and condense for your notebook. Add your own thoughts, in brackets. A book thus read is twice yours. I would date every piece of note-taking; for the autobiography of your mind is writing itself.
In these college exercises your pen has acquired practice, and to turn it next to use for artistic purposes should be natural. For it is the literary art that you are set to study. When you are asked to write your first freshman essay, you are asked to turn life into literature. Shakespeare did no more than that. This single, exalted aim should be yours: and you should remember in your humblest writing Ruskin’s definition of the artist. He is “a person who has submitted in his work to a law which was painful to obey, that he may bestow by his work a delight which it is gracious to bestow.”
The literary art as practiced in college goes by the excellent name “essay-writing”: a comprehensive, modest, dignified word. It gives you liberty to write about anything; and if you happen to have the literary instinct, everything will present itself to you as waiting to be written about. To turn into words is the impulse of the born writer, like Irving, or Emerson, or Stevenson. There is probably one such person in this company, possibly there are two. But it is to the average young essay-writer that I address myself.
As to the matter of which you make your essays, only let it be “the real thing”: a piece of yourself, one of your own interests. You have active minds, or you would never be here: to you “the world is so full of a number of things” that subjects can never fail you. The fact that you expect to write much during your college life is stimulating to your observation. You are “out after ideas,” as a college girl expressed it. You look and listen and read with an eye on your next essay. Once set up a subject in your mind, and it gathers material as a magnet draws steel. Everybody is conspiring to help you with fresh points of view and apt illustrations. You have heard of Madame de Staël’s method: when preparing to write, she gave a dinner-party and led up the conversation of her guests to the subject she had chosen. Your essay will also require solitude and brooding, long walks alone, and possibly hours in the library.
When you begin to write, write rapidly, even if you leave many gaps and many crudities. You will then have something to work upon. Moreover, the mere act of writing is stimulating to thought. Movendo move: move by moving. By writing, write. “I stared at the page an hour before I had a thought,” says one miserable young woman. Keep on looking at your paper. Things will come to you, you know not whence; but you must prepare the way for them, by thinking and feeling and dreaming, by reading and listening and observing, with every part of you alive and receptive. Then wait for yourself patiently.
It is for most people unprofitable to correct their work as they write, because the productive state of mind and the critical state of mind are quite apart. There should be the hot writing and the cool writing. The fatal thing is to cool off in the first writing: you will soon be “grinding out” your essay. When the time comes for the critical re-writing, remember what Schiller said, “By what he omits, show me the artist.” There is a hard saying, “Art is the rejection of the almost right.”
Yet when you subject your work to pitiless cutting, see that you do not destroy its flow and rhythm. Look carefully to the little connectives that bind up the thought, words that are only too rare in our English language. The delicate nuances of meaning are indicated and the harmony of the sentence is preserved by the judicious placing of these little words. In revision study to improve the diction. Insert trial words each time that you read your paper. Use every means to enrich your vocabulary and to widen your choice of words. Be able to run your fingers over that loved instrument, the English language, as a musician lets his hands play over his keys.
Precision in diction is the mark of intellect, but also of patient labor. Stevenson said the man not willing to spend the whole afternoon in search of the right word was unfit for the business of literature. Be unsparing of your time. The silliest boast is of the short time a writer has spent upon his work. Authors’ vanity is peculiarly distasteful, because they are the people from whom one might expect more intelligence.
The force, that is, the interest, of your writing, will depend much on the freshness of your choice of words, and on the freshness of your phrasing. Yet in the pursuit of freshness, beware of affected or far-fetched words, or words too old, as “gotten”; or too new, as “viewpoint,” “foreword,” words that, for mere ugliness, should not be allowed to exist.
Write with words, not phrases. Commonplace writing is composed of “bromidic” phrases. They are very catching. Excessive reading, unaccompanied by thinking, is sure to produce a stilted, conventional style. I wonder if college girls know how often they are, even in conversation, stilted in their language, though often with a half-humorous intent. I have noticed one who uses a Latin participial construction even at the breakfast table.
In order to be vigorous, your writing must be brief, simple, and clear. Yet in our cult of simplicity, let us not be content with the clear and simple commonplace. Some books nowadays, though written by the cleverest of men, have a commonness of style that is a mere coming down to their inferiors. It will never make literature.
Put into your notebook what writers have said about their craft. You will find in Shakespeare some admirable hints about his art, though people often tell us he gave no account of himself. Modern self-consciousness has made authors more and more aware of themselves and their processes. Mark what Goethe, Emerson, and all our later writers have said of their work. In my college days, we read the old writers upon these subjects: the incomparable “Ars Poetica” of Horace, and the pleasant pages of Quintilian. Do you read them now?
How reading should help writing is a question. I have heard it said that a professional writer should read some other more excellent writer one hour a day! How far we should take another writer for master is very doubtful. Said a Michigan man to Mr. Emerson, as he came out from a lecture, “Mr. Emerson, I see you never learned to write from a book.” It goes without saying that we want only original, first-hand work from our writer; nevertheless, it is true that he may learn something about his art from nearly every book he reads. You yourselves are observing readers; observe, among other things, how the thing is done.
Beyond and out of college, the educated woman should live pen in hand. Power of expression is power itself, and expression with the pen will add much to a woman’s efficiency as a member of society. With many business careers opening to her, success depends not a little on the ability to write an admirable business letter. Her usefulness as a secretary hangs on the efficiency of her pen. A teacher’s letter of application often settles her fate. The librarian will introduce books to readers all the more effectively if she hold the pen of the ready writer. The college woman should be valuable in many branches of journalism. In philanthropic work, occasions arise for wise, tactful, brief, effective composition, in letters, reports, and public addresses. The pen is not enough used in preparation for speaking. We should be spared many a rambling discourse if the orator had first submitted to its discipline.
