We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Letters to Young Authors
SIXTEENTH LETTER
My Dear Lin:
When your good parents named you after Lindley Murray they doubtless did not intend that you should ever have to ask of their old comrade, "What is a sentence?" But, raillery aside, my boy, I congratulate you upon making sure of this little point while you are still in your 'teens, for I have often seen the writings of those who neglected to settle the question until they had published their first novels — at their own expense.
A sentence is like an unbroken colt — charged with untold possibilities. The only rider who can predict its destination is he who has a good seat, holds an experienced rein, and looks ahead. Your young fancy may invent other comparisons at pleasure — from the tone of your letter I judge that most of them might be doleful.
When I was a lad I cordially hated English Grammar — chiefly, I now think, because my teacher did not allow me to reason about the why of things, but set before me a penitential book, bound in forbidding black, and bearing the name of Bullion. I saw no aptitude in that author's name, you may be assured. But later I came to see that the countless forms into which, say, fifty selected words may be turned make up a puzzle problem as fascinating as any ever sold in a novelty shop. So I have wondered, sometimes, whether the same boys and girls whose constructive abilities are challenged by " Erectors," dissected pictures, and like useful games, could not be made to see how much fun it is to take two words, put them together so as to make them express a thought, and then by adding word after word make changes and improvements in what is said until the whole stands as complete as a palace. Sounds simple, doesn't it, Lin?
Well, I am not jesting. It can be done. Some rare teachers are doing it day by day, and they are opening up delightful fields to their pupil-friends — fields which are sure all their lives long to yield new things to the seekers.
You'll not mind my repeating at the start much that you know? It may help me make clear just what you do not understand.
Single words are the units of ideas. A single word is enough to express a single idea — I am not going to deal with school-book terms except as I have to. For example, black carries from you to me an idea which needs no definition. Now let us see how this very general idea is narrowed to something definite when we add the word cloud — black cloud. What have we done? We have called up a mental picture, more definite than the first, but we have done no more than make a suggestion. Anything we add further mentally is from our own imaginations — it does not exist in the two words.
Now this is the simplest form of language. A baby begins to talk so. He has learned that his brother is called a boy, and also that when brother is rough with him he is said to be bad, so when the child wishes to assert that his brother is bad he simply names the two ideas — bad boy, or perhaps boy bad. This suggests that brother is bad but it does not actually assert it.