2. Mrs. Chick admires that Edith should be, by nature, such a perfect Dombey. - DICKENS.1 3. Her virtue, and the conscience of her worth, Wrought in her so, that, seeing me, she turn'd. - MILTON. 4. The writer is absolutely without conscience of the truth.ENGLISH NEWSPAPER (1896). 5. Forth skipp'd the cat, not now replete As erst with airy self-conceit. COWPER.1 6. The enigmas which of erst puzzled the brains of Socrates and Plato and Seneca. -THE CATHOLIC WORLD (1884).2 7. Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. - - ACTS ii. 24.8 8. Very pleasant and instructive meetings have been holden on Saturday evening. — AMERICAN Newspaper (1897). 9. For hundreds of years, but no man knoweth just how many, they had lain untouched. AMERICAN NEWSPAPER (1898). 10. The heart knoweth his own bitterness. PROVERBS xiv. 10. 11. Whilome thou camest with the morning mist, Even as a maid. TENNYSON. 12. The fickle queen caused her whilom favorite to be beheaded. W. S. GREGG (1886).2 EXERCISE V Show what principle of good use is violated by each italicized expression; substitute for each an equivalent expression that is in good use in serious writing: 1. At the mid-year examination I flunked in mathematics. 2. I like the little man, he's so sandy. 3. They found him smoking his afternoon pipe on the stoop. 1 Quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. 2 Quoted in the Century Dictionary. 8 In this book, all citations from the Bible are from the King James versiou. 4. When Kent glanced at the examination paper, he thought he was going to have a snap. 5. If you are going to catch the train, you'll have to hustle. 6. I am right glad that he's so out of hope. 7. She apparently had not noticed his advent. 8. If President Roosevelt reads all that is written about him, he will not know where he is at. 9. It didn't take long to size him up. 10. Mr. Crane requested those persons who calculated to join the singing-school to come forward. 11. His speech was a corker. 12. "It's all fixed up," he said; "I've cinched the wharf." 13. The small fry are all in bed. 14. A two-horse barge containing twenty-three guests plunged down an embankment. 15. You'll be caught if you don't watch out. CHAPTER II PUNCTUATION PUNCTUATION, which is sometimes spoken of as if it were an abstruse science or a fine art, is in point of fact a very simple affair. At bottom, it rests on a general understanding among writers, printers, and readers that certain marks shall serve certain purposes. These marks, whatever their origin, have no occult significance; like the letters of the alphabet, they are useful, not because they have any virtue in themselves, but because they are convenient means to an end, the end of making the author's meaning clear to the reader. When put in the proper places, the places prescribed by good sense and good taste, they help to show the relation between one word or group of words and another, and thus to bring out the meaning. With this simple principle in mind, a young writer of ordinary intelligence can, in a few hours, learn as much as he needs to know in order to punctuate his compositions properly, provided always that his aim in writing is to express what he has to say in clear, simple, and straightforward English. With this principle in mind, he will not, by omitting a stop from the place in which it belongs, bring words together that are disconnected in thought, nor will he, by inserting an unnecessary stop, separate words that should be closely connected. When he has once learned the principal uses of the several marks of punctuation, he will put stops where they belong, without paying much more attention to what he is doing than when he crosses his "t's" and dots his "i's": he will have formed a habit of doing correctly what he has done many times. Now and then, to be sure, he may hesitate in the choice between one point and another; but he will meet with few difficulties that he cannot easily overcome. A careless writer omits stops that are needed to make his meaning plain; an inexperienced writer, oppressed with the necessity of putting in points enough, uses too many. Of the two classes of faults, the latter is the more dangerous; for it is easier to supply omissions than to remove obstructions. Nowadays, "open punctuation, characterized by the avoidance of all pointing not clearly required by the construction," is preferred to "close punctuation, characterized especially by the use of many commas." 1 The marks of punctuation in their principal uses are as follows: A simple way to give a general idea of the uses of the several marks of punctuation in everyday writing is to show them in practice. Let us take, for this purpose, some passages from a paper supposed to have been read at a meeting of a boys' club in Boston. 1 The Century Dictionary, under "Punctuation." OUR PICNIC AT A paper read to the (1a) Last Saturday we had a picnic at Walden Pond. (16) What a delightful afternoon it was! (1 c) Shall I tell you all about it? (2 a) John James, Charles Williams, and Helen Pride, a girl from Beacon Hill, went with us from Boston. (2b) We got to Concord just after ten, found our friends waiting for us at the station, and at once started with them for the pond. (2c) Soon we In the title of this paper, in conformity with the practice adopted in recent publica tions, no marks of punctuation are used. The omission (with some exceptions not necessary to note here) of all stops from titlepages, and also from superscriptions of letters and from inscriptions on monuments, rests on the theory that the meaning is plain without any punctuation, and the page more agreeable to the eye. In (1a) the period [] marks the end of the sentence. The most important business of the period is to mark the end of a declarative, or assertive, sentence; but this stop also serves to mark an abbreviation, as in "Ill." (Illinois), "U. S. A." (United States of America), “O. W. (Oliver Wendell) Holmes," "A. B."(artium baccalaureus, bachelor of arts), “i.e." (id est, that is). 66 In (16) the exclamation-point [] indicates that the sentence after which it stands is ejaculatory. The exclamation-point is also commonly, but not always, used after an interjection, as "alas!" "ah!" "oh!" In (1c) the interrogation-point [?] indicates that the sentence after which it stands asks a question. In (2a) the first comma [] serves to separate the names of two persons; it would, of course, have been unnecessary if the two names had been connected by "and." The second comma indicates that "Charles Williams" is no more closely connected with "Helen Pride" than with "John James." In such a sentence, the comma before "and is sometimes omitted; but it is habitually used by careful authors. When, however, the two expressions connected by "and" are related to each other more closely than to the rest of the series, - as in "John James, |