Sentences and thinking A practice book in sentence making

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SUMMARY SENTENCES The most profitable practice in the principles of subordination, parallelism, and emphasis will be found in the writing of summary sentences. The summary sentence, as the term is here used, is a sentence which expresses all the essential thought of a paragraph. Such a sentence is not ordinarily used in actual writing, though it sometimes occurs at the end of a long or difficult passage, and though the topic sentence is sometimes a virtual summary sentence. Generally, the topic sentence is inadequate as a summary of the thought of the paragraph, for the reason that it merely points to the subject treated, without indicating precisely how it is treated. It is often no more than the label on a bottle; the summary sentence, on the other hand, is always a distillation of the contents. How should one set about the writing of a summary sentence? Given a paragraph, more or less misunderstood by a hasty reader; wanted, a single, deft sentence that shall embody the thought of the paragraph: obviously, the thing cannot be done in a moment. Although the practiced writer of summary sentences may sometimes compose his sentence by merely reflecting on the substance of the paragraph, the novice will probably find it necessary to go through a rather exacting analysis. A short paragraph from the War Message will afford an example. We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their Government acted in enteringthis war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days, when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest...