rive for a double mastery; we ought to speak well _and_
write well. Indeed the two powers so react upon each other that we ought
to cultivate both for the sake of either. True, some men, though inexpert
as writers, have made themselves proficient as speakers; or though
shambling and ineffective as speakers, have made themselves proficient as
writers. But this is not natural or normal. Moreover these men might have
gleaned more abundantly from their chosen field had they not shut it off
from the acres adjacent. Fences waste space and curtail harvests.

The assignments in this chapter are of such a nature that you may perform
them either orally or in writing. You should speak and write alternately,
sometimes on the same topic, sometimes on topics taken in rotation.

In your oral discussions you should perhaps absent yourself at first from
human auditors. A bedstead or a dresser will not make you self-conscious
or in any way distract your attention, and it will permit you to sit down
afterward and think out the degree of your failure or success. Ultimately,
of course, you must speak to human beings--in informal conversations at
the outset, in more ambitious ways later as occasion permits.

In your writing you may find it advantageous to make preliminary outlines
of what you wish to say. But above all, you must be willing to blot, to
revise, to take infinite pains. You should remember the old admonition
that easy reading is devilish hard writing.

<The Mastery of Words in Combination>

These purposes and methods are general. We now come to the specific fields
in which we may with profit cultivate words in combination. Of these
fields there are four.

<I. Mastery through Translation>

If you read a foreign language, whether laboriously or with ease, you
should make this power assist you to amass a good English vocabulary.
Take compositions or parts of compositions written in the foreign tongue,
and turn them into idiomatic English. How much you should translate
at a given time depends upon your leisure and your adeptness. Employ all
the methods--the spontaneous, the carefully perfected, the oral, the
written--heretofore explained in this chapter. In your final work on a
passage you should aim at a faultless rendition, and should spend time and
ransack the lexicons rather than come short of this ideal.

The habit of translation is an excellent habit to keep up. For the study
of an alien tongue not only improves you