in the selection from Stevenson, on
page 242?

19. What methods of description does he seem to prefer?

20. Write and deliver, without notes and with descriptive gestures, a
description in imitation of any of the authors quoted in this chapter.

21. Reexamine one of your past speeches and improve the descriptive
work. Report on what faults you found to exist.

22. Deliver an extemporaneous speech describing any dramatic scene in
the style of "Midnight in London."

23. Describe an event in your favorite sport in the style of Dr.
Talmage. Be careful to make the delivery effective.

24. Criticise, favorably or unfavorably, the descriptions of any travel
talk you may have heard recently.

25. Deliver a brief original travel talk, as though you were showing
pictures.

26. Recast the talk and deliver it "without pictures."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: _Writing the Short-Story_, J. Berg Esenwein.]

[Footnote 20: For fuller treatment of Description see Genung's _Working
Principles of Rhetoric_, Albright's _Descriptive Writing_, Bates' _Talks
on Writing English_, first and second series, and any advanced
rhetoric.]

[Footnote 21: See also _The Art of Versification_, J. Berg Esenwein and
Mary Eleanor Roberts, pp. 28-35; and _Writing the Short-Story_, J. Berg
Esenwein, pp. 152-162; 231-240.]

[Footnote 22: In the Military College of Modena.]

[Footnote 23: This figure of speech is known as "Vision."]

CHAPTER XXI

INFLUENCING BY NARRATION

The art of narration is the art of writing in hooks and eyes.
The principle consists in making the appropriate thought follow
the appropriate thought, the proper fact the proper fact; in
first preparing the mind for what is to come, and then letting
it come.

--WALTER BAGEHOT, _Literary Studies_.

Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may
observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have
thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in
exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite
unlimited one, do talkers dilate. Cut us off from Narrative, how
would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest,
languish into detached handfuls, and among the foolish utterly
evaporate! Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say
little but recite it.

--THOMAS CARLYLE, _On History_.

Only a small segment of the great field of narration offers