![]() ![]() Excepting in the case of capital offenders-expressions ancestrally vulgar or irreclaimably degenerate-absolute proscription is possible as to serious composition only in other forms the writer must rely on his sense of values and the fitness of things. Not all locutions blacklisted herein are always to be reprobated as universal outlaws. Everything in quotation marks is to be understood as disapproved. When both are employed the precept is commonly given after the example has prepared the student to apply it, not only to the matter in mind, but to similar matters not mentioned. The plan of the book is more illustrative than expository, the aim being to use the terms of etymology and syntax as little as is compatible with clarity, familiar example being more easily apprehended than technical precept. Narrow etymons of the mere scholar and loose locutions of the ignorant are alike denied a standing. ![]() This actual and serviceable meaning-not always determined by derivation, and seldom by popular usage-is the one affirmed, according to his light, by the author of this little manual of solecisms. As Quintilian puts it, the writer should so write that his reader not only may, but must, understand.įew words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however many metaphorical, derivative, related, or even unrelated, meanings lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading dictionaries. It is attained by choice of the word that accurately and adequately expresses what the writer has in mind, and by exclusion of that which either denotes or connotes something else. The author's main purpose in this book is to teach precision in writing and of good writing (which, essentially, is clear thinking made visible) precision is the point of capital concern. Public domain via Project Gutenberg.ĪIMS AND THE PLAN. Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faultsīy Ambrose Bierce (1909). ![]()
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