Composition-Rhetoric | Page 4

done this week, so that the class
may know exactly what you did.
3. Name some things in which you have been interested within the last
two or three months. Tell the class about one of them.
4. Tell the class about something that happened during vacation. Have
you told the event exactly as it occurred?
+5. Interest.+--In order to enjoy listening to a story we must take an
interest in it, and the story should be so told as to arouse and maintain
this interest. As you have listened to the reports of your classmates you
have been more pleased with some than with others. Even though the
meaning of each was clear, yet the interest aroused was in each case
different. Since the purpose of a story is to entertain, any story falls
short of its purpose when it ceases to be interesting. We must at all
times say what we mean and say it clearly; but in story telling
especially we must also take care that what we say shall arouse and
maintain interest.
+6. The Introduction.+--The story of an event should be introduced in
such a manner as to enable the hearer to understand the circumstances
that are related. Such an introduction contributes to clearness and has
an important bearing upon the interest of the entire composition. In
order to render our account of an event clear and interesting it is usually
desirable to tell the hearers when and where the event occurred and who
were present. Their understanding of it may be helped further by telling
such of the attendant circumstances as will answer the question, _Why_?
If I begin my story by saying, "Last summer John Anderson and I were
on a camping trip in the Adirondacks," I have told when, where, and
who; and the addition of the words "on a camping trip" tells why we
were in the Adirondacks, and may serve to explain some of the events
that are to follow. Even the statement of the place indicates in some
degree the trend of the story, for many things that might occur "in the
Adirondacks" could not occur in a country where there are no
mountains. Certainly the story that would follow such an introduction
would be expected to differ from one beginning with the words, "Last
summer John Anderson and I went to visit a friend in New York."
It is not always necessary to tell when, where, who, and why in the
introduction, but it is desirable to do so in most cases of oral story

telling. These four elements may not always be stated in incidents taken
from books, for the reader may be already familiar with them from the
preceding portions of the book. The title of a printed or written story
may serve as an introduction and give us all needed information. In
relating personal incidents the time element is seldom omitted, though
it may be stated indirectly or indefinitely by such expressions as "once"
or 'lately.' In many stories the interest depends upon the plot, and the
time is not definitely stated.
EXERCISE
Notice what elements are included in each of the following
introductions:--
1. Saturday last at Mount Holly, about eight miles from this place,
nearly three hundred people were gathered together to see an
experiment or two tried on some persons accused of witchcraft.
2. On the morning of the 10th instant at sunrise, they were discovered
from Put-in-Bay, where I lay at anchor with the squadron under my
command.
3. It was on Sunday when I awoke to the realization that I had quitted
civilization and was afloat on an unfamiliar body of water in an open
boat.
4. Up and down the long corn rows Pap Overholt guided the old mule
and the small, rickety, inefficient plow, whose low handles bowed his
tall, broad shoulders beneath the mild heat of a mountain June sun. As
he went--ever with a furtive eye upon the cabin--he muttered to himself,
shaking his head.
5. After breakfast, I went down to the Saponey Indian town, which is
about a musket shot from the fort.
6. The lonely stretch of uphill road, upon whose yellow clay the
midsummer sun beat vertically down, would have represented a
toilsome climb to a grown and unencumbered man. To the boy
staggering under the burden of a brimful carpet bag, it seemed fairly
unscalable; wherefore he stopped at its base and looked up in dismay to
its far-off, red-hot summit.
7. One afternoon last summer, three or four people from New York,
two from Boston, and a young man from the Middle West were
lunching at one of the country clubs on the south shore of Long Island,
and there came about a mild discussion of the American universities.

8. "But where