Instruction Paper (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Instruction Paper

1. Forms of written Thought. - Extended composition has been divided into four kinds: Description, Narration, Exposition, Argument. Of course, there are many other varieties, but these four are the only forms that are usually found in textbooks on history. To understood the reason why it is so difficult to find a good working manual on the subject of history and what qualities should characterize such a manual, it will be necessary to consider briefly these four kinds of composition.

2. Description. - Description may be of persons or of things. A description of anything should present an orderly account of the qualities that belong to the object described. If a description be in terms that are commonly used, it is ordinary or popular: if it introduces the technical terms employed in some particular science, it is scientific description.

3. Narrative. - Narrative bears the same relation to acts and events that description does to persons and things. A narrative, as well as a description, may be either minute or cursory - it may descend to the smallest particulars, or it may give only the most conspicuous and striking facts in a series of happenings.

The items that make up a narrative should follow, first, the order of time. It will appear, later, that in this requirement consists the principal difficulty in historical writing. In the nature of things, events that together make up a complex whole succeed one another in time, and an account of them is more vivid and more easily remembered if, in relating them, the order of their occurrence is observed.

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