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A general sentence such as "Mother's back yard is full of flowers" is suitable only as a topic sentence, as embracing specific examples which preceded or better which will follow. It ought to have at least three examples or proofs or de- scriptions of these flowers in detail. Shakespeare, in the King Lear citation given above, opens his enumeration of crows, samphire gatherer, and the fishermen with the generalized or topical sentence, "How fearful and dizzy 'tis to cast one's eye so low!" Jesus, too, in His discussion of Providence begins with a fairly generalized statement, "do not be solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on." One should fix in one's mind that generalized statements are justifiable only as the caps or binders of clusters of statements proving or explaining them. As such topic sentences, they are good and necessary. But without such a cluster, a generalized statement is a loose lead to dullness. They are the mark of the windbag and the bore. You should make a conscious effort to count things and to measure them in your speech. Resolve, for example, never to say few if you can say three, never animal if you can say cat, never went if you can say ran, never entertained if you can say yodled. This resolve will prove a marvelous tonic to your whole conversational personality. You will begin to count and measure things. Your vocabulary will increase magically, and will take on life and color and realism. You will begin to learn the names of trees, birds, and flowers, of tools and machines, in short, of everything in more types and classes. When you attend a rally or a play, you will automatically estimate by rows and seats how many people are there. Then when you talk about it you will not say lamely that a "lot of people" were there, but you will say that you calculated 850. In this way, assuming that you ever keep with you that common sense without which nothing is a virtue, you will become an increasingly more interesting conversationalist. You will also be a more interesting person — mainly because you will be a more interested one. |
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