The Art Of Authorship PDF Download

From the INTRODUCTION. Some time since I was requested by a number of young men to address them upon the art of composition and effective public speech. Thinking how best to make such a topic interesting as well as instructive, I resolved to illustrate the lecture by securing, if at all possible, personal experiences and counsels from a few of the leading writers and speakers of our day. Appealing to several well-known authors and orators, and receiving valued and helpful replies, I was induced to extend the number of such personal testimonies, with the idea of giving them to those for whom they were designed in a more permanent form than an address spoken from the lecture platform. This volume is the outcome, so far as the above-mentioned communications bear directly upon the art of effective written composition. I must ask my readers to remember that the experiences and methods of those authors only are here quoted who have personally contributed, at my request, their reminiscences and advice. If, therefore, any gratitude should be felt for pleasure or profit experienced by a perusal of these pages, it must be accorded to those without whose aid and generous acquiescence the book could never have been written. Several names of eminent living writers will not be found here. In most instances their help has been requested, but has either been withheld or has proved insufficient for the purpose required. Accounts of. their methods might have been gleaned from other sources, but these would have broken the harmony of the book, which' contains only those experiences and counsels written for the purposes above stated by the authors themselves. In dealing with so large a number of communications of so varied a character as those which compose the bulk of this volume, it has been impossible to classify them with any approach to consistency. I have used them, as best I could without injury to their original form, to illustrate and enforce several points of interest, 'which every student of expressive written composition may with advantage consider. As example must be always better than precept, statements of how our best known authors learned to write, or what influences aided them the most in preparing for and finding their life-work, together with whatever counsel drawn from their own experience they may be disposed to give to others, cannot fail to be both instructive and deeply interesting. "He that walketh with wise men shall be wise."