| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: girl and put her in a white dress, with a pink slip, on a green
lawn under a string of rose-colored Japanese lanterns, and she'll
develop an almost Oriental beauty. It is an ideal setting. The
leading lady was not cross-eyed or pock-marked. She stood at the
lantern-illumined booth, with Pearlie in the background, and dis-
pensed an unbelievable amount of strawberries. Sid Strang and the
hotel bench brigade assisted. They made engagements to take
Pearlie and her friend down river next day, and to the ball game,
and planned innumerable picnics, gazing meanwhile into the leading
lady's eyes. There grew in the cheeks of the leading lady a flush
that was not brought about by the pink slip, or the Japanese
Buttered Side Down |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: that youths coming to their manhood during this year in
Russia and in the future will not be able to confirm from
their own experience the reasoning of Karl Marx,
because they will have had no experience of a capitalist
country. What can they make of the class struggle? The
class struggle here is already over, and the distinctions of
class have already gone altogether. In the old days,
members of our party were men who had read, or tried to
read, Marx's "Capital," who knew the "Communist
Manifesto" by heart, and were occupied in continual
criticism of the basis of capitalist society. Look at the new
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed;
to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to
balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader,
that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally
prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too,
we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for
the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more
nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse; so that not
only is there a greater interval of continuous sound between
the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more
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