Fences waste space and curtail harvests.
The assignments in this chapter are of such a nature that you may perform
them either orally or in writing. You should speak and write alternately,
sometimes on the same topic, sometimes on topics taken in rotation.
In your oral discussions you should perhaps absent yourself at first from
human auditors. A bedstead or a dresser will not make you self-conscious
or in any way distract your attention, and it will permit you to sit down
afterward and think out the degree of your failure or success. Ultimately,
of course, you must speak to human beings--in informal conversations at
the outset, in more ambitious ways later as occasion permits.
In your writing you may find it advantageous to make preliminary outlines
of what you wish to say. But above all, you must be willing to blot, to
revise, to take infinite pains. You should remember the old admonition
that easy reading is devilish hard writing.
These purposes and methods are general. We now come to the specific fields
in which we may with profit cultivate words in combination. Of these
fields there are four.
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