Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/210

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS along the blade of his weapon and pointing with that. In like manner, we have all been accustomed from childhood to point, as it were, with spoken words; and this we do with a fair degree of accuracy, for otherwise we should frequently fail to obtain what we want. But we have not been accustomed from childhood to point with written words; so it is at least an experiment worth trying to lay the index finger of ordinary conversation along the written line and see if this does not improve the accuracy of our aim.

Some reader is almost certain to raise the objection that the result of such an experiment will be an excess of colloquialism. But there is no foundation for any such fear. It would be impossible by any means short of a phonograph to emulate the carelessness, the redundancy, the elisions and slurrings of even rather careful conversation. In fiction where a trained and [196]