Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/314

300 belong rather to the spoken than to the written language. It follows that a good writer will seldom have a causal as clause of any kind at the end of a sentence. Two further limitations remain to be noticed:

i. When the cause, not the effect, is obviously the whole point of the sentence, because, not as, should be used; the following is quite impossible English:

I make these remarks as quick shooting at short ranges has lately been so strongly recommended.–Times.

ii. As should be used only to give the cause of the thing asserted, not the cause of the assertion, nor an illustration of its truth, as in the following instances:

My finding the Encyclopaedia's confirmation was not the cause of mistake, nor the keeping too close the cause of bad steering.

No sentence is to be condemned for mere length; a really skilful writer can fill a page with one and not tire his reader, though a succession of long sentences without the relief of short ones interspersed is almost sure to be forbidding. But the tiro, and even the good writer who is not prepared to take the trouble of reading aloud what he has written, should confine himself to the easily manageable. The tendency is to allow some part of a sentence to develop unnatural proportions, or a half parenthetic insertion to separate too widely the essential parts. The cure, indispensable for every one who aims at a passable style, and infallible for any one who has a good ear, is reading aloud after writing.

1. Disproportionate insertions.

Some simple eloquence distinctly heard, though only uttered in her eyes, unconscious that he read them, as, 'By the death-beds I have