force.

There are certain minor matters, subsidiary to elegance, if not
elegancies, and therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your
sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make
them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these
devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave
loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged
along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly, as Biddy at
her bread-pan gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, till
she has one round and comely mass.

Reduce yourself to short allowance of parentheses and dashes; if you
employ them merely from clumsiness, they will lose all their proper
power in your hands. Economize quotation-marks also, clear that dust
from your pages, assume your readers to be acquainted with the current
jokes and the stock epithets: all persons like the compliment of having
it presumed that they know something, and prefer to discover the wit or
beauty of your allusion without a guide-board.

The same principle applies to learned citations and the results of
study. Knead these thoroughly in, supplying the maximum of desired
information with a minimum of visible schoolmaster. It requires no
pedantic mention of Euclid to indicate a mathematical mind, but only the
habitual use of clear terms and close connections. To employ in argument
the forms of Whately's Logic would render it probable that you are
juvenile and certain that you are tedious; wreathe the chain with roses.
The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be
disposed to keep Ollendorff in the background: the proper result of such
acquirements is visible in a finer ear for words; so that Goethe said,