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The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster - With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style by Daniel Webster;Edwin P. Whipple
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schoolmaster that it would be well to allow me to select my own subject.
The request was granted; and, as narrative is the natural form of
composition which a boy adopts when he has his own way, I filled, in
less than half the time heretofore consumed in writing a quarter of a
page, four pages of letter-paper with an account of my being in a ship
taken by a pirate; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate
captain; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my
fellow-passengers, in not being ordered to "walk the plank." The story,
though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of
the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the
whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made in the art
of "composition."

This falseness of thought and feeling is but too apt to characterize the
writing of the student, after he has passed from the common school to
the academy or the college. The term "Sophomorical" is used to describe
speeches which are full of emotion which the speaker does not feel, full
of words in four or five syllables that mean nothing, and, in respect to
imagery and illustrations, blazing with the cheap jewelry of
rhetoric,--with those rubies and diamonds that can be purchased for a
few pennies an ounce. The danger is that this "Sophomorical" style may
continue to afflict the student after he has become a clergyman, a
lawyer, or a legislator.

Practical men who may not be "college educated" still have the great
virtue of using the few words they employ as identical with facts. When
they meet a man who has half the dictionary at his disposal, and yet
gives no evidence of apprehending the real import and meaning of one
word among the many thousands he glibly pours forth, they naturally
distrust him, as a person who does not know the vital connection of all
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