and vivid. The rapid reader can grasp a concrete story or a word
picture. He cannot so readily comprehend a more general explanation
unaccompanied by specific examples and graphic pictures of persons,
places, and objects.

Narration and description are used effectively for the concrete examples
and the specific instances by which we illustrate general ideas. The
best way, for example, to make clear the operation of a state system of
health insurance is to relate how it has operated in the case of one or
more persons affected. In explaining a new piece of machinery the writer
may well describe it in operation, to enable readers to visualize it
and follow its motions. Since the reader's interest will be roused the
more quickly if he is given tangible, concrete details that he can
grasp, the examples are usually put first, to be followed by the more
general explanation. Sometimes several examples are given before the
explanatory matter is offered. Whole articles are often made up of
specific examples and generalizations presented alternately.

To explain the effects of a new anæsthetic, for example, Mr. Burton J.
Hendrick in an article in _McClure's Magazine_, pictured the scene in
the operating-room of a hospital where it was being given to a patient,
showed just how it was administered, and presented the results as a
spectator saw them. The beginning of the article on stovaine, the new
anæsthetic, illustrating this method of exposition, follows:

A few months ago, a small six-year-old boy was wheeled into the
operating theater at the Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled
Children, in New York City. He was one of the several thousand
children of the tenements who annually find their way into this
great philanthropic institution, suffering from what, to the lay