The assignments in this chapter will do less toward making your vocabulary wide than toward making it facile and precise.  To be sure, they will now and then set you to hunting for words that are new.  Better still, they will give you a mastery over some of your outlying words—­words known to your eyes or ears but not to your tongue.  But these advantages will be somewhat incidental.  Means for the systematic extension of your verbal domain into regions as yet unexplored by you, are reserved for the later chapters of this book.

2.  A Vocabulary for Speech or for Writing?

In the second place, are we to develop a vocabulary for oral discourse or a vocabulary for writing?  It may be that our chief impediment or our chief ambition lies in one field rather than in the other.  Nevertheless we should strive for a double mastery; we ought to speak well and write well.  Indeed the two powers so react upon each other that we ought to cultivate both for the sake of either.  True, some men, though inexpert as writers, have made themselves proficient as speakers; or though shambling and ineffective as speakers, have made themselves proficient as writers.  But this is not natural or normal.  Moreover these men might have gleaned more abundantly from their chosen field had they not shut it off from the acres adjacent.  Fences waste space and curtail harvests.

The assignments in this chapter are of such a nature that you may perform them either orally or in writing.  You should speak and write alternately, sometimes on the same topic, sometimes on topics taken in rotation.

In your oral discussions you should perhaps absent yourself at first from human auditors.  A bedstead or a dresser will not make you self-conscious or in any way distract your attention, and it will permit you to sit down afterward and think out the degree of your failure or success.  Ultimately, of course, you must speak to human beings—­in informal conversations at the outset, in more ambitious ways later as occasion permits.

In your writing you may find it advantageous to make preliminary outlines of what you wish to say.  But above all, you must be willing to blot, to revise, to take infinite pains.  You should remember the old admonition that easy reading is devilish hard writing.

The Mastery of Words in Combination

These purposes and methods are general.  We now come to the specific fields in which we may with profit cultivate words in combination.  Of these fields there are four.

I.  Mastery through Translation

If you read a foreign language, whether laboriously or with ease, you should make this power assist you to amass a good English vocabulary.  Take compositions or parts of compositions written in the foreign tongue, and turn them into idiomatic English.  How much you should translate at a given time depends upon your leisure and your adeptness.  Employ all the methods—­the spontaneous, the carefully perfected, the oral, the written—­heretofore explained in this chapter.  In your final work on a passage you should aim at a faultless rendition, and should spend time and ransack the lexicons rather than come short of this ideal.