1.  A modern fable.
  2.  The willow whistle.
  3.  How I baked a cake.
  4.  The delayed picnic.
  5.  The missing slipper.
  6.  A misdirected letter.
  7.  A ride on a raft.
  8.  The rescue of Ezekiel.
  9.  A railway experience.
 10.  A soldier’s soldier.

(Do you think the reader will form the images you wish him to form?  Consider what you have written with reference to climax. (See Section 7.) Have you needed to use figures?  If so, have you used them in accordance with the suggestions on page 55?  If you have used the word only, is it placed so as to give the correct meaning?)

+31.  Determination of Meaning Requires More than Image Making.+—­The emphasis laid upon image making should not lead to the belief that this is all that is necessary in order to determine what is meant by the language we hear or read.  Image making is important, but much of our language is concerned with presenting ideas of which no mental pictures can be formed.

[Illustration]

This very paragraph will serve as an illustration of such language.  Our understanding of language of this kind depends upon our knowledge of the meanings of words, upon our understanding of the relations between word groups, or parts of sentences, and especially upon our appreciation of the relations in thought that sentences bear to one another.  Each of these will be discussed in the following pages.  Later it will be necessary to consider the relations in thought existing among paragraphs.

+32.  Word Relations.+—­In order to get the thought of a sentence, we must understand the relations that exist between the words and word groups (phrases and clauses) that compose it.  If the thought is simple, and expressed in straightforward terms, we grasp it readily and without any conscious effort to determine these relations.  If the thought is complex, the relations become more complicated, and before we are sure that we know what the writer intends to say it may be necessary to note with care which is the main clause and which are the subordinate clauses.  In either case our acquiring the thought depends upon our understanding the relations between words and word groups.  We may understand them without any knowledge of the names that have been applied to them in grammar, but a knowledge of the names will assist somewhat.  These relations are treated in the grammar review in the Appendix and need not be repeated here.

+33.  Incomplete Thoughts.+—­We have learned (Section 27) that the introduction of unfamiliar words may cause us to form incomplete images.  When the language is not designed to present images, we may, in a similar way, fail to get its real meaning if we are unfamiliar with the words used.  If you do not know the meaning of fluent and viscous, you will fail to understand correctly the statement, “Fluids range from the peculiarly fluent to the peculiarly viscous.”  If we wish to think