As the grayish cloud drifted over the parapet, there was a stifled call from some dozen men who had carelessly let their protectors drop.  The gas was terrible.  A breath of it was like a wolf at the throat, like hot ashes in the windpipe.

The yellowish waves of gas became more greenish in color as fresh volumes poured out continually from the squat iron cylinders which had now been raised and placed outside the trenches by the Germans.  The translucent flood flowed over the parapet, linking at once on the inner side and forming vague, gauzy pools and backwaters, in which men stood knee deep while the lighter gas was blown in their faces over the parapet.

FAULTS IN DICTION.  Since newspaper reporters and correspondents are called upon day after day to write on similar events and to write at top speed, they are prone to use the same words over and over again, without making much of an effort to “find the one noun that best expresses the idea, the one verb needed to give it life, and the one adjective to qualify it.”  This tendency to use trite, general, “woolly” words instead of fresh, concrete ones is not infrequently seen in special feature stories written by newspaper workers.  Every writer who aims to give to his articles some distinction in style should guard against the danger of writing what has aptly been termed “jargon.”  “To write jargon,” says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his book, “On the Art of Writing,” “is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms.  So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men’s summarized concepts of things, to concrete ones which lie as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand.  If your language be jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond.  Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge; the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent.  For the style is the man, and where a man’s treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.”

FIGURES OF SPEECH.  To most persons the term “figure of speech” suggests such figures as metonymy and synecdoche, which they once learned to define, but never thought of using voluntarily in their own writing.  Figures of speech are too often regarded as ornaments suited only to poetry or poetical prose.  With these popular notions in mind, a writer for newspapers and magazines may quite naturally conclude that figurative expressions have little or no practical value in his work.  Figures of speech, however, are great aids, not only to clearness and conciseness, but to the vividness of an article.  They assist the reader to grasp ideas quickly and they stimulate his imagination and his emotions.