Summary

Woolf asks readers to "think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing" (7). She says that if this were possible, every medium that uses words "would tell the truth, would create beauty" (7). But, she resigns, the teaching of words seems replete with obstacles. She explains that although there are literature professors and literary critics teaching and reviewing texts at this very moment, society's writing and reading are no better than they were before these jobs existed. Woolf asks her listeners where they should lay their blame, and answers her own question by saying it is the words that are at fault. "They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things" (8). She says that while words can be organized and collated in dictionaries, "words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind...