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Close Reading—(Concluded)

- Charles Herbert Sylvester

Words alone are not a sufficient possession. They must be known in all their relations. A comprehension of the structure of the sentence is always necessary. A sentence is a unit of thought, an idea reduced to its lowest terms. It may not be necessary that each sentence be analyzed strictly by grammatical rules, but it is essential that the reader should recognize by study if necessary the subject and the predicate and the character and rank of all the modifiers of each. Even the practiced reader by unconsciously laying undue prominence upon some minor phrase frequently modifies the meaning an author intends to convey. This is particularly true in verse, where the poet, hemmed in by the rules that govern his meter and his rhyme, varies the natural order of the elements of a sentence to bring the accents where they belong or to throw the rhyming word to the end of a verse. The grouping of related sentences into paragraphs is an aid to the reader and should be noticed by him till the habit of expecting a slight change in thought with the indentation of a line becomes fixed and automatic.

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