本书是葛传椝先生为我国读者撰写的英语写作专著,可作高校教材,亦可作自学课本。除对写作基本知识、写作技巧和文体修辞分章介绍之外,还特别对惯用法、习语和遣词造句等有关问题进行了详实阐述。同时配以大量取自现代英美书刊原著中的实例,以及各种切合实际的练习题。本书用简明地道的英文写成,是英语写作教材之经典。

2. Purpose of this Book. This book is not confined to compositions in the narrower sense though these are by no means neglected. Nor does it claim to teach the writing of novels, short stories, dramas, poems, literary criticism, newspaper editorials, or scholarly treatises. It gives principles, suggestions, models, and exercises that will help you to express yourself well in English no matter what form of writing you may happen to do.
This book is written for you, who are supposed to be a Chinese student of English having a vocabulary of several thousand words and a fair knowledge of grammar, but having had little practice in writing, and even less in speaking, the language. From the use of this book you may expect to acquire the art of expression in English — on condition that you do all the exercises carefully, preferably under the guidance of a competent teacher, and act upon all the principles and suggestions as far as possible. 3. Your Advantage. As I have said in the above, you “are supposed to be a Chinese student of English ... having had little practice in writing, and even less in speaking the language”. If you had been brought up in an English-speaking family, you would no doubt have more freedom of expression in the use of English than you have. But you have your advantage too. Just because you have not been brought up in an English-speaking family, you will be saved a great deal of trouble of trying to unlearn many errors and faults peculiar to those having been brought up on English. You are not, for instance, in the habit of using the notorious double negative, as in “I don’t know nothing about him”, which many English-speaking children say when they ought to say “I know nothing about him” or “I don’t know anything about him”.
Much of the material that is usually found in books of composition written for English-speaking students is therefore quite useless to you — perhaps as useless as any method of getting rid of the cigarette habit would be to non-smokers. 4. Your Special Difficulties. Being the kind of student you are, you have certain special difficulties in learning English composition. You are perhaps a better speller than the average English or American schoolboy is; you have perhaps had more practice in parsing and analysis than he has; you perhaps know a great many words that he does not know. But you find it much more difficult to express many common ideas and thoughts than he does; you are far less good at the use of many common words than he is; you may even make such ridiculous mistakes as he never dreams of.
A large part of this book is devoted to helping you to conquer these difficulties. 5. Rhetoric. The two words “and Rhetoric” might have been added to the title of this book. You would like to have them added, wouldn’t you? At any rate, you must not think that the high-sounding word “rhetoric” as used in the titles of so many American books of English composition has anything “deep” in it. In fact, it is practically equivalent to “composition” or “the art or practice of writing”, as can be seen from the following definition of the term quoted from a very popular book of “Composition and Rhetoric”: “Rhetoric consists of the study of the principles governing the clear, forceful, and elegant expression of thoughts”. Such books, which are often called “rhetorics” (with the singular “a rhetoric”) in America, do not teach anything that is not taught in those having only the more homely word “composition” in their titles.
If I have dropped the word “rhetoric” from the title of this book, however, it is not merely because the term would sound more or less like an Americanism or because it would not have much meaning. There are two other reasons. First, this book is not a formal treatise on rhetoric in the old-fashioned sense of the word: it does not make a parade of the many jaw-breaking rhetorical terms that are of little use except as an essential part of a knowledge of rhetoric, such as “asyndeton”, “oxymoron”, and “syllepsis”. Secondly, this book abstains from advising the observance of many rules that exist only from a narrowly rhetorical point of view: it mentions some of them only to condemn them as superstitions, such as “A sentence should not begin with ‘and’” and “A sentence should not end with a preposition”.

CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1. Composition and Compositions
2. Purpose of This Book
3. Your Advantage
4. Your Special Difficulties
5. Rhetoric CHAPTER II MECHANICS OF COMPOSITION
6. Materials
7. One Side or Two Sides?
8. Margins
9. Spacing
10. Titles
11. Paging
12. Folding
13. Endorsing
14. Spelling
15. Syllabication
16. Underlining
17. Italics
18. Omissions, Corrections, and Insertions
19. A Warning CHAPTER III LEARNING TO WRITE
20. Something to Say
21. How to Say It
22. A Consolation
23. Others May Have Said It before You
24. What to Read
25. How to Read
26. Some Dictionaries Recommended
27. Self-cultivation
28. Writing from Memory
29. Imitation, Conscious and Unconscious
30. Reading Dictionaries
31. Expressing Another Person’s Thoughts
32. Paraphrasing Sentences
33. Suggestions for Paraphrasing
34. Paraphrasing Paragraphs
35. Paraphrasing Verse
36. Condensing
37. Various Degrees of Condensation
38. Suggestions for Condensing
39. Using Materia1 in Han
40. Expressing Your Own Thoughts
41. Keeping a Diary
42. Choosing a Subject
43. Choosing a Title
44. Taking Notes
45. Making an Outline
46. Note-taking and Outline-making in the Head
47. Making Outlines of What You Read
48. Expanding an Outline
49. Practice in Composition CHAPTER IV WRITING CORRECTLY
50. What is Correct English?
51. Usage
52. Present-day Usage
53. Neologisms
54. English and American Usage
55. Good Usage
56. Expressions Outside of Good Usage
57. Colloquialisms Etc in Written English
58. You are Quite Safe
59. How You Violate Usage CHAPTER V WRITING CORRECTLY (Continued)
60. Grammar
61. Idiom
62. Grammar and Idiom
63. About the Study of Grammar
64. About the Study of Idiom
65. Some Books Recommended
66. Make Your Own Dictionary of Usage
67. Exercises in Grammar
68. Proper Nouns Used as Common Nouns
69. Nouns Used as Adjectives
70. Singulars and Plurals
71. Nouns Singular Only
72. Nouns Plural Usually or Plural Only
73. Nouns Plural in a Special Usage
74. Nouns of Multitude
75. Abstract Nouns in Plural
76. Material Nouns in Plural
77. Nouns Ending in”-ics”
78. Some Miscellaneous Nouns
79. Numerals in Plural
80. Number in Nouns Used as Adjectives
81. Number and Articles
82. Plural Subject with Singular Verb
83. Some Knotty Points of Number
84. Gender and Sex
85. Male or Female Beings Considered Neuter
86. Animals Considered Masculine or Feminine Without Reference to Sex
87. Sexless Things Considered Masculine or Feminine
88. Masculine and Feminine Nouns Used as Nouns of Common Gender
89. Feminine Nouns Ending in “-ess”
90. Nouns Ending in “-man”
91. Words of Common Gender Made Masculine or Feminine
92. Gender and Number
93. Possessive Case and Of-phrase
94. Subjective and Objective Meanings
95. Possessive Plurals
96. Noun Phrases and Possessive Case
97. “’S” Repeated and “Of” Repeated
98. Possessive Case and Lifeless Things
99. Idiomatic Uses of Possessive Case
100. Noun Omitted after Possessive
101. “Of” before Possessive
102. One Noun in Two Cases
103. Pronoun and its Antecedent
104. Lack of a Common-gender Third-person-singular Pronoun
105. A Question of Person
106. Case in Pronouns
107. Objective Used as Predicate Nominative
108. Interrogative “Who” Used as Objective
109. Relative “Whom” Used as Nominative
110. “Whom” Used after “Than”
111. Nominative or Objective after “But”?
112. A Curious Case of Agreement
113. National, Editorial, and Generic Uses of “We”
114. Generic Use of “You” and “Your”
115. Indefinite Use of “They”
116. Generic Use of “One” and “One’s”
117. Idiomatic Uses of “It”
118. Two Distinct Constructions of “It ... That”
119. Defining and Non-defining Relative Clauses
120. The Relative Pronouns “Who”, “Which”, and “That”
121. Three Points of Choice between “Who(m)” and “Which”
122. Two Relative Clauses Linked by “And” or “But”
123. Omission of Relative Pronouns
124. “Which” without Definite Antecedent
125. “As” as Relative Pronoun
126. “Who” as Indefinite Relative Pronoun
127. “What” Preceding Statement
128. “One Another” and “Each Other”
129. Adjectives Used as Nouns
130. Exact Senses of Adjectives
131. A Curious Point about Comparatives
132. Two Curious Uses of Superlatives
133. “A Most” Followed by Adjective
134. “Worth” Taking an Object
135. “The Matter”
136. “Nothing Much”
137. Articles
138. “A” and Abstract Nouns
139. Some Words Often Mistaken for Abstract Nouns
140. Generic Use of Articles
141. Position of “A” (or “An”)
142. “The” Giving Common Noun Abstract Sense
143. Articles and Proper Nouns
144. Omission of Articles
145. Repetition of Articles
143. Final Remarks on Articles
147. Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
148. Absolute Use of Transitive Verbs
149. Copulative Verbs
150. Factitive Verbs
151. Verbs Taking Double Object
152. Tense and Time
153. Present Tense Referring to Future
154. Present Tense Referring to Past
155. Past Tense Referring to Future
156. Present Perfect Tense vs Past Tense
157. Past Perfect Tense
158. Perfect Tense vs Factitive “Have” with Past Participle as Complement
159. Continuous Tenses
160. “Always” with Continuous Tenses
161. “Be” in Continuous Tenses
162. “Used” Followed by Infinitive
163. “Be” Followed by Infinitive
164. “Have” Followed by Infinitive
165. Infinitive without “to”
166. Split Infinitives
167. “To” Standing for Infinitive
168. “To” Followed by Gerund
169. Infinitive or Gerund?
170. “Enough” Qualified by Infinitive
171. “Too” Qualified by Infinitive
172. Active and Passive Infinitives
173. Active and Passive Gerunds
174. Gerunds Used as Adjectives
175. Gerund and Possessive
176. Fused Participles
177. Present Participle Separated from Subject by Predicate Verb
178. Unattached Participles
179. Intransitive Past Participles Used as Adjectives
180. “Shall” and “Will”, “Should” and “Would”
181. Subjunctive Mood
182. Sequence of Tenses
183. “The” as Adverb
184. Double Adverbial “The”
185. Quasi-adverbs
186. Prepositions
187. Idiomatic Uses of Prepositions
188. Prepositions before Particular Nouns
189. Prepositions after Particular Words
190. Omission of Prepositions
191. Prepositions Governing Words Other than Nouns and Pronouns
192. That-clause in Apposition to Nouns
193. That-clause Qualifying Adjectives and Past Participles
194. That-clause Used after Verbs
195. That-clause Qualifying “So” and “Such”
196. Idiomatic Uses of “That”
197. Omission of “That”
198. “And” Expressing Result
199. “Or” Meaning Otherwise
200. Idiomatic Uses of “If”
201. “Than” with Ellipsis
202. “When” as Relative Conjunction
203. “As Well As”
204. “Though ... Yet ...”
205. Indirect Questions
206. Negative Inversion

CHAPTER VI WRITING WELL
207. What is Good Writing?
208. Superstitions
209. Diction and Sentence Structure
210. The Exact word
211. Specific and General Words
212. Plain and Pretentious Words
213. Idiomatic Phrases and Idiomatic Uses of Plain Words
214. “Fine Writing”
215. Hackneyed Phrases
216. Words Used Too Often
217. Economy of Words
218. Periodic and Loose Sentences
219. Qualities of a Good Sentence
220. Unity
221. Coherence
222. Emphasis
223. Euphony CHAPTER VII PARAGRAPHS
224. What is a Paragraph?
225. Length of Paragraphs
226. Paragraphs and Outline
227. Topic Sentence
228. Paragraph Development
229. Qualities of a Good Paragraph
230. Transition between Paragraphs Chapter VIII FORMS OF COMPOSITION
231. Narrations, Description, Exposition and Argument
232. Point of View in Narration
233. What Tense to Use?
234. “Story Style” and “News Style”
235. Plain Account of Events
236. Artistic, Practical, and Scientific Description
237. Avoid “Fine Writing”

★ 由英语学界泰斗、英文教育界先驱、陆谷孙恩师葛传椝先生撰写。 ★ 全书以简明地道的英文写成。
★ 指出中国英语学习者在写作中遇到的难题并一一解答。
★ 包含摘自现代英语中的大量实例。
★ 配以切合实际的练习题,巩固写作技巧。
★ 对惯用法、习语和遣词造句等有关问题进行了详实阐述。