ABSTRACT
The highest kind of writing must always be the task immediately in hand — an epic, a history, a report, a letter to a friend. Writing is a continual process of choosing. Writing that merely transcribed ‘natural’ speech would be dull and ineffectual; it would sacrifice the acrior without achieving the altius. But the long centuries of tradition have taught us the devices that stimulate the emphasis, the urgency, the apparent disjunctions, of the spoken language. There are devices of language, text-controlling devices, on which the skilful writer learns to call. The chapter suggests an example, not from the experience of writing, but from the rather more mundane business of shopping.
