Excerpt from Sentences and Thinking: A Practice Book in Sentence Making I. What the sentence is. The sentence, as the thought unit, is the starting-point for the study of composition. It should be regarded, at the outset, not as the result of a mechanical manipulation of grammatical elements, but as an organism, an organic whole, reproducing in words a thought in the mind, as a-photograph reproduces a scene. It is always our first concern to see the thought clearlyfto get it clearly focused in our minds; to this everything else is secondary, - the grammar, the parts of speech, the syntax that are so often the bugbear of the student because they are approached wrongly. In the discussion that follows, we shall look first to the thought