ON COPIA—IS THIS HOW SHAKESPEARE, DONNE AND MILTON LEARNED TO WRITE?

ON COPIA—IS THIS HOW SHAKESPEARE, DONNE AND MILTON LEARNED TO WRITE? I posted here about Stanley Fish’s book HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE which show students and others how to model good sentences on good sentences from great writers. Victoria Kahn in the Times Literary Supplement (September 9) writes about the rhetorical education of the Renaissance grammar school which “produced the great flowering of English literature” that included the works of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. The grammar school education was devoted to what Erasmus called “copia”—“rhetorically pleasing persuasive and fluent writing on all variety of subjects.” Victoria Kahn cites “Erasmus’s manual, On Copia, [which] includes hundreds of ways of saying ‘I was so happy to receive your letter’….” Hundreds of variants. Posting on this blog often reminds me of how stilted my sentence choices are. Victoria Kahn suggests writing ten different versions of Erasmus’s sentence, and I can see the value in the exercise.