56. As the student, by practice and experience, gains gradually a mastery of the principles and rules of phrase-making, he will almost instinctively form, and form correctly, more phrases than can be put in any collected list. But in too many cases, beginners "take much longer time in jerking out inconvenient and illegible joinings than would be occupied in writing words separately." In their zeal they carry phrasing to excess by undertaking to "join every word that is physically capable of uniting with another."

57. The student, ambitious to acquire the art of phrasing, often errs in assuming that, because a certain number of phrases are formed by the application of a particular principle, the same principle may be indiscriminately extended to all cases apparently similar that can possibly arise. For instance, having employed the l hook to express will in the phrases it will, they will, which will, etc., some students, jumping wildly to the conclusion that in any case the l hook can thus be used, may undertake to express will by the hook in such combinations as the country will, the kingdom will, time will, the result of which must be forms unsuggestive and illegible.

58. The various phrasing expedients are but a means, not an end, and are always to be used in subordination to the great laws of convenience and legibility. Useful expedients, intended to be time-saving, must not be forcibly and violently brought into play in cases where their employment would really be a hindrance. Correct and conservative habits in this matter will be a natural outgrowth of a study of these lessons, if the student conscientiously confines his phrasing efforts for the time being to the models here given.

59. The student must especially aim to "avoid a hurried, spasmodic style of writing." With many young writers, somewhat familiar with ordinary word-forms, but frequently at loss in determining whether and how to join them, the pen, when phrasing is undertaken, halts at the end of each word, and the writing becomes a succession of spasmodic jerks. Instead of this, there must be acquired the habit of steady, continuous writing. The student should determine not to indulge himself in the too common habit of starting a phrase and then, pen in hand, feeling his way, as it were, through the mazes of the phrase, word by word or stroke by stroke. If there must be a hesitating pause, let it come before the phrase is begun and while the writer is deciding, not how a particular word, but how the phrase as a whole, is to be written. Thus the mind will gradually learn to outrun the hand, to think out a phrase as the pen begins to write it; and in this way there will be formed that habit of pauseless, unhesitating movement at which every student should aim.

60. It should not be assumed that all the phrases or methods of phrasing presented in this book are adapted to all writers. Some hands are naturally fitted for the execution of minute characters and delicate distinctions, while other hands, in attempting such contractions, must fail. Adopting in substance the language of Thomas Allen Reed, it may be said that if the student has a naturally heavy hand, he will require more time and labor to acquire a facile shorthand execution than his light-fingered brother, and may not indulge in some of the refinements of abbreviation requiring delicate and minute distinctions. But even such should remember that lightness of hand, though largely a matter of constitution and temperament, may be cultivated. What an undisciplined hand can do is no criterion of what the same hand may do after patient, well-directed training.