15. Phrasing is sometimes defined as "the joining of words together without lifting the pen." But this definition is for several reasons too narrow. Good phrasing is much more than this. As Benn Pitman has wisely said, "The mere desultory stringing of words together is not phrasing." In the first place, this definition ignores several highly-useful classes of phrases which, it may be said, illustrate phrasing as a fine art. It includes only one class of phrases, and those the simplest and least artistic - "those which simply join together, without alteration, the ordinary outlines of words as they are written when standing alone." These phrases, for the writing of which one needs to know

' but little more than the separate forms of the words to be phrased, may be called simple or word-joining phrases.