When
the phrase is at the beginning or at the end of the sentence, how many
commas do you need to set it off? How many, when it is in the middle?
Do you find any choice in the four positions of this phrase? After having
been told that your answers were correct, would it be a disappointment to
be told that they were not all correct? Is the interest in a story best
kept up by first telling the important points and then the unimportant
particulars? What then do you think of placing this phrase at the end?
What does the last phrase of (_j_) modify? Take out the comma, and then see
whether there can be any doubt as to what the phrase modifies.
In the placing of adverbs and phrases great freedom is often allowable, and
the determining of their best possible position affords an almost unlimited
opportunity for the exercise of taste and judgment.
Such questions as those on (_i_) above may suggest a mode of easy approach
to what is usually relegated to the province of rhetoric. Let the pupils
see that phrases may be transposed for various reasons--for emphasis, as in
(_h_) above; for the purpose of exciting the reader's curiosity and holding
his attention till the complete statement is made, as in (_i_) above, or
in, "In the dead of night, with a chosen band, under the cover of a truce,
he approached"; for the sake of balancing the sentence by letting some of
the modifying terms precede, and some follow, the principal parts, as, "In
1837, on the death of William IV.
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