# Making the Most of One's Mind/Chapter 9

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CONSTRUCTIVE STUDY IN TRANSLATION AND ESSAY-WRITING
ΟNE of the best examples of the working of constructive study is to be found in the translation into English of passages from a foreign language. This always presupposes a great deal of acquired knowledge and skill, and exemplifies their application to a specific problem. If the pupil bad to find out afresh the meaning of all the words in such a passage, he would have little chance of ever making sense out of it. At the same time, the ordinary student always does find in the work of translation some words with which he is not familiar or which he has never seen before; and the looking up of these in the dictionary gives that supply of new matter that nearly always accompanies constructive work. Each new passage is necessarily a problem, sometimes easy of solution, sometimes very difficult; occasionally, indeed, with the student's limited knowledge, insoluble.
One of the most useful forms in which construc​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/251 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/252 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/253 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/254 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/255 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/256 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/257 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/258 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/259 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/260 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/261 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/262 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/263 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/264 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/265 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/266 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/267 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/268 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/269 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/270 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/271 ​Page:Making the most of one's mind (IA makingmostofones00adam).pdf/272 ​could have been obtained in carrying out a research that, even if it does not reveal anything new, at least confirms what is already known, and makes the researcher realize what he knew before only in a vague way, and on the evidence of others. We all know in a general way that Milton uses a higher percentage of Latinized words than does Defoe. But if we take the trouble to select two thousand words consecutively from any part of the Areopagitica, and two thousand words consecutively from any part of Robinson Crusoe, and classify the words as (1) Latinized, (2) Saxon, and (3) those neither Latin nor Saxon in origin, we get a quantitative result from which we can say with greater exactness how the two vocabularies stand to one another. Results of this kind very often surprise the investigators: nearly always they suggest facts that had not before been suspected.
A particularly useful exercise at the early stages of your practice in research is the verification or testing of results obtained by others. The advantage of this exercise is that you have a sort of standard by which to judge whether you are keeping fairly near the truth. If your results are widely different from those of your predecessor, you have the alluring hunt for the big error you have made, with, of course, just the delightful possibility that the error was made by the other fellow.