Beginnings of Rhetoric and Composition, Including Practical Exercises in English

Excerpt from Beginnings of Rhetoric and Composition, Including Practical Exercises in English

While I have been at work on this book, I have had constantly in mind the needs of pupils in secondary schools who are learning to express themselves with the pen. Toward supplying these needs, little can, in my judgment, be contributed by treatises on the theory or the science of rhetoric, by cut-and-dried methods of instruction, or by diagrams, skeleton essays, or other mechanical devices. A young writer will not do so well when he is helped along a smooth and well-travelled highway of commonplace as when he is encouraged to strike out a path for himself.

The best teacher of English composition is he who stimulates his pupils to put their natural selves into all that they write. With this object in view, he will provide for them, or will tell them how to provide for themselves, subjects which are closely connected with their work or their play and in which they take a living interest; he will give them freedom in the treatment of their material; and he will help them to remove obstacles, small or great, that lie between what they think and what they write.

In the removal of obstacles between thought and expression, this book will, I hope, be of service; for it aims to show a young writer how to present what he has to say in the best English within his reach, and in a form adapted to his purpose.

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