Elementary Composition Author:Dorothy Canfield Fisher Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ELEMENTARY COMPOSITION CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION For several years you have written, from time to time, short compositions. These have been letters, or stori... more »es, or descriptions, or explanations of ideas you had in mind, or summaries of your lessons in history or geography. You have now come to a point in your education where it will be well for you to take up composition as a separate subject, studying it as you would geography or history. Let us begin by asking ourselves what it is. What is composition? What geography and history are, it is easy to see. Geography is the subject that has to do with the world as a place. We learn the names that men have given to the parts of the world, large and small; and, with regard to each country, what are its climate and the nature of its soil, its products and manufactures, its cities, and mountains, and rivers. History is the subject that has to do with the actions of the inhabitants of the world. We learn what were the chief nations that have existed or still exist, what were the important events that took place in each nation, as time went on, and who were the great men that shaped its destinies. Any one who knew about all the main events inthe life of all the great nations would be a very learned person indeed; but you have already read or studied some very important things in the history of Greece or Rome, or the United States, and thus have a general idea of the history of one or more of these nations. Since the beginning of time men have been talking to one another, and many thousand years ago they found a way of communicating with one another by written signs or letters; and not so many hundred years ago they discovered printing, which enables one person to communicate with many people in different places at the same time. ...« less