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Exercises in Rhetoric and English Composition (Advanced Course)
Exercises in Rhetoric and English Composition - Advanced Course Author:G. R. Carpenter 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: modern treatises — those of Professor Hill, Professor Genung, and Professor Wendell, for instance — aim to supply a brief but sufficient theory of the general la... more »ws of expression by means of written words, to arrange them in a natural order, and to illustrate them until misapprehension is almost impossible. While mastering these general principles of the art the student is encouraged to put them in practice frequently and regularly, and, experience feeding knowledge and knowledge directing experience, he thus gains skill in expression with more rapidity than would otherwise be possible. But there are those who maintain, and with some reason, that skill in writing comes partly from a knowledge of the theory of Rhetoric and partly from such experience as is derived from practice, but most of all from the diligent reading of good authors and a conscious or unconscious absorbing of their style. "Just as it has come to be generally recognized," writes a successful teacher of English Composition, "that the true way to achieve clearness, force, and elegance in our English is not to study the rules laid down in the rhetorics, but to become familiar with writing that is clear, forcible, and elegant, so it is now almost universally conceded that the true way to attain correctness is not to peruse the rules of the grammars, but to habituate one's self to correct language by hearing and reading correct language as much as possible." And again: "The knowledge most directly fundamental to intelligent control ofone's own expression is a historical acquaintance with the language and the literature. The manuals of rhetoric fill the youth's mind with prohibitions of objectionable words and constructions ; but the fund of diction on which the youth must learn to draw is our standard prose. The mai...« less