The Rhetorical Reader Author:Ebenezer Porter 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: tolerable readiness, from lessons which belong to the grammatical class, and put them upon those which contain some rhetorical principles. These lessons should, ... more »at first, be chiefly narrative; or narrative and colloquial combined;— by which I mean, dialogue proper, or rhetorical dialogue; in which the same voice must Represent two speakers or more. CHAPTER II. ARTICULATION. It has been well said, that a good articulation is to the ear, what a fair hand-writing, or a fair type is to the eye. Who has not felt the perplexity of supplying a word, torn away by the seal of a letter; or a dozen syllables of a book, in as many lines, cut off by the carelessness of a binder? The same inconvenience is felt from a similar omission in spoken language; with this additional disadvantage, that we are not at liberty to stop, and spell out the meaning by construction. A man of indistinct utterance reads this sentence ; " The magistrates ought to prove a declaration so publicly made." When I perceive that his habit is to strike only the accented syllable clearly, sliding over others, I do not know whethel it is meant, that they oughi to prove the declaration, or to approve it, or reprove it,—for in either case he would speak only the syllable prove. Nor do I know, whether the magistrates ought to do it, or the magistrate sought to do it. Defective articulation arises from bad organs, or bad habits, or sounds of difficult utterance. Every one knows how the loss of a tooth, or a contusion on the lip, affects the formation of oral sounds. When there is an essential fault in the structure of the mouth; when the tongue is disproportionate in length or width, or sluggish in its movements; or the palate is too high, or too low; or the teeth badly set, or decayed, art may diminish, but cann...« less