CHAPTER II
ON READING ALOUD, AND ON SPELLING
Reading Aloud.—One of the quickest ways of learning to know good English, is oral reading. For him who would write the language it is therefore a great economy to learn to read it. It is an invaluable habit to read aloud every day some piece of prose with the finest feeling the reader can lend to it. In no other way can one so easily learn to notice and to remember new words. In no other way can one catch the infinitely varied rhythm of prose, and acquire a sense of how a good sentence rises gradually from the beginning and then descends in a cadence. This rise and fall of the sentence is not merely a matter of voice; it is a matter of thought as well. Similarly, the law of unity in the sentence, a law which prescribes what shall constitute a complete thought, is curiously bound up with the laws of the human voice. A clause that is too long to be pronounced in a single breath is usually clumsy in logic. In the next place, reading aloud helps one to spell correctly. Furthermore, it is the best means of detecting those useless repetitions which betray poverty of vocabulary.
Rousseau called accent the soul of language. If the student reads aloud from writers whose work was natural, unforced, original, he will gradually come to see his own ideas more clearly, feel his own feelings more keenly. Best of all, however, let him read his own work aloud, habitually. This will help him to see whether or not it is correct, natural, effective.
Spelling.[7]—Bad spelling should practically be a thing of the past for each student by the end of his first high school year. Every one can learn to spell, though some more rapidly than others.
Perhaps the chief reason why persons fail to spell correctly is that they do not read correctly. They have not trained their eyes to see what is on the page; they do not notice the syllables. It is a good practice to read every day a page or two very slowly, examining the words letter by letter. It is equally helpful to read the page aloud after examining it. In so doing give every vowel its true value; cut no syllable short that should be sounded distinctly.
After writing a theme, go through it, challenging the spelling. Do not hand in your work without having consulted your own dictionary. A bad speller may not be able to win in an oral spelling-match; but there is no reason why every page of his writing should not be perfect in orthography.
Into a little blank-book copy the correct form of every word you misspell. Each day read over carefully several words by syllables, and then write them from memory. The more frequently the hand writes the word in its correct form, the better; for the hand has a memory of its own, and the mere act of writing a given form tends to fix it in memory.
Make good spelling a matter of pride. Habitual bad spelling is a slovenly thing, a mark of illiteracy.
Spelling of Compound Words.—It may be well to call attention here to the use of the hyphen in compound words.