“Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”
Samuel Johnson. Life of Addison.
“Children learn to speak by watching the lips and catching the words of those who know how already; and poets learn in the same way from their elders.”
James Russell Lowell. Essay on Chaucer.
“Grammars of rhetoric and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world.... Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?”
Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Trevelyan’s Life of Lord Macaulay. Chapter VI.
PRACTICAL ENGLISH COMPOSITION
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
THE NEWSPAPER
“Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.”
Chaucer.
I. Introduction
The object of this book is to teach high-school boys and girls how to write plain newspaper English. Next to letter-writing, this is at once the simplest and the most practical form of composition. The pupil who does preëminently well the work outlined in this volume may become a proof-reader, a reporter, an editor, or even a journalist. In other words, the student of this book is working on a practical bread-and-butter proposition. He must remember, however, that the lessons it contains are elementary. They are only a beginning. And even this beginning can be made only by the most strenuous and persistent exertions. English is not an easy subject. It is the hardest subject in the curriculum. To succeed in English three things are required: (1) Work; (2) Work; (3) WORK.