Читать книгу A First Book in Writing English онлайн

3 страница из 20

In the present book, originally printed privately for my own classes and now rewritten and enlarged, I have tried to present a large number of definite situations to be faced for constructive practice both in organization and in diction; and to give in simple, even colloquial language, all the larger generalizations which a boy presenting himself at college might reasonably be expected to have been using for two or three years as touchstones of his own work. Except in the chapters on punctuation and grammar, the order of reaching generalizations is meant to be essentially inductive. In these review-chapters a part of the principles come before the illustrations in order to get the help of all past associations. Even here the induction is often gone through with a second time, leading up to a restatement of the principle. It is recommended that students should often be asked to frame generalizations of their own, though the text-book may have led up to similar ones. In Chapters ssss1 and ssss1, on words, I have tried to present conditions favorable to the framing of definitions by the student. By various devices I have constantly tried to avoid separation between exercise critical and exercise constructive. Occasionally, after the correct form has been studied, bad English is offered for correction, for the sake of the appeal to the student’s personal pride and his sense of the ridiculous; but in general it is assumed that the student’s correction of his own bad English will afford plenty of contact with faulty forms.