Читать книгу A First Book in Writing English - Edwin Herbert Lewis - Страница 7

Table of Contents

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.

1. The hyphen is needed in a compound adjective, if there is any doubt as to the meaning when the hyphen is omitted. “Red-hot iron” may be a different idea from “red hot iron.”

2. Numbers like the following take the hyphen: seventy-three, seventy-third.

3. Many a word once compounded is now written solid, that is, as a single word: railroad, steamboat, anybody, anything, raindrop, forever, schoolboy, schoolhouse, schoolmate, schoolfellow (but school days, school teacher, school district); myself, yourself (but one’s self); childlike, lifelike. All these words but two, it will be seen, have a monosyllable for the first part. When in doubt as to whether or not a hyphen is needed, consult some special manual like Bigelow’s Handbook of Punctuation.

In all your writing, join distinctly syllables that you wish to have go together. Notice the absurd and misleading effect of such careless writing as this: “He was a glass maker and worked down at the glass house; his gal lant moust ache and his loud voice trai ned by blow ing glass mad e him wel come at the harvest home celebrations.”

Possessives.—The possessive singular of a monosyllable ending in s is regularly made by adding ’s, pronounced as an extra syllable. Thus: Jones’s; Briggs’s. For the polysyllable ending in s or the sound of s, merely the apostrophe is usually required, as in the plural. Thus: “Moses’ seat”; “conscience’ sake.”

Singulars and Plurals.—Spell aloud by syllables, and write from dictation the plurals of the following: Analysis, animalcule, antithesis, appendix, bandit, cherub, crisis, ellipsis, focus, fungus, genus, hypothesis, madame, memorandum, monsieur, mother-in-law, mussulman, nebula, oasis, parenthesis, radius, spoonful, synopsis.

What are the singulars—if singulars there are—of data, errata, magi, strata, vertebræ?

Written Exercise.—Below are given the correct form of certain words often misspelled by pupils in the first and second years of a secondary school. Without previous study write each word from dictation. Afterwards spell aloud by syllables each word that you misspelled in writing from dictation. Then write at least twenty times the correct form. The object is to acquire a kind of automatic correctness. In composing, one should have his mind free for thought; one should not have to think much more about spelling than about breathing.

Accompany; advisability; all right; anniversary; appearance; associated; bargained; buried; carriage; catarrh; cemetery; characteristic; commander; commotion; conceive; condescension; confidants; confidence; deceive; describe; descriptions; despair; difficulty; dilapidate; disappointed; disappeared; ecstasy; enemies; enemy; exaggerate; excrescence; existence; fascination; fatiguing; finally; further; grammar; handkerchief; hating; hemorrhage; immature; indispensable; irresistible; lightning; literary; living; loathsome; lose (the money); manœuvre; melancholy; minister; ministry; misshapen; necessary; niece; occurrence; offered; opportunity; outrageous; parallel; paralysis; peaceable; persuade; planned; poniard; primitive; principal (objection); principle (of action); privilege; promenading; pursuit; received; recommend; redoubtable; referred; representatives; rhythm; sacrilegious; secretary; seize; seized; separate; shoeing; siege; simile; stopped; striking; studied; superintendent; supposing; tenants; theatre; their (money); transferred; until; veil (on face); vengeance; very; village; wasn’t; whether; Roger de Coverley; George Eliot; Lord Macaulay; Michigan; Thackeray.

Word-Breaking.—At the end of a line do not divide (a) a monosyllable, (b) a short disyllable, such as real, doing. Divide polysyllables according to their etymological composition (to be found in the dictionary). Some authors discountenance beginning a second line with -ic, -al, -ing, -ly. These breakings are perhaps permissible, if the hyphen is made very distinct.

Written and Oral Exercise.—The instructor should ask each pupil in turn to recall, spell, and pronounce some word that doubles the letter c. The class should then be given a few minutes to write from memory as many of those given as they can recall. After this the pronouncing and spelling should proceed as long as possible, alternately with the writing. The lists should then be compared, and the pupil who has reproduced the largest number of words should be asked to spell and pronounce each one on his list. The other pupils should then be called upon to read from their own lists words that the first fails to give. Each should then be asked to add to his paper all words remembered by other members of the class, but not by him.[8]

Pronunciation.—A person who regards good usage in pronunciation and who articulates with unaffected nicety, is received at once as an educated man. It is interesting to see how often Lord Chesterfield, the best-mannered of Englishmen, insists that a gentleman is known by his accent. Chesterfield’s letters to his son are full of this idea. A sense of ease and security blesses him who knows how to sound every word that occurs to him as he talks; it is such a sense as a man feels when he is sure that his clothes fit him and are cut according to the accepted conventions. It is accordingly worth all the trouble involved, to form a habit of letting no word pass unchallenged as to its orthoëpy. Look it up in the dictionary, or in a good manual like Phyfe’s Seven Thousand Words often Mispronounced.

Exercise.—Below is given a short list of words frequently mispronounced. The instructor should pronounce the words, and ask the class to pronounce them.

 Abdomen,

 abject,

 absinthe,

 abstruse,

 acacia,

 accessory,

 acclimate,

 acoustics,

 actor,

 adagio,

 adult,

 advertisement,

 aëronaut,

 again,

 aged,

 aggrandize,

 aide-de-camp,

 allopathy,

 ally,

 alma mater,

 alternate (noun and adjective),

 amenable,

 apricot,

 arbutus,

 aroma,

 aspirant,

 bade,

 bellows,

 biography,

 bitumen,

 boatswain,

 bravado,

 bronchitis,

 canine,

 cant,

 can’t,

 cement (noun),

 cemetery,

 cerebrum,

 clematis,

 coadjutor,

 daunt,

 decade,

 devil,

 diphtheria,

 disdain,

 dislike,

 drama,

 duke,

 dynasty,

 enervate,

 evil,

 exhale,

 exhaust,

 extant,

 extempore,

 finale,

 finance,

 financier,

 garrulous,

 gaunt,

 genuine,

 gibber,

 gibbet,

 glacier,

 gratis,

 grimace,

 half,

 hegira,

 heinous,

 impious,

 jugular,

 lamentable,

 learned (adj.),

 legend,

 lever,

 literature,

 nape,

 nomad,

 opponent,

 pageant,

 patriot,

 patron,

 petal,

 precedence,

 precedent,

 quay,

 revolt,

 rise (noun),

 sacrifice,

 squalor,

 subtile,

 subtle,

 vagary,

 water,

 wrath,

 zoölogy.[9]

 Abélard,

 Abernethy,

 About (Edmond),

 Abydos,

 Acheron,

 Achitophel,

 Adonis,

 Ægean,

 Æolus,

 Æschylus,

 Afghanistan,

 Agincourt,

 Agnes,

 Aguilar (Grace),

 Aïda,

 Aix-la-Chapelle,

 Alaric,

 Alcantara,

 Alcuin,

 Aldebaran,

 Alighieri,

 Amphion,

 Andronicus,

 Antinous,

 Aquinas,

 Arab,

 Aral,

 Arundel,

 Athos,

 Avon,

 Aytoun,

 Bajazet,

 Balliol (college),

 Balmoral,

 Czerny,

 Latin,

 Laocoön,

 Medici,

 Mivart, (St. George),

 Orion,

 Paderewski,

 Pepys,

 Proserpine,

 Sienkiewicz,

 Southey,

 Thalia,

 Tschaikowsky,

 Volapük,

 Wagner,

 Ygdrasil.