Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric
by Sherwin Cody
English, published in 1903
62,958 words (196 pages)
Categories: Language, Instructional
If there is a subject of really universal interest and utility, it is the art of writing and speaking one’s own language effectively.
ionships, and when we have mastered these and their chief modifications and combinations, we have the essence of grammar as truly as if we knew the name for every possible combination which our seven fundamental relationships might have. Since rhetoric is the art of appealing to the emotions and intelligence of our hearers, we need to know, not the names of all the different artifices which may be employed, but the nature and laws of emotion and intelligence as they may be reached through language; for if we know what we are hitting at, a little practice will enable us to hit accurately; whereas if we knew the name of every kind of blow, and yet were ignorant of the thing we were hitting at, namely the intelligence and emotion of our fellow man, we would be forever striking into the air,—striking cleverly perhaps, but ineffectively.
Having got our bearings, we find before us a purely practical problem, that of leading the student through the maze of a new science and teaching him the skill of an old