1887 printing of 1886 copyrighted text. The author is credited with an M.A. and as Professor of Rhetoric in the College of Liberal Arts, Syracuse University. Texts strives to give rhetorical a more practical character, as training has been "impractical and fruitless." Prefaces discusses the perceived failure of education in composition and textbooks' focus on a labyrinth of abstractions, such as invention, taste, deduction, simplicity, partial exposition, feeling, perfection, the sublime, the picturesque, etc. Instead, the author emphasizes imitation and observation as the natural teachers, and that rhetorical training must be largely negative (focusing on detecting errors and revision). The text includes examples of undergraduate essays for criticism and correction. The parts: the form, the style, the thought, and versification. Chapters still use common abstractions and modes of discourse. Schultz Archive copy contains preface, suggestions to teachers, TOC, and pages 240 – 299, covering chapters from part III (the thought) on selection of a subject, the outline, description, narration, exposition, and persuasion.
1899 printing of the 1899 copyrighted work. Both authors are credited as Instructors in English at Vassar College. Buck has a Ph.D. from Michigan. Woodbridge has a Ph.D. from Yale. The preface emphasizes that students need a sense of a real audience for their writing as well as a subject they're interested in. The prefaces says the work includes few explicit directions on sentences and paragraphs. It offers Scott and Denney's Composition-Rhetoric as a guide for those. The work is organized in four chapters: the basis of exposition, the process of description, description in its relation to exposition, and definition in its relation to exposition. The text itself is quite discursive, providing lengthy discussions of the writing processes with analyzed examples. The lessons posit different subjects, writing situations, or audiences, while also usually asking students to observe and comment upon examples by distinguished authors that treat similar situations, subjects, audience, etc. The Schultz Archive's copy is the complete text.
