1896 copyrighted text. Practical construction and logical arrangement of lessons designed to lead the pupil from perception to expression, illustration to definition, sentence-building to composition. It uses pictures, poems and unfinished stories for exercises as well as questions at the beginning of lessons. Progressive lessons on word forms and sentences structure are combined with exercises in narration and description. Good models are used to teach good style through imitation. The Schultz Archive's copy is roughly the complete text.
1890 printing (83rd 1000) of the 1884 copyrighted text. The author is credited as Teacher of English Language and Literature in Ann Arbor High School. Chittenden's text seeks to provide young high school students with a primer of knowledge for the study of rhetoric. The author claims that the intention is to use as little theory as possible to teach the beginnings of correct writing. She details a fairly precise method that begins with the principles of English grammar and works through examples of literature, style, expression, letter-writing and more. Exercises in reproduction are designed to have students put good writing examples in their own words. Exercises in development provide students with detail, which they must then weave into a composition. Exercises in summary teach student to condense. Exercises in paraphrase teach students to rephrase with style. The Schultz Archive includes the complete text, except pages 122-23, and the scans are in good condition.
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.
