Words in Action [antikvár]

PREFACE Several thousand boys and girls whom I have endeavored to teach have been my teachers. Through association with them have come the convictions upon which this book is based. These convictions are: (i) that the difficulties of the poor reader, the poor writer, and the poor speaker can be summed up under two heads: vocabulary and sentence structure; (2) that in any field of artistry pupils learn best by doing; (3) that ability to form true mentái images is the main requisite to facility in reading and in composition; (4) that the young mind - especially the less developed type - though baffled by abstractions, can image the concrete with comparative ease; (5) that an understanding of the structural elements constituting a sentence and of the functional relations existing among those elements greatly assists a pupil, whether he is phrasing his own thoughts or interpreting the phraseology of others; (6) that full comprehension of a principle is of far greater value than a memorized rule; (7) that in composition, whether written or oral, mattérs of meaning and matters of form require dissimilar teaching techniques. Words in Action provides more than three hundred set tasks for pupils to perform. The book aims mainly (1) to develop the various skills needed for the orderly, clear, and accurate expression of thought, and for the correct interpretation of lengthy and involved sentences; (2) to foster imagination; (3) to enlarge the pupil's working vocabulary; (4) through extensive y