ON READING ALOUD, AND ON SPELLING
=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.