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WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 A BOOK OF STRATEGY FOR 
 ENGLISH TEACHERS 
 
 BY 
 
 C. H. WARD, M.A. 
 
 HEAD OP THR DKPARTMKNT OP ENGLISH, THE TAPT SCHOOL, 
 WATERTOWN, CONNECTICUT 
 
 SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 
 CHICAGO ATLANTA NEW YORK 
 

 
 Copyright 1917 by 
 Scott, Foresman and Company 
 
 247 
 
To 
 
 ALBERT SHAW 
 
 "Who once taught me the most valuable lesson an 
 English teacher can learn 
 
 5 71 5574 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Many of the ideas in this book have been elabo- 
 rated as special articles, but the chapters are in no 
 sense a set of reprinted essays. Thanks are due to 
 the following journals for permission to adapt or 
 use parts of what they published: 
 
 English Journal 
 
 Intensive Spelling, Oct., 1914 
 Punctator Gingriens, Sep., 1915 
 We Must Not Be Enemies, Feb., 1916 
 The Bottomless Pond of oes, March, 1916 
 The Scale Illusion, April, 1917 
 
 Education 
 
 English Apparatus, Nov., 1915 
 
 / 
 ational Review 
 
 What Is English? Feb., 1916 
 
 English Leaflet 
 Inculcated Love, Feb., 1915 
 Defending Camelot, Oct., 1916 
 
 School Review 
 
 A Platform of Grammar, April, 1916 
 
 Bulletin of the Illinois Association 
 Exploring the Comma, Nov., 1916 
 
CONTEXTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface 5 
 
 / Introduction 9 
 
 Chapter I. What English Is 15 
 
 II. Descent to Earth 29 
 
 —3* HI. Intensive Spelling 36 
 
 , IV. What Grammar Is All About 74 
 
 V. Teaching Grammar. 96 
 
 VI. John Wilson 's Idea 115 
 
 VII. What Is a Comma? 128 
 
 VIII. Present Usage in Pointing 154 
 
 • IX. Themes 189 
 
 1 X. Reading '.219 
 
 XI. Odds and Ends 244 
 
L 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A paraphrase of the Advertisement to The Vicar 
 of Wakefield will serve to introduce this book. "A 
 hundred doubts may be stirred by this manual, and 
 a hundred things could be said to prove them ground- 
 less. But it is needless. A book may be iisefnj_ with 
 1 1 u merous_ over-statements , or it may be e rroneou s 
 witEbuljaL_single emphatic remark. Such as are fond 
 of pulpit-banging will turn with disdain from the 
 author's simple work-shop. Such as mistake suave 
 wording for sound teaching will find no help in this 
 kit of tools for a laborer, and such as have been 
 taught to deride accuracy will laugh at one whose 
 whole stock of advice is drawn from the facts of a 
 long experience.' p 
 
 English has until recently been considered above 
 and beyond other subjects of the curriculum. Its 
 function lias been supposed to be the cultivation 
 of insight into beauty, of charm and finesse in 
 '■xpression. Teachers have taken pride in the 
 idea that their beautiful occupation had little to 
 do with imparting facts to crassly ignorant minds ; 
 have felt little need of accurate knowledge or careful 
 scheme of attack. Algohrn, Latin, physics — these 
 required a teacher to have definite information and 
 to go about his instruction according to plans worked 
 out through centuries of experience. But English — 
 that demanded only hazy desire and the throb of 
 inspiration. A large proportion of its teachers, in 
 both school and college, have been dilettanteish, 
 
 9 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 amateurish, ignorant of fact, and scornful of system. 
 They have professed horror at the notion that the 
 main purpose of secondary English is to attack 
 methodically the most rudimentary illiteracy. They 
 have felt that such a proposal could come only from 
 a mental blacksmith, and have thus made the me- 
 chanics of their art an almost unmentionable subject. 
 But they have not denied the necessity of the gross 
 mechanics, and in practice have done much good 
 work. 
 
 Such a jumble of emotion and fact perplexes the 
 novice. And there is another potent cause of per- 
 plexity — the experts in pedagogy. They occupy 
 lofty positions, they thunder in conventions, they 
 appal us with articles and books. Though they know 
 nothing of the craft of teaching English, they tell 
 us of noble aims: "Why instead of confining our 
 students to English literature do we not make them 
 acquainted with the first-class literature of man- 
 kind V This from a prominent man in our oldest 
 university. An even better-known man has written 
 " authoritatively' ' about spelling. The only par- 
 ticles of information in his brochure are wrong in 
 principle; there is hardly a sentence that presents 
 anything concrete; the adjurations are mostly im- 
 possible to follow. Lest such violent language should 
 seem the impertinence of a small man toward great 
 ones, the reader is referred to an article in the Un- 
 popular Review for July, 1916, "The Professor of 
 Pedagogy Once More," written by a man who "for 
 twenty years in several institutions has been next- 
 door neighbor' ' to professors of pedagogy, and who 
 "has on his shelves seventeen feet of pedagogic lit- 
 erature." This article is not savage or vindictive 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 or satirical; it rather good-naturedly states such 
 facts as these: " Among the secondary school-teach- 
 ers, of course, the professor of pedagogy is an oracle 
 and a great man. And it is the secondary school to 
 which, almost exclusively, he addresses his litera- 
 ture. . . . Few college professors would be so 
 naive as to discuss their methods with a pedagogical 
 expert. ... He knows, too, that only a sort of 
 professional courtesy prevents them from frankly 
 calling him a humbug. . . . His whole 'line of 
 talk' reveals that he has never considered the ques- 
 tion of dealing w T ith responsible minds. . . . 
 Their praises of the delights of literature and art 
 have a curious way of suggesting, by the vagueness 
 and generality of the terms, that these delights are 
 being reported, rather than recalled from personal 
 experience. ... In the teacher of experience, 
 who takes the pedagogical courses as a condition of 
 promotion, they excite only ridicule and contempt." 
 Where can the novice look for counsel! He knows 
 not what his objective is, nor what to do, nor how to 
 do it, nor how to correlate the demands for litera- 
 ture and written composition and oral composition 
 and spelling and grammar and " appreciation' ' and 
 clear thinking and self-expression and sentence- 
 structure and analysis of style — and so on, world 
 without end. TngYj^fjipTmed tpflrhftrs F^lf^im ^" Q ^^ 
 third of the English work in the high school? of the 
 author's fltflte, and probably that ratio holds for 
 the rest of the country. They cannot rely on their 
 texts for guidance as teachers of algebra can; and 
 so rapidly have methods changed that they may get 
 only misdirection by recalling how they themselves 
 were taught when they were in school. So there is a 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 real use for a vade mecum which shall display what 
 one man has observed, what he has found essential, 
 how he drives at that objective, and what devices 
 he has learned to employ. Such a guide may be wide 
 of the truth in some particulars ; not all of it can be 
 used by any one reader. But it is a coherent body 
 of practice which is available until a teacher has had 
 time to build up a codex of his own. Everything 
 here presented is the result of experience — an ex- 
 perience based on acquaintance with the product of 
 many schools in all parts of the country. Every one 
 of the suggestions has been tested for at least five 
 /years and most of them for twelve ; some for eighteen. 
 Hardly anything has been arrived at by experiment- 
 ing with a preconception ; everything has been forced 
 upon the author by observing what was effective 
 with particular young human beings who sat on 
 material benches in an actual class-room. 
 
 For the most part a colloquial style has been used. 
 The author has thought it better to say "I" and 
 "you" and "don't" and "tackle," because he is a 
 practical workman who fears formality when he is 
 talking about his trade. 
 
 After this volume was ready for the press the 
 author read Rollo Walter Brown's How the French 
 'Boy Learns to Write. Mr. Brown's inquiries were 
 scrupulously and fully made; the results are care- 
 fully compiled and temperately expressed. Here is 
 an epitome of the judgment of the world's most clear- 
 sighted, most literary nation on the teaching of its 
 mother-tongue. It appears that the French boy, 
 "not superior in intellect to the American boy, and 
 not aided by some sort of magic in his native lan- 
 guage, writes with sharper accuracy of thought, 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 surer and more intelligent freedom." Yet France 
 "does not believe that the great body of boys shouM 
 be trained in any special graces, has no idea of mak- 
 ing a great body of literary writers. " "In the early 
 grades the matters to receive chief attention are 
 ordinary accuracy and conventional correctness." 
 Simplified grammar, especially "the functions of 
 words in ordinary sentences," is carried purpose- 
 fully through the whole school course ; teachers take 
 the position that a boy's ability to express himself 
 well "must eventually depend in large measure upon 
 his skill in handling the sentence, and that this skill 
 must come in part from deep-seated, long-established 
 knowledge of sentence elements." France requires 
 that every pupil in its secondaire schools "shall have 
 his attention called to punctuation" from his eighth 
 t<> his tenth years and shall be taught "the principles 
 of punctuation ' ' during the next two years. The suc- 
 cess of these efforts may be gaged by one of Mr. 
 Brown's experiments. A class of 28 French boys 
 (aged 11 and 12) wrote from dictation a paragraph 
 of Knglish (64 words) which they had never seen 
 before; 11 wrote without error. When the same 
 paragraph was tried in American schools with 500 
 pupils of the same or higher grades, only 11 wrote 
 without error — i. e., the younger French pupils were 
 18 times better. This is hardly so astonishing as a 
 bit of evidence that the present writer can adduce : a 
 set of twelve-minute themes, written at Cambrai for 
 an American teacher of English at the lycee, mere 
 class tests for idiom written by fourteen-year-old 
 boys, written tor a teacher who never had a word to 
 say about punctuation — these show only two petty 
 instances of carelessness with commas. France has 
 
14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 achieved in the schools, by the only possible method 
 — patient and unrelenting care with fundamentals — 
 what our best universities agonize over and can only 
 partially attain. Anyone who is skeptical about the 
 wisdom of What is English? will do well to read How 
 the French Boy Learns to Write. 
 
 The most astonishing portion of this message from 
 France is the answer to the question: "What is the 
 objective in all teaching of the mother-tongue f ' ' Our 
 American answer has been that there is a double ob- 
 jective : 1. (minor) some graces of style, 2. (major) 
 stimulating a taste for good literature. But France 
 says : " It is the conviction of the great body of teach- 
 ers, as well as the Ministry, that work in grammar, 
 rhetoric, and literature is in most respects lost unless 
 it contributes to the pupil 's ability to give full, intel- 
 ligent expression to his thought. Moreover, theories 
 of teaching, and all the proposed changes in the 
 course of study seem to be considered first in respect 
 to their influence on this ability of the pupil. Ex- 
 pression is not the sole end, but in all the lower 
 schools it is the primary end." 
 
 The voice of France speaks there. A voice is now 
 being heard from American universities (see pages 
 17-22) that issues the same mandate to secondary 
 teachers. It declares that originality without literacy 
 is valueless. These voices must be heeded by one 
 who would avoid failure. But the following of their 
 counsel is a complicated task. It is the aim of this 
 book to supply the knowledge necessary to success. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 WHAT ENGLISH IS 
 
 No inexperienced teacher needs to be told what 
 algebra is, or Latin, or German. Among teachers 
 and superintendents there is no discussion of what 
 these subjects are, nor is there wide difference of 
 opinion as to just how they must be taught. If a nov- 
 Ice were suddenly told to take an arithmetic class, he 
 would not need to consult about what he was to do; 
 his textbook would be in itself a sufficient guide. 
 The long sets of problems, the careful grading of 
 these sets from very easy to somewhat hard, the 
 elaborate display of every step in working a new 
 kind of problem, the wary and slow advance from 
 one small difficulty to another — the whole plan of 
 the hook declares on every page that things which 
 are simple to the teacher are perplexing to the child, 
 that the teacher must take time and be thorough, 
 that arithmetic is a long campaign in which the con- 
 -t of simple fractions is a huge operation. 
 
 But suppose the subject were new and that pro- 
 bers of astronomy, with little sympathy for chil- 
 dren's minds, were furnishing the textbooks. Their 
 brains have heen engrossed with stellar parallax and 
 the hyperbolic courses of comets. The result would be 
 a preface explaining that "Arithmetic is an intro- 
 duction t<> that noblest and most useful of sciences, 
 to the science of quantity and arrangement, to the 
 Btudy of i<leal const nut ions, and the discovery there- 
 
 15 
 
16 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 by of relations -between the parts of these construc- 
 tions." The untrained teacher, trusting that the 
 great savant knew his business, would dutifully re- 
 quire William and Susan to commit this precious 
 truth to memory. Then he would begin with a lesson 
 in subtracting decimals, quickly go through a page 
 in long division, spend two recitations on fractions, 
 devote three days to percentage, and so quickly pro- 
 ceed to quadratic equations and the plotting of 
 curves. 
 
 This is exaggerated and sarcastic. Yet it comes 
 much nearer to plain facts than any of us realize. It 
 represents all too vividly the plainest and most pain- 
 ful truth about English textbooks. Most of them 
 have been written in a literary atmosphere as dif- 
 ferent from school-room necessities as astronomy 
 is from simple decimals. Their prefatory remarks 
 are hardly less astonishing than the bit of fiction 
 quoted above. One author writes: "An artist does 
 not paint a masterpiece without continual effort, 
 changing, modifying, perfecting his work by de- 
 grees. Only constant rewriting will help you to 
 gain the power of self-expression." That may be 
 as true as the definition of mathematics, but it is 
 like the astronomy of rhetoric. Another author 
 says : "After matters of technique have become so 
 easy for us that we need to give them little attention, 
 we may seek for something original to say"; and 
 again, "When these elements of literary construc- 
 tion are once understood, the problem of composi- 
 tion is merely that of their effective combination." 
 This is sheer astronomy. 
 
 Listen' to four illustrations of the hard facts of 
 practice: (1) It is all but impossible in four years to 
 
WHAT ENGLISH IS 17 
 
 train a whole class of bright boys to write we shall or 
 to avoid try* and crys. (2) A professor in one of our 
 oldest universities testifies that all he can exact as 
 an English requirement for the degree of Ph.B. is 
 reasonably decent spelling and punctuation; that to 
 insist on skill in paragraphing would mean the with- 
 holding of so many degrees that other departments 
 would protest. (3) One of our largest universities, 
 which organizes freshman composition very strictly, 
 gives a passing grade for mere freedom from me- 
 chanical errors. (4) A great state university, which 
 has a high standard for entrance, announces to 
 schools, in order that they may not go astray in Eng- 
 lish work, that the only requirement of. candidates 
 for admission is " proficiency in rudiments"; that 
 candidates are qualified if their writing "is devoid 
 of interest, originality, or any other literary merit. \ \ 
 Yet this university has to organize every fall a large 
 class for freshmen who are incompetent in mere 
 mechanics. 
 
 These testimonies (a whole bookful of similar ones 
 could be gathered) are recent. Twenty-five years 
 ago, when English was brand-new, such statements 
 would have been heard with horror; for rhetorics 
 dealt mostly with astronomy — that is, with qualities 
 of grace and charm. Fifteen years ago such state- 
 ments would have been a little better understood, but 
 few teachers would have sympathized with them. 
 Ten years ago it still required courage to make any 
 such declaration ; it would have been likely to brand 
 a man as mechanical, inartistic, soulless. The Eng- 
 lish-teaching world still directed its telescope toward 
 the stars, still had that lofty literary ideal. Five 
 years ago the harsh facts were beginning to be per- 
 
18 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ceived. In 1909 the Princeton catalogue spoke only 
 of examination questions on "subject-matter, struc- 
 ture, and style of these books.' ■ In 1913 a very 
 significant addition was made : and his proficiency in 
 English composition. 
 
 From every college in the country goes up the cry, 
 "Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' ' Every 
 high school is in despair because its pupils are so 
 woefully ignorant of the merest rudiments. A refor- 
 mation is everywhere demanded. It is being brought 
 about, and so rapidly that most textbooks are 
 stranded in the idealism of a decade ago, and many 
 teachers are floundering badly in the new conditions. 
 It is hard to keep pace with the swift change ; hard 
 to know what it is all about, or why our duties are 
 preached to us in such contradictory terms. "In- 
 spire" is still the watch^cry ; "drill in rudiments" is 
 soonJ^Jhe_the_fa£t. 
 
 A bit of personal experience will show how times 
 are changing. The first chapter of a draft of this 
 book written three years ago had a legend in capi- 
 tals : ' ' This is not guaranteed wisdom ; it is merely 
 what I find it necessary to do. ' ' So much was it the 
 fashion to denounce drill in rudiments that the book 
 might have been less effective if it had spoken un- 
 qualifiedly. That fashion has so much changed now 
 that I should feel no hesitation in saying, "This is 
 guaranteed wisdom"; because every number of the 
 English Journal, every talk with a college instructor, 
 makes it plainer that English-teaching has been in- 
 efficient — sadly inefficient— and that we have had 
 the wrong notion of our duty. In 1912, in the first 
 number of the English Journal, a high-school teacher 
 declared: "Everywhere the answer is the same. The 
 
WHAT ENGLISH is 19 
 
 colleges cannot sufficiently condemn our product. 
 . . . Business men tell us that our graduates cannot 
 write a decent letter.' ' 
 
 One possible misunderstanding must be here 
 stated emphatically. If it can be removed, this will 
 be the most important paragraph in the book. I am 
 not arguing that tries is of greater importance than 
 a lively introduction to a theme. I am not arguing 
 tli.it a semicolon is better than emulating the charm 
 of Stevenson. I have not the least feeling that me- 
 ( 'balneal accuracy is more blessed than graceful style. 
 I do not think any less of George Meredith because 
 he once wrote alright. I am not in any way or de- 
 gree, anywhere in this book, instituting any com- 
 parison between two such utterly unlike things as 
 knowledge of mechanics and literary skill. That 
 \\<»uld be as monstrous as to compare ditch-digging 
 with painting a madonna. Knowledge of how to 
 form plurals or to use commas is one of the unlove- 
 liest things in an ugly world. It gives me no joy 
 whatever. But my lack of joy has nothing to do with 
 the case. The sad fact of nation-wide experience for 
 a quarter of a century is that our effort to teach 
 charming English has not amounted to much, and 
 tli at our failure to teach decent English is so scanda- 
 lous that men point the finger of scorn at us. Our 1 
 first and simplest and plainest duty is to teach decent 
 English. Not the most seraphic of the astronomers 
 of rhetoric ever opposed that idea. But we have 
 thought this elementary part of the task so easy that 
 it could be performed incidentally, as a sort of side- 
 issue. Actually it is very ha rd, requiring caref ul 
 approach, skilful handling, and arduous labor. That 
 first task must be done first. This hook denies none 
 
20 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 of the glorious possibilities that may lie beyond. Its 
 purpose is to assert that what is of primary impor- 
 tance musfhave foremost consideration. 
 
 That is what English is today — the teaching of 
 plain essentials of decent style. When it first be- 
 came a college-entrance subject, it was generally de- 
 fined as " power to appreciate literature. ' ' Examina- 
 tions required the candidate to show some ability to 
 criticize and appraise literary values. The attention 
 of high schools was fixed on the reading of classics, 
 on developing "insight/ ' and on writing about books 
 1 * appreciatively. ■ ' This kind of thing lasted through 
 the 90 's and into the present century. How result- 
 less it all was may be judged from a paper written 
 in 1905 by a Harvard examiner, in which he calls the 
 fetish "that indefinable and vague quality." He 
 would not have dared to utter those words ten years 
 previously. Now he is not afraid to say : "So few 
 possess 'literary appreciation* that after a careful 
 search through the higher graded books of the spring 
 and fall examinations of the last two years I have 
 found no specimen to quote which possesses more 
 than a semblance." This college instructor longs 
 just as much as ever for the teacher who can "inspire 
 the writer with something of the spirit that awakens 
 the consciousness of literary appreciation ,, ; but has 
 to protest that as a matter of fact no such power has 
 been evidenced on the Harvard papers. 
 
 Then he proposes a substitute: "To create and 
 give utterance to his own ideas ; freer, more natural, 
 and more individual expression; his individuality 
 counts for everything. ' ' That has been the slogan 
 in the twentieth century. All our texts and councils 
 and addresses to conventions have had much to say 
 
WHAT BNGLISB 18 U 
 
 expressing ourselves in a pleasing way. " They 
 have seldom failed to imply the scorn which this Har- 
 vard man put so fiercely: "Teaching this living, 
 breathing English composition as mechanically as 
 they do the unchangeable and rigid laws of science." 
 Hence few teachers have dared to profess publicly 
 that they paid any attention to mechanics. The word 
 has been anathema. No, we have all been for pleas- 
 ing self-expression. 
 
 But these glittering ambitions were all the while 
 covering a most hideous reality, which it was not 
 good form to discuss. The ugly fact of horrible illit- 
 eracy was not to be mentioned in our soulful circles. 
 The Harvard man politely referred to it in his paper 
 as "what the examiner ought not to find." Since it 
 must not be named, he employed that delicate euphe- 
 mism. He adroitly said, "The familiarity of the 
 teacher with what I am talking about warns me to 
 omit discussion. ■ ■ Even when he is " tempted to pre- 
 sent a few examples" of this unmentionable thing, 
 he chooses blunders in diction and cases of wobbly 
 structure. It is curious to see how very, very refined 
 the world was in that by-gone age — for ten years is 
 a historical epoch in the history of English. 
 
 Yet the Harvard man misrepresented a great body 
 of university opinion. Colleges loathed and dreaded 
 the slipshod preparatory work, but failed to insist 
 that we should do with thoroughness the humble part 
 of our duty. They failed because there was no agree- 
 ment on the question of what English is. What they 
 Umged for was carefulness; what they were princi- 
 pally occupied with themselves, what they talked 
 about before us, was "appreciation." We have all 
 D confused, at variance, unguided. The colleges 
 
22 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 have misled us ; high schools, planning their courses 
 for students who are not to receive further educa- 
 tion, have assumed a college attitude, have fixed their 
 attention on "appreciation" and "living, breathing 
 composition." 
 
 If we were so eager to imitate when the model was 
 "appreciation," we should be no less eager to imi- 
 tate now that the model is "accuracy first." Very 
 lately we have had the unabashed confession from 
 four high-minded university instructors that they 
 condition a theme in the first semester of freshman 
 year for three misspelled words or one incomplete 
 sentence.* They may be all wrong. This book has 
 nothing to do with any discussion of whether they 
 are right or wrong. It deals only with the present- 
 day facts. And there is not the slightest doubt that 
 these gentlemen fairly represent the sentiment of 
 their age about carefulness in details. They say 
 flatly that ' ' originality without literacy cannot in any 
 place or under any circumstances be considered a 
 meritorious quality in a college course in English 
 composition." What do you suppose they would 
 think about school themes f 
 
 We have seen tiie three steps— literary apprecia- 
 tion/ spontaneity, 'accuracy. Do not suppose that 
 they are steps downward. Education in this country 
 is not descending. Do not suppose that they show a 
 conflict of purpose or any disagreement as to what 
 real merit is. All sensible teachers must agree on 
 what constitutes a good theme, do agree always that 
 ability to apprehend literary values and to express 
 
 * See the very interesting article on ' * Grading Freshman Composi- 
 tion" at the University of Illinois, in the English Journal for Nov., 
 1915. 
 
WHAT KNCiLISH IS 23 
 
 oneself pleasingly are the only qualities that make 
 \\ riting valuable. These steps do not mark any 
 change in a judgment that has never altered since 
 Irnus invented letters. They simply show a pro- 
 gressive realization of what cannot be obtained in 
 school composition. All professors still prize and 
 give credit for "appreciation" ; but they very seldom 
 get it, and they cannot require it. All teachers still 
 value spontaneity, and we get quite a bit of it ; but we 
 have learned that it is not a curricular subject, that 
 we cannot require it. What we can require, what it is 
 dishonest and criminal not to require, is accuracy. 
 It is frightfully wrong to stimulate a little sponta- 
 neity (!) in a few pupils while leaving all the pupils 
 so ignorant of mechanics that their letters prove 
 them to be uneducated. 
 
 Fifty years from now the student of educational 
 history will be puzzled to know what we thought we 
 were doing in 1916. His unflattering comment will 
 run about like this : "Those teachers were not stylists 
 — at least very few were. Why did the great majority 
 suppose they could impart what they did not pos- 
 sess? They must have seen that only a small minority 
 of pupils could achieve a graceful style; what did 
 they suppose they were doing for the majority! Did 
 they even flatter themselves that the minority's 
 charm of style was due to instruction? And suppose 
 this power to write pleasingly had been much more 
 general, what was the prodigious exercise of it all 
 about? Did teachers conceive that they wore train- 
 ing up professional authors, or were they counting 
 on private theme writing as an enjoyment comp; 
 ble to amateur painting or piano-playing? It is 
 hard to see the similarity. Were they aiming at 
 
24 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 literary letters? Nothing is so affected and unpleas- 
 ant. Why, then, all their parade of * perfecting the 
 work by degrees'? What did they think they were 
 doing V 
 
 I, for one, am glad that I shall not have to answer 
 those straightforward inquiries. English ought to 
 be the greatest good to the greatest number. Per- 
 haps we could see more clearly what we make it if 
 we paid more attention to that future historian. 
 
 You may be surprised that we have so much to 
 say about composition, for you know that themes 
 are only one part of English. You would be excus- 
 able for thinking them a very small fraction. Glance 
 through this list of the different things that English 
 is. It represents graphically the impression we 
 might get from reading a few dozen pedagogical arti- 
 cles, though it is shorter and less confusing than the 
 reality would be. Small capitals indicate the topics 
 that would stand out more prominently because of 
 their frequency or the deep feeling with which they 
 are discussed : 
 
 A love of literature, the college entrance 
 books, supplementary reading, narratives 
 and expositions, teach clear thinking, 
 grammar, cooperation with other depart- 
 ments, magazine reading, imitate Burke or 
 Homer or Goldsmith, spelling, teach para- 
 graphs by an analogy with geometry, stim- 
 ulate refined speech, coach dramatics, pros- 
 ody, analyze masterpieces, memorizing of 
 
 poems, INSPIRE A LOVE FOR CLASSICS, DON'T 
 
 try to impose the classics, history of Eng- 
 lish and American literature, read to the 
 
WHAT ENGLISH is 26 
 
 pupils, teach effectiveness in writing, insist 
 on precision in writing, don't look for pre- 
 cision, encourage charm and freedom, stim- 
 ulate insight, declamations, oral composi- 
 tion, teach play-writing, choose a wide va- 
 riety of reading, develop personality, cul- 
 tivate sound taste in literature, have pri- 
 vate conferences, much reading aloud by the 
 pupils, argumentation, word analysis, have 
 pupils correct the themes, the love of good 
 reading, correct pronunciation, don't use 
 annotations, teach criticism of the art of 
 different authors, insist on theme outlines, 
 coach debaters, refuse to be hampered by 
 
 NARROW COLLEGE REQUIREMENTS, business 
 
 English, dictionary work, encourage good 
 
 READING. 
 
 Perhaps some of these extra-curriculum tasks, like 
 supervising dramatics or debating or journalism, 
 may fall to your share. Nothing will be said in this 
 book, however, about such matters, because local con- 
 (1 it ions vary extremely and because your own good 
 sense can get little help from another man's advice. 
 They are largely questions of your own talents and 
 initiative. The whole mass of jumbled English 
 reduces to three subjects, of which the first is how 
 to read — called Literature. This is now the part 
 of English that receives the largest share of atten- 
 tion, the part that may always take up the largest 
 portion of time. It may in the future, when elements 
 of composition are properly taught in the grades, 
 occupy an even greater proportion of the schedule 
 But to this subject, in spite of its importance, I shall 
 
26 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 devote only one chapter. Handling literature is 
 largely a matter of personality; advice about 
 methods is likely to be futile ; and the world is al- 
 ready full of good counsel about what to aim at. The 
 second subject is how to speak — called Oral Com- 
 position. I am as sensitive as the next man to the 
 horrors of our slovenly and clumsy vernacular, but 
 fear that they are for the most part beyond the reach 
 of schooling; because they are founded in infancy, 
 are ingrained by home training, and are as deep and 
 wide as any other social phenomenon that we find 
 disagreeable. "Written forms can be taught; they 
 are a veneer put on by the school. But when we get 
 beyond some superficial matters of syntax and pro- 
 nunciation it is easy to overestimate what a school 
 can achieve in changing habits of speech. The prac- 
 tical value of learning to compose one 's thoughts for 
 addressing a crowd is beyond all reckoning. In- 
 deed this power is so unusual and so difficult of 
 attainment that I fear some teachers deceive them- 
 selves as to what they are accomplishing. Even if 
 I had their faith I should abstain from discussing 
 Oral Composition for the same reasons that influ- 
 ence me to be brief with Literature: advice cannot 
 guide very far in such a matter of personality, and 
 plenty of advice is available. 
 
 The third subject is Written Composition. That 
 is the necessity without which all else counts for 
 naught Parents are glad to have Thomas know 
 some lyrics by heart, are pleased deeply if he ac- 
 quires at school a fondness for reading Thackeray; 
 but their gratification turns to ashes if Thomas's 
 letter to his grandfather is barbarously spelled and 
 punctuated. Business men may not be wholly indif- 
 
WHAT KXGLISH IS 27 
 
 ■ent to a knowledge of Sir Launfal, but they will 
 not accept it as an excuse for unbusinesslike spelling 
 and punctuation. Colleges are devoutly interested 
 in having young people taught to read, but will not 
 accept any amount of appreciation in lieu of some 
 II measure of ability to spell and punctuate. 
 With one common judgment the world insists on a 
 modicum of knowledge about framing sentences. 
 
 So that even if it were desirable to take up those 
 higher and more beautiful departments, there would 
 be sufficient reason for limiting ourselves to decent 
 writing. There is another reason which, though it is 
 not a certainty, has great weight. In 1915 the uni- 
 form college-entrance requirements for the whole 
 country were so altered that instead of a blend of 
 Literature and Composition in papers a and b we 
 now have a first paper on Grammar and Composition 
 and a second paper on Literature. This is a most 
 significant cleavage. It formally splits apart two 
 subjects that have always been inextricably blended 
 in the common conception of English. It is a recog- 
 nition of a difference that has never been acknowl- 
 edged before. It displays one subject which no col- 
 lege or technical school can disregard, and another 
 subject to which any faculty could be indifferent 
 without serious danger — just as it can be to Greek or 
 I at in or to some history or music or painting. Liter- 
 ature is just like these things in being infinitely more 
 enjoyable to the human race, but not indispensable 
 in an academic schedule. It is possible that it will 
 soon be classed with them as an optional. Its status 
 is now an open question. At present it had better 
 not to be stressed in a manual that deals with perma- 
 nencies. 
 
28 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 In fact the scope of this book is still further re- 
 stricted. Little will be said about authors as models ; 
 very little about the planning of a whole composi- 
 tion; not much about paragraphs. The following 
 chapters aim at decent sentences. If these seem to 
 you a petty corner of English, you are in need of 
 enlightenment. The art of teaching a commonplace 
 mind how to construct a series of reasonably good 
 sentences can be no more than outlined in this space. 
 It reaches deep into psychology, and can be partially 
 acquired only by a patient resourcefulness that taxes 
 a teacher's best powers. When we have called Eng- 
 lish the process of creating decent sentences, we 
 have given an ample definition, one that proposes a 
 vast field of endeavor. You shall see. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 DESCENT TO EABTH 
 
 A man who presumes to offer advice is more likely 
 to succeed if he addresses someone in particular. To 
 have in mind teachers in general while I write is to 
 court failure. I have chosen to imagine that "you" 
 who read are a college graduate who has been elect- 
 ing a good deal of English during the last two years. 
 You have your diploma and are engaged to teach 
 English at the Smithboro high school. During the 
 summer you are rather vaguely wondering whether 
 you had better be doing anything in particular to 
 prepare yourself for the new work. You have been 
 assigned to freshman English, and have therefore 
 been reading over the classics you are to teach 
 and have carefully gone through the rhetoric you 
 are to use. Is there more to do? You have an 
 uneasy feeling that you don't know what is expected 
 of you beyond exhibiting some of that critical 
 shrewdness and exerting a literary uplift — being a 
 center of sweetness and light. Quite by chance a 
 friend has put this volume into your hand. 
 
 Of course "you" are all sorts of people. Occa- 
 sionally teachers of five years' experience know no 
 better than to look over another man's ideas, for 
 they never can tell where they may pick up useful 
 hints. But I shall always speak as if to one who has 
 never taught, for I have known so many cases of 
 English-teachers-to-be who would have been grate- 
 
 29 
 
30 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ful for some simple guide-book. Not that they would 
 follow it trustfully (skepticism is the only safe atti- 
 tude toward any advice of the kind set down here), 
 but that they could get some definite program, some 
 platform however opinionated and distorted, from 
 which they could depart. It is more useful to stir 
 you to a procedure of your own than to persuade you 
 to an easy acquiescence. These chapters are not to 
 be swallowed, but to be pondered. 
 
 In another way my readers are very heteroge- 
 neous : some will have all the English and parts of 
 other subjects in a small school; others will have one 
 division of one class in a large city school. One may 
 have complete liberty to follow his own judgment; 
 another may have everything prescribed. But "you" 
 are going to Smithboro, where you will have a good 
 deal of chance to exercise your own judgment; 
 and "you" are the sort of person who wishes to 
 know the essentials of his trade in all conditions, 
 so that he may be fitted to do best in present cir- 
 cumstances and to go with assurance to a different 
 position. 
 
 The purpose is to furnish the general strategy of- 
 that long, long process of teaching how to form 
 good complex sentences. The tricks of the trade, the 
 knowledge of facts may be so presented that a 
 teacher can profit by other people's failures, learn- 
 ing in a few hours what he might struggle toward 
 blindly for years — as I did. This manual will not 
 inform you how to convey spiritual values. It is 
 only a set of mechanical aids for teaching mechanics. 
 Any author who promises more is not likely to per- 
 form. 
 
 I will first explain something that is true of every 
 

 DESCENT TO EARTH 31 
 
 college graduate when he begins to teach English. 
 
 e has a feeling that his knowledge of the subject is 
 broad, catholic. He has come down from the stars 
 upon the narrow texts and the ignorant class. Not 
 that he is conceited. Far from it. He may be all 
 humbleness, may feel too sensitively his shortcom- 
 ings. But after his senior electives or graduate spe- 
 cie lizings he feels that the little earth of school is all 
 surrounded aid comprehended by his wideness. This 
 t('Miagjs_aJyjidrance. If vo n can get rid of it, yo u 
 will be in a condition to get better resuTts with ele- 
 mentary lessons, because you will begin to realize the 
 great work that can be done. You will accomplish 
 much more than this : you will be ready to see how 
 large the earth really is. It merely appears small 
 at first to one who has been studying astronomically 
 of how Shakespeare 's genius was not for originating 
 plots, of Chaucer's indebtedness to Boccaccio. It i9 
 actually as wide, as full of wonders, demands as keen 
 exploration, as the skyey regions that you have been 
 mapping. 
 
 One reason why it seems restricted is that you 
 encounter such marvelous ignorance of what seems 
 to you common knowledge. In the secondary world 
 to be always takes an object, discribe is the form pre- 
 ferred by pupils who have read Cicero, Plato is the 
 ruler of the underworld, the art of Silas Marner is 
 "where Eppie was put in the coal-hole.' ' It is al- 
 most impossible to feel thai those who make such 
 blunders have minds as good as your own. They 
 have. That is the great truth for an English teacher 
 to koop in mind. A teacher of algebra is differently 
 situated; he does know everything and the pupil 
 knows nothing. But the English teacher is a fellow- 
 
K- 
 
 32 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 being. He never can know a tithe of what may be 
 useful and is always in peril of showing his igno- 
 rance. Only yesterday I learned mumpsimus, a word 
 I have always needed ; and after twenty-five years of 
 zealous consultation of the dictionaries I pronounced 
 rationale like a French word. When I set myself 
 at age forty to learn French irregular verbs, I found 
 myself hardly getting a passing mark; a boy who 
 was excessively dull in an English class thought I 
 was a numskull when he tried to teach me how to 
 use a telephone switch-board. When I pause to con- 
 sider the ignorance of pupils, I usually find it less 
 wonderful than my own. 
 
 , Another cause of that feeling of restriction ap- 
 pears much less excusable — that is, the violence and 
 persistence of error that has been again and again 
 dilated upon. Yet even this is not so discreditable 
 to the young minds as you would suppose. The ex- 
 planation is usually that in lower grades they have 
 been allowed to confirm themselves in wrong habits ; 
 the wrong forms are fairly engraved in their brains. 
 When you tackle seperate, you are like young Thor 
 who supposed he was merely struggling to lift 
 a cat, whereas the animal was the serpent who 
 held the earth together. Seperate is a tremendous 
 antagonist, who looks feeble enough, but is in reality 
 the greatest force in life, evil habit. You have war- 
 fare before you; titanic forces are to be grappled 
 with. To know in advance what you must contend 
 against is an advantage beyond exaggeration. Nearly 
 the whole difference between an experienced and an 
 inexperienced teacher is that the former has acquired 
 a handy code of these troubles, so as to be able to 
 anticipate them; and also a set of methods for stamp- 
 
DESCENT TO BABTB 33 
 
 ing truths upon youthful brains. The aim. of this 
 book is to supply some devices of this sort. 
 
 what to do means knowing what not to 
 
 mpt. The most probable mistake ot a novice 
 will 5e struggling with choice of words. All Amer- 
 icans are deeply sensitive about diction, feeling that 
 this and the other use of a word is " wrong.' ' Not 
 in politics or religion do men entertain such violence 
 of prejudice. "Good English* ' always means in 
 popular speech correct choice of words. There are 
 persons who would rather go to jail than say "had 
 rather"; every printer of a restaurant menu knows 
 that welsh rabbit is a vulgarism; one very refined 
 old lady always substitutes jerkin for the indecent 
 sweater. There is no limit to which such a list could 
 not be extended. Every rhetoric contains a choice 
 assortment. A list of errors in diction compiled by 
 a university for the guidance of teachers contains the 
 following: burglarize, firstly, retrogress, aggravate 
 for vex, fix for plight, near-by, to down, cannot help 
 but, in back of, lessen for diminish in number. 
 
 Have nothing to do with such things. For one 
 reason, the time you put upon them is badly needed 
 elsewhere ; for another reason, most such objections 
 to common idioms are pure ignorance, for every 
 word listed above has good warrant. Firstly is used 
 by several writers in the Britannica, and lessen is 
 defined by the Century as "contract in number, di- 
 minish." I never open to a list of "faulty diction" 
 without some new shock; the latest was to learn in a 
 handbook of business forms that very much appre- 
 ciate, beg to state, and not a one are "bad English. M 
 An hour spent with Professor Lounsbury's School- 
 stering the Speech will prove the inanity of all 
 
34 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 similar. efforts to brand everyday idioms as " incor- 
 rect. " Every teacher who reads J. Lesslie Hall's 
 -* Studies in Usage (Scott, Foresman & Co.) will be 
 \ saved a vast amount of worry over "bad English" 
 which is not bad at all, which should never delay a 
 theme-reader for an instant. Some of this pedantic 
 ignorance is due to bad logic (like arguing that stop 
 means to cease motion, and therefore stop for the day 
 is wrong) ; some of it is nothing more than misinf or- 
 mation that happened to find lodgment, grew into 
 sturdy prejudice by being repeated, and finally 
 became an object of veneration. If this sounds 
 presumptuous or bitter, read Dr. Hall's book. 
 
 Even if such "bad English' ' were really much 
 worse, there is a powerful reason for paying small 
 attention to it — namely, that you will spoil all the 
 emphasis that ought to be reserved for had of known, 
 thusly, borrow for lend, had ought. When you pro- 
 test against fix, you destroy the faith of pupils in 
 your judgment about had of known. Keep your pow- 
 der for the blowing up of such gross and ridiculous 
 things as had of known. There are more serious 
 mistakes of policy, but none so truly pathetic, as 
 this of lumping together monstrous blunders with 
 reputable colloquialisms. The really bad idioms will 
 give enough to do. Had ought and couldn't hardly 
 are lifelong habits and will not be eradicated in one 
 year. 
 
 You have noticed, and you will frequently see as 
 you read on, that the writer has a tendency to chal- 
 \ lenge textbooks. This is unfortunate, for no one is 
 so tiresome as the man who has no hesitation in 
 shouting that all the world is mistaken. Be assured 
 that the writer has no sympathy with reckless out- 
 
DESCENT TO EAKT1I 35 
 
 cries against authority and will never on any ac- 
 count obtrude personal opinions. Every protest 
 is backed by good authority. A cquire the habit V 
 of challenging everythi ng in the books you use, not 
 quarrelsomely, hut inquiringly. The more you do 
 so, The more yoU will be convinced that because our 
 subject is so new and has been dealing so much with 
 matters of taste a large proportion of the textbooks 
 are tainted with ignorance — not only of facts, but of 
 right methods. A novice who is not on his guard 
 may be sadly misled. 
 
 As to ignorance of methods, remember that those 
 elaborate designs of assembling a lot of ideas, writ- 
 ing them all out as they occur, assorting them 
 roughly in a first draft, pruning and extending and 
 recombining for a second draft, polishing and refin- 
 ing for a third draft — remember that all this may 
 possibly represent what some authors have done 
 with a heap of material to be condensed into a 
 weighty chapter, but that it also is what many au- 
 thors have never done, is what no child ought to try 
 to do. It is astronomy. You are now on earth, where 
 only certain things are true, where many things are 
 worse than useless, where we walk instead of swing- 
 kig a telescope about. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 INTENSIVE SPELLING 
 
 Why one person can spell and another can not is as 
 deep and unanalyzable a mystery as why we langh. 
 No acceptable solution has ever been offered. One 
 mother who observed her four children from infancy 
 testifies that two were born to spell and two were 
 born to struggle in vain. You can infallibly divide 
 your class the first day of the year into spellers and 
 non-spellers. Some uninteresting, narrow-minded 
 people are spellers, and some versatile and esthetic 
 people are not spellers. Some authors and critics 
 cannot spell. But most of them can. There is no 
 classification by general traits. 
 
 The case is comparable to that of people who can 
 draw and who can not. One seems to notice outlines, 
 and so can reproduce them; the other never really 
 sees an outline. Whether this difference is as deep 
 as an instinct or as shallow as an accidental turning 
 of interest in early years there is no knowing. But 
 it is the nearest I could ever come to a formula for 
 attacking a poor speller. Notice the words ; get an 
 interest in the forms. If a poor speller is trying to 
 improve himself, that is the direction in which to 
 steer. 
 
 This is a frail help. No amount of urging it and 
 pleading for it will do much toward bringing up the 
 average of a class. 
 
 All experienced teachers develop mnemonic de- 
 
 36 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 37 
 
 to for startling a child's attention, trying to make 
 an impression so striking that it will recur when next 
 the child starts to write the wrong form, that it will 
 4 ' run out and bite him. ' 9 One teacher tells his classes / 
 that in the second syllable of separate they ought to f 
 find their father. Another plot against carelessness 
 is to write on the board s-e-p, wait a moment until 
 attention is concentrated, then dash down an A a 
 foot high, then finish in small letters. No plan is 
 bizarre enough to prevent seperate from appearing / 
 on some theme within a week. " De+scribo' p written / * 
 out extravagantly, with scathing or burlesque accom- 
 paniment, and repeatedly exhibited with variations 
 for weeks, will not kill discribe. A dining-room is 
 a dinning-room and a writer is a writter to the end 
 of a year of drill for some obdurate minds — yes, to 
 the end of three years. This sounds discouraging, 
 but think how much better it is to know what is com- 
 
 than to go through the year without knowing 
 what you are to expect. 
 
 Several professors in different parts of the coun- 
 try have been at work on this Augean problem. They 
 have hardly gone deep enough in their published 
 monographs, but their trend is unmistakable. They 
 are discovering that the trouble is with a few words. 
 It is a momentous finding. When the school world 
 
 all heard of it, and when later we all believe it 
 and work on the basis of it, a new era will have 
 daw ned in secondary English. How far we are still 
 in darkness may be judged from a paragraph in 
 Cook and 'Shea's The Child and His Spelling, 
 1914: "How many words should a child be able to 
 spell when he finishes the eighth grade! Estimates 
 made by various teachers and administrators and 
 
38 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 professors ran all the way from five hundred to fif- 
 teen thousand. A rough estimate of the number of 
 words presented to the typical pupil of a first-class 
 elementary school gives from eight thousand to ten 
 thousand. The average elementary speller contains 
 upwards of six thousand words." This, mind you, 
 is in the grades ! The conclusion of the investigators 
 is that their lists of 763 are a minimum for the lower 
 grades, and that an additional 2200 should be studied 
 in the upper grades. This advice seems to me fear- 
 fully beyond the truth, for it means that children are 
 to learn such words as legislature, minimum, and 
 opportune. 
 
 One investigator who anticipated them by a year 
 reached a much lower minimum. In Concrete Inves- 
 tigation of the Material of English Spelling^ by Pro- 
 fessor Jones, of the University of South Dakota, are 
 tabulated the misspellings in 15,000,000 words of 
 theme-writing done by pupils in the grades in four 
 states. Here are some quotations from his com- 
 ments on the data. 
 
 1. Indeed the very words that give most trouble 
 \ in spelling are almost invariably found in the second 
 \ or third grade lists, and faithfully reappear through- 
 out the subsequent years. Over nine-tenths of all 
 words misspelled by the 1050 grade students are 
 found in these two lists. 
 
 2. From the standpoint of usefulness this second- 
 grade list is worth many times as much as all the 
 other lists combined. 
 
 3. Since these troublesome but useful words are 
 not pointed out and effectively dealt with in these 
 early grades, our handling of the most dangerous 
 spelling material is not efficient, and students go on 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 39 
 
 misspelling, year after year, words that should be 
 mastered in the early school years. 
 
 4. Since grade students commonly use from 500 
 to 2500 words in writing, yet on the average mis- 
 spell but about fifty words, not one child out of a 
 thousand misspelling as many as one hundred words, 
 our spelling problem is not so gigantic as it is com- 
 monly believed to be, for the reason that a handful of 
 words misspelled over and over by each student has 
 misled us in our judgment. 
 
 5. The twenty - words - a - day lesson should dis- 
 appear. 
 
 It is instructive to see how this staid scientific 
 report waxes emotional when it discusses the mis- 
 spellings of simple and commonplace words. Mr. 
 Jones presents a list of "One Hundred Spelling 
 Demons of the English Language.' ■ Surely this is 
 an authentic demonology and is worth presenting. 
 
 i/ 
 
 ("Order not significant after first four," says Mr. ^ 
 Jon< 
 
 which 
 
 used 
 
 lose 
 
 ready 
 
 their 
 
 always 
 
 Wednesday 
 
 forty 
 
 ■ 
 
 where 
 
 country 
 
 hour 
 
 separate 
 
 women 
 
 February 
 
 trouble 
 
 don't 
 
 done 
 
 know 
 
 among 
 
 meant 
 
 hear . 
 
 could 
 
 busy 
 
 husiness 
 
 here 
 
 seems 
 
 guess 
 
 many 
 
 writo 
 
 Tuesday 
 
 says 
 
 friend 
 
 writing 
 
 wear 
 
 having 
 
 some 
 
 can't 
 
 answer 
 
 just 
 
 been 
 
 sure 
 
 two 
 
 doctor 
 
 since 
 
 loose 
 
 too 
 
 wfaethei 
 
40 
 
 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 believe 
 
 coming 
 
 cough 
 
 would 
 
 knew 
 
 early 
 
 piece 
 
 built 
 
 laid 
 
 they 
 
 raise 
 
 color 
 
 tear 
 
 half 
 
 ache 
 
 making 
 
 choose 
 
 break 
 
 read 
 
 dear 
 
 tired 
 
 buy 
 
 said 
 
 instead 
 
 grammar 
 
 again 
 
 hoarse 
 
 easy 
 
 minute 
 
 very 
 
 shoes 
 
 through 
 
 any 
 
 none 
 
 tonight 
 
 every 
 
 much 
 
 week 
 
 wrote 
 
 enough 
 
 beginning 
 
 often 
 
 heard 
 
 truly 
 
 blue 
 
 whole 
 
 does 
 
 sugar 
 
 though 
 
 won't 
 
 once 
 
 straight 
 
 I know nothing about spelling in the grades, nor 
 how many words ought to be taught. But it is a fact 
 that most pupils are advanced to the high school 
 without knowing the " demons,' ' that somehow the 
 grade teachers in their efforts to teach five thousand 
 have not taught their and meant, that these wrong 
 habits have become fixed almost ineradicably, that 
 most secondary spelling consists in trying to over- 
 turn the vicious misspellings of a few hundred com- 
 mon words. This is so important that it must be 
 explained rather fully. 
 
 The best introduction is a pair of quotations, the 
 first from a learned treatise on spelling: "We do not 
 yet know with any show of accuracy which of these 
 one, two, or three thousand words are persistent 
 sources of error among large numbers of people.' ' 
 The other quotation is the words of a mere high- 
 school teacher: "It has been the privilege of the 
 writer to follow one pupil through the four years' 
 course of English with the one word benefiting, only 
 
INTBN8IVE SPELLING 41 
 
 to be compelled to explain the derivation and the 
 rule for doubling ten times to the same individual 
 during the fourth year." 
 
 Every secondary teacher does know which words 
 are persistent sources of error. If you should con- 
 front a grade teacher, a high-school teacher, and a 
 professor of rhetoric with the forms stoped, wierd, 
 aii'l final if, you would get from each the same weary 
 smile of recognition ; each one knows that from kin- 
 dergarten to fiftieth reunion, from Maine to Califor- 
 nia, from grocer's boy to successful novelist, it is the 
 same three hundred deadly words that betray illit- 
 eracy. A college graduate who can't spell idiosyn- 
 y is excusable. College examiners needn't worry 
 if a candidate for admission writes maintainance — 
 provide* 1 lie never writes such forms as noticable 
 or occassmn. 
 
 Cea_8jL_t ft worry abou t- tlia th™* fhnna«Tui ; nifVgj* 
 
 bloodthirsty nitnnV nn ih* thro* ftfln^rWl 
 
 1 was fifteen years in discovering that most of my 
 spelling troubles were confined to a few hundred 
 very common words and a few dozen type-forms. 
 All that time I faithfully dictated the thousands — 
 sc/ftJir, knead, porcelain, etc. During the first five 
 years I was quite unconscious that I wasn't getting 
 anywhere ; during the next five I slowly learned that 
 seme forms like seperate and discribe were deathless 
 hydras ; during the last five I discovered that it was 
 infinitely harder to get rid of dissapoint and definate 
 (and infinitely more useful) than to teach a hundred 
 forms like musician and engineer. Why more use- 
 ful.' Because tin w//^ - are used a hundred times 
 as often. Whylnore difficult? Because as spelling 
 is~aT~present organized a heedless pupil may slip 
 
42 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 through the grades writing these common words 
 wrong year after year. A firm, an all but unbreak- 
 able habit is formed, which may, in some cases, defy 
 the most strenuous attack in the high school. 
 
 The day will come when every grade teacher will 
 be supplied by his principal with an authorized list 
 of Words That Must Be Started Right. It is crimi- 
 nal to spend time on banana or crystal until too 
 and their are habitually spelled correctly when the 
 writer's attention is on a composition. They must 
 be paraded on the blackboard, dilated upon, written 
 ; and sounded with exaggerated emphasis, dictated, 
 1 returned to and returned to. But even then the work 
 is only begun; until the knowledge is habitually 
 applied when the main attention is elsewhere the 
 spelling lessons are vain. 
 
 This last yearTlfave been observing a class of 
 average boys preparing to take final entrance exam- 
 inations for college, all of whom had studied Latin 
 for four years, had passed paper a, and nearly all 
 of whom had been strictly drilled in spelling and 
 punctuation for from four to six years. Their most 
 frequent error was writing to for too. Not, mind 
 you, that the second o was carelessly omitted; the 
 nature of the error was usually misspelling. There 
 for their occurred with enough frequency to drive a 
 teacher insane. Replys persisted to the end of the 
 year, and one boy, who had been under my care for 
 six years, wrote planing for planning on his college 
 paper. His was an obdurate mind; but if for six 
 years before he came to me he had been allowed to 
 exercise the bad habit, he was not entirely to blame 
 for not overcoming it in the next six. 
 One more exhibit may do good. It is a list of the 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 43 
 
 misspellings in a spelling test made by a class of 
 seventeen, corresponding to the second year of high 
 school, near the end of the school year. All of the 
 class had had unremitted violent instruction in the 
 few hundred common forms — five of them for one 
 year, seven for two years, and ^ve for three years. 
 The one-year boys did not contribute all the errors — 
 nor did the three-year boys fail to contribute. 
 
 faskes 
 
 once Jwritting twice fwierd 
 
 ] beleive \ childrens ■ 
 
 [dispair 
 
 {@> Ws {thmshes'3 
 
 three 
 times 
 
 This difficulty of rooting out an old habit, of fixing 
 a new one in its place, of insuring the operation of 
 the new habit when the mind is busy expressing 
 ideas, is quite beyond the comprehension of any pro- 
 fessor or critical parent. It passes the understand- 
 ing of the teacher himself. Although at present I 
 regard myself as a spelling fiend, still I am sure that 
 a decade hence I shall look back upon my present 
 self as mildly unconscious of the forces against 
 which I struggle. 
 
 The essence of these forces is always confusion. 
 Some psychologist of the future may formulate the 
 mental mix-ups; at present we guess and grope. But 
 our minds must be cleared of the idea that we deal 
 with mere heedlessness. Consider shepherd. Every 
 boy and girl is confronted throughout his life with 
 
44 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 such spellings of the proper name as Shephard, 
 Shepard, until his mental picture is a blurred and in- 
 extricable composite. Ashes, fourty, villiage, dis- 
 pair, shure, controle, flew, etc., are easily referable 
 to parallel correct forms ; minuite may be due to bis- 
 cuit. Oral confusions only partially account for 
 such mistakes as probally, atheletics, supprise, 
 enimy. Of a different sort and more complicated 
 are errors in using suffixes. It is quite impossible 
 for the trained mind to realize the alertness neces- 
 sary in an immature mind, during the rush of a 
 written test, if the knowledge of altering final letters 
 is to be properly applied. For example, the teacher 
 finds enjoies, is inflamed with wrath, wonders if the 
 pupil has any mentality; inquires the next day in 
 class about replies and employs, and finds that the 
 understanding of the principle is perfectly clear; 
 confronts the pupil with his idiotic enjoies and sav- 
 agely demands whether his brain is larger than a 
 pea ; the modest answer is, ' 'I got mixed up. ' ' Bright 
 boys, whose accuracy in a spelling test is invincible, 
 will in themes write ladie y s, dinning room, does' nt, 
 and be just as puzzled as the teacher when the errors 
 are disclosed. The old ignorance is always slipping 
 in to confound the recently established knowledge. 
 In some form or other misspelling is confusion. 
 
 Therefore the first object of intensive spelling is 
 to establish order. "This is invariably done"; 
 "such a form does not exist"; "when must you 
 always double V 9 "Henrys ought to look as strange 
 to you as snow in July"; "there are only three pre- 
 terits in aid 99 ; "only ex,' pro, and sub take ceed' 9 — 
 and so on eternally, the old "alwayses" and 
 "nevers" being unremittingly presented until they 
 
IXTKNSIVH SI'KLLING 45 
 
 are deeply planted in careless minds, take root, and 
 crowd out the confusions. / 
 
 It is the opposite of this plan, it is creating con-) 
 fusion, to present there and their together, or seize 
 and siege, or all right and already. When you dis- 
 play as a group of freaks seize, weird, either, empha- 
 size them as three of a kind, repeat them and ex- 
 patiate upon them, then you make one clean-cut im- 
 pression ; for a few in the class that one presentation 
 is indelible. If you then say anything about siege, 
 you smudge the mental diagram ; for some in the class 
 you may have created permanent confusion. If all 
 right gets fervid comment in a recitation (never is 
 that wrong form to be exhibited), then there must 
 be nothing said that day about already; for that 
 would be to construct disorder. 
 
 Examine your own processes, if you have any 
 memories of that remote period when you had any 
 slight troubles with spelling. Suppose you were in 
 doubt about cemetary. Did it help you to pair it 
 with secreteryf Was it your custom to put dis- 
 similar words together and say, "Now, I will remem- 
 ber that the first is different from the second" T 
 Suppose that when you were a bit flustered before 
 a (lass you had to declare the proper spelling of a 
 word, would you wish menial pictures like these f 
 
 incompat[ a Jble emba \ rrjass 
 
 mcontest ^ a Jble ha \ rrjass 
 
 Most of us have to pal the similar forms together. 
 Once we have learned "stationery is not used in a 
 
/ 
 
 46 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 cemetery, ' ' no embarrassment can make ns err with 
 either word. By some mnemonic device we fix the 
 impression of two r's in embarrass; by another de- 
 vice, in another brain-cell, we fix one r in harass; if 
 we pair them, we are lost. 
 
 The author can cite a striking proof from his own 
 recent experience. A spelling test of twenty choice 
 words that have been bowling over all the peda- 
 gogues was dictated to him. One is caterpilll >r. 
 
 Even the disciplined teacher's mind was confused; 
 for it had seen both forms frequently, had pre- 
 viously looked up the word, had thought of the two 
 together (one as old, one as new) ; now, in the test, 
 it hesitated, was confused, was lost. If that 
 mind had grouped similar forms, had once said 
 caterpillar is like pillar, it would have acquired 
 knowledge. 
 
 The whole system of intensive spelling is to build 
 groups of words that corroborate each other. 
 Almost, already, always, altogether belong together, 
 help each other. All right must be kept as far apart 
 as possible in time and thought. ' ' There is no such 
 thing as an adjective in us" we must insist, "no 
 such thing as an adjective in full"; later we may 
 casually mention bogus and citrus, or comment on 
 crop-full. "Speeches every week" will teach the 
 spelling of two words; "he speaks in a weak voice" 
 will, later, teach two others. But "he speaks a 
 speech" may unteach spelling for life. Lose, move, 
 and prove; laid, paid, said; exceed, proceed, succeed; 
 divide and divine; he hadn't a particle of principle; 
 the principal man was a practical man; ninth, truly, 
 argument; decision and occasion — all such group- 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 47 
 
 - help to build up an assured and lasting 
 knowledge. 
 
 There is no other clue to the labyrinth of ie and v 
 "Always expect it to be ie unless you know 
 d< finitely to the contrary." Learn the four cases! 
 in which it is ei: (1) when the sound is that of long! 
 a or long i; (2) when the sound is short i or short ej 
 cept mischief, kerchief, friend, and sieve); (3Y 
 After c (except financier); (4) in six freaks: seize\ 
 ucird, leisure, either, neither, inveigle. For practi-t 
 ea] purposes the two great points to emphasize are: 
 (I) always write ie for the long e sound — piece, be- 
 lieve, fierce, siege, etc. — except seize, weird, and 
 neither; (II) always ei after c. 
 
 The whole matter can be remembered by the fol- 
 lowing jangles, the plan of which is to suggest the 
 rules in the first lines and the exceptions in the next 
 
 two: 
 
 v 
 
 1. I before e when sound is long e 
 
 Seize, inveigle, either 
 "Weird, leisure, neither 
 
 2. Ei after c or when sound is not e 
 
 Financier, fiery, and mischief 
 Friend, sieve, view, and kerchief 
 
 This looks complicated to you; much more will it 
 to your pupils. But so far as I know, it is the only 
 rule given under heaven among men.| If you ap- 
 proach it one step at a time, getting yourself and the 
 M gradually familiar with it, it will finally sorin 
 almost as simple as " Thirty days hath September." 
 Should you not wish to use it, you can at least do 
 valuable work (and tho important part) by empha- 
 sizing the two points suggested abow. 
 
48 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 I will add a paragraph about some exceptions ; not 
 because it is very useful and certainly not because 
 your classes will ever need it, but so as to give assur- 
 ance against embarrassment if a pupil should sud- 
 denly spring one of the forms. There are no excep- 
 ' tions to long a; use for illustration sleigh, freight, 
 rein, vein, feint, their, heir. The only real exception 
 to long i is fiery, for such forms as lie, vie, tries do 
 not give trouble on this score, are not entered for 
 discussion; use for illustration height, sleight, stein, 
 meister singer, seismograph, kaleidoscope, eider- 
 down, heigh-ho. Words in short i are foreign, sover- 
 eign, surfeit, counterfeit; the only exceptions I know 
 are mischief, kerchief, and sieve. "Short e" is put 
 in above simply for completeness; the only one I 
 have noted is heifer (though often leisure) ; the only 
 exception is friend. One speller makes a point of 
 glacier as an exception to the c rule, another is wor- 
 ried about ancient, and we might add species; but 
 these, on account of their sh sound, give no trouble, 
 do not belong in this class. There are a number of 
 exceptions to long e, but none that are likely to occur 
 on themes; plebeian is a possibility; seignorage is 
 an impossibility; Scotch forms like weir and teind 
 are not in court; nor archaisms like teil; sheik and 
 obeisance have a common pronunciation in long a. 
 Lieu is like view. 
 
 The first draft of this solution of ie and ei was 
 printed in the New York Times in 1897, has been 
 constantly checked up since, and may be trusted; 
 though there is not the least doubt that shortly after 
 this book is published I shall wish I had slipped in 
 one more comment or exception. Remember: All 
 these ins and outs are not vour business, but your 
 
INTENS1VK SPELLING 49 
 
 stock of reserve knowledge; all that count- much is 
 "the two great points. ' \ 
 
 Your business is always to determine what errox 
 common and to dm ly at that. A few 
 
 common names m your locality may be necessary, 
 or a few names that are being frequently written 
 because they occur in the books you study. I have 
 heard of a teacher who always dictated for the last 
 word of a spelling test the Indian name of the school 
 in which he taught; it was known that the name 
 would always be given, yet it was seldom that the 
 whole class could w r rite it correctly. A wise teacher 
 (whose chief interest is in literature) says that he 
 finds it good economy to spend ten minutes in getting 
 on the board by slow degrees, with facetious com- 
 ment, with repetitions and variations, the name 
 Macaulay. 
 
 It is not a matter of commonness, but of what you 
 find commonly misspelled. For example, in the Eng- 
 lish Journal for June, 1916, two teachers in two dif- 
 ferent kinds of schools testify that some of Mr. 
 Jones's demons do not trouble them. But in gen- 
 eral it is the same old list that is needed every- 
 where. There is striking proof from preparatory 
 schools that careful teachers working quite inde- 
 pendently will reach very similar results as to 
 demons. It may be well to print one list, which was 
 irot up on this basis: Have we encountered a mis- 
 spelling so often that it can be fairly called a demon? 
 In case of doubt a word was excluded. A few of the 
 forms were included more as illustrations of a type 
 than as demonic in themselves — like emphatically 
 and /.9. A few were due to local conditions — 
 
 sucl leB&dtragedy. Hut you can certainly 
 
50 
 
 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 count that nine-tenths will trouble you in your first 
 month. ' ' Second-grade words ' ' is used as a title for 
 the first list simply because it is less sarcastic than 
 ' ' for the little ones. ' ' All but six actually are in Mr. 
 Jones's second-grade list, 
 only "not quite so childish. 
 
 " Fifth-grade' ' 
 
 means 
 
 SECOND-GRADE WORDS 
 
 It is too big 
 
 J rough 
 1 enough 
 
 Their house 
 
 I know the lesson 
 
 which 
 
 He knew it 
 
 straight 
 
 He threw the ball 
 
 across 
 
 The ball was thrown 
 
 among 
 
 He meant to do right 
 
 every 
 
 ' He shows good sense 
 
 before 
 
 He asks questions 
 
 once 
 
 He turns the crank 
 
 
 He speaks in a weak voice 
 
 crowd 
 
 Tired after working 
 
 some 
 
 We got off the road 
 
 piece 
 
 He ought to have told us 
 
 believe 
 
 We told him 
 
 friend 
 
 Stay there 
 
 since 
 
 A new rule 
 
 stretch 
 
 Go through the woods 
 
 a rough road 
 
 They are almost here 
 
 toward the house 
 
 It is already five o 'clock 
 
 It is quite cold 
 
 He always comes 
 
 The guide led us 
 
 Although I don't want to 
 
 No one except him 
 
 Wait until six 
 
 I am sure it is sugar 
 
 Speeches every week 
 
 Did you lose the money? 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 
 
 51 
 
 FIFTH -GRADE WORDS 
 
 perhaps probably sentence surprise 
 
 1 
 E dropped before ing 
 writing coming dining hoping 
 
 Oana ing and shoeing are peculiar forms 
 
 stop 
 
 stopped 
 
 stopping 
 
 drag 
 
 dragged 
 
 dragging 
 
 hop 
 
 hopped 
 
 hopping 
 
 slam 
 
 slammed 
 
 slamming . 
 
 sin 
 
 sinned 
 
 sinning 
 
 strip 
 
 stripped 
 
 stripping 
 
 plan 
 
 planned 
 
 planning 
 
 begin 
 
 
 beginning J 
 
 occur 
 
 occurred 
 
 occurring 
 
 compel 
 
 compelled 
 
 compelling 
 
 refer 
 
 referred 
 
 referring 
 
 prefer 
 
 preferred 
 
 preferring * 
 
 omit 
 
 omitted 
 
 omitting 
 
 control 
 
 controlled 
 
 controlling 
 
 roll 
 
 rolled 
 
 rolling 
 
 write 
 
 written 
 
 writing 
 
 dine 
 
 dined 
 
 dining-room 
 
 suffer 
 
 suffered 
 
 suffering 
 
 offer 
 
 offered 
 
 offering 
 
 travel 
 
 traveled 
 
 traveling- 
 
 develop 
 
 developed 
 
 develop ing 
 
 open 
 
 opened 
 
 opening 
 
52 WHAT IS ENGLISH! 
 
 
 3 
 
 try trying tries 
 tie tying ties 
 lie lying lies 
 
 tried 
 
 tied 
 
 lay 
 
 It lay there yesterday 
 
 It has lain there many days 
 
 
 study studying studies 
 hurry hurrying hurries 
 
 studied 
 hurried 
 
 Verbs in ay — three peculiar forms 
 
 lay laid lays 
 
 pay paid pays 
 
 say said says 
 
 All other ay verbs are regular 
 
 stay stayed stays 
 
 play played plays 
 
 delay delayed delays 
 
 Consonant before y 
 
 
 lady 
 
 story 
 
 family 
 
 ladies 
 
 stories 
 
 families 
 
 Vowel before y 
 
 
 alley 
 monkey 
 
 alleys 
 monkeys 
 
 journey 
 
 boy 
 
 play 
 
 journeys 
 
 boys 
 
 plays 
 
INTKNSIVK Sl'KLLING 53 
 
 easy 
 
 easier easily- 
 
 happy 
 
 happier happiness 
 
 heavy 
 
 heavier heavily 
 
 lucky 
 
 luckier luckily 
 
 busy 
 
 business busily 
 
 Adjecti\ 
 
 7 
 r es like these end in ful 
 
 
 awful 
 
 
 painful 
 
 
 useful 
 
 
 fearful 
 
 
 hopeful 
 
 
 successful 
 
 8 
 Adjectives like these end in ous 
 
 famous 
 
 ingenious 
 
 generous 
 
 cautious 
 
 precious 
 
 delicious 
 
 conscious 
 
 religious 
 
 victorious 
 
 curious 
 
 jealous. 
 
 suspicious 
 
 furious 
 
 mysterious 
 
 various 
 
 bogu* is a peculiar form 
 
 dis + agree = disagree^ 
 dis + appear = disappear 
 .lis + appoint disappoint* 
 dis + satisfied = dissatisfied 
 
54 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 mis + spell = misspell 
 
 re + commend = recommend *> 
 
 re -f collect = recollect 
 
 accommodate £ } 
 
 committee 
 
 mean + ness = meanness 
 
 drunken + ness = drunkenness 
 
 sullen + ness = sullenness 
 
 10 
 No hyphens 
 
 together nevertheless 
 
 altogether nowhere 
 
 without apiece 
 
 whatever inside 
 
 wherever outside 
 
 11 
 
 generally 
 really 
 naturally 
 finally 
 ^usually 
 accidentally 
 especially 
 
 4e*mairy=m a formal way 
 formerly = in former times 
 practically 
 ar tistically 
 frantically 
 enthusiastically 
 grammatically 
 sarcastically 
 emphatically ^ 
 
 Publicly is a peculiar form 
 
INTENSIVE sn«: LLING 
 
 12 
 Two sep a rate words 
 
 all right in spite 
 
 at last in fact 
 
 13 
 
 Trouble with o 
 
 forty 
 
 prisoner 
 
 porch 
 
 lose 
 
 move 
 
 prove 
 
 55 
 
 14 
 trouble with u 
 
 minute 
 
 pursuit 
 
 accustomed* 
 
 guard 
 
 ^jj 
 
 four 
 
 fourteen 
 
 though 
 
 thorough 
 
 tmuble 
 
 15 
 Trouble with ou 
 
 x 
 
 of course not 
 the ship's course 
 prom I 
 cloud 
 
 loU«l 
 
 double 
 
56 
 
 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 
 16 
 
 
 Trouble with a 
 
 separate 
 
 any 
 
 separation 
 
 many 
 
 preparation 
 
 again 
 
 secretary 
 
 furnace 
 
 grammar 
 
 a stationary engine 
 
 pleasant 
 
 coarse cloth 
 
 descendant 
 
 rainy weather 
 
 
 It doesn't affect me 
 
 
 17 
 
 
 Trouble with e 
 
 describe 
 
 pretty 
 
 description 
 
 repetition 
 
 biggest 
 
 benefit 
 
 greatest 
 
 whether to go or not 
 
 enemy- 
 
 buying stationery 
 
 destroy 
 
 a good effect 
 
 despair 
 
 a quiet Sunday 
 
 
 18 
 
 
 Trouble with i 
 
 definite 
 
 intelligent 
 
 divide 
 
 originally 
 
 divine 
 
 delicate 
 
 privilege 
 
 medicine 
 
 view 
 
 disturb 
 
 similar 
 
 
1NTBN8IVB SPELLING 57 
 
 19 
 
 Possessives 
 
 a lady's hat the ladies' hats 
 
 a fox's tail the foxes' tails 
 
 Mr. Jones's house the Joneses' property 
 
 the men's hats 
 
 the children's toys 
 
 its 
 
 yours 
 
 hers 
 
 theirs 
 
 whose 
 
 One another's burdens 
 Each other's arms 
 Any one 's cap 
 
 20 
 An apostrophe shows that letters have been left out 
 
 ha ve + not = haven 't 
 ( 1 id + not = didn't 
 a re + not = aren't 
 w as + not = wasn't 
 should* not = should n't 
 does + not = doesn't 
 we + wills well 
 they + are = they 're 
 it + i8 = it's 
 you + have = you \« 
 where • if w here's 
 
58 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 21 
 
 a participle 
 
 an article 
 
 a principle 
 
 a practical man 
 
 the principal thing 
 
 22 
 
 Pronounce brilliant ruffian; a comes before i in the 
 following : 
 
 certain 
 captain 
 villain 
 
 23 
 
 decision } omission } , , , 
 
 fone s = z . . two s's = sh 
 
 occasion J permission J 
 
 Possessive is a peculiar form 
 
 24 
 
 Queerly pronounced 
 
 Wednesday carriage 
 
 beautiful answer 
 
 knowledge solemn 
 
 marriage necessary 
 
 one woman three women 
 
 Ought not to be queerly pronounced 
 
 government particularly 
 
 arctic Saturday 
 
 February quarter 
 
 obstinate corner 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 
 
 
 25 
 
 
 No extra letters 
 
 athletics 
 
 translation 
 
 possibly 
 
 library 
 
 translate 
 
 apologies 
 apologize 
 
 
 26 
 
 
 Single letters 
 
 around 
 
 amount 
 
 arouse 
 imitate 
 
 image 
 imagine 
 
 59 
 
 27 
 
 E before a suffix that begins with a consonant 
 
 nineteen 
 
 affectionately 
 
 ninety 
 
 immediately 
 
 surely 
 
 entirely 
 
 safety 
 
 < xtremely 
 
 arrangement 
 
 • Infinitely 
 
 rely 
 
 immensely 
 
 Ninth, truly, argument are peculiar forms 
 
 Drop e before a suffix that begins with a vowel 
 
 Lovable 
 
 immovable 
 desirable 
 
60 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Pronounce cable gable elegance 
 
 Notice the e's in the following: 
 
 noticeable changeable 
 
 unmanageable peaceable 
 
 vengeance 
 
 E is kept in order to preserve the sound of c and g 
 Judgment is a peculiar form 
 
 28 
 Double letters 
 
 supplies address 
 
 approach arrive 
 
 29 
 Some of the more common nouns in el 
 
 angel tunnel 
 
 nickel shovel 
 
 channel level 
 
 30 
 Words that end in d or nd have on 
 
 loud found frfw^ 
 
 cloud ground 
 
 proud sound ? 
 
 But "put the w in crowd" 
 
 31 
 
 critic opinion 
 
 criticize fascinate 
 
 criticism 
 
INTENSIVK SPELLING 61 
 
 32 
 
 prophet 
 a prophecy 
 two prophecies 
 
 33 
 
 to prophesy 
 ho prophesies 
 
 Five Wonderful Words: 
 
 goddess 
 
 shepherd 
 
 nymph 
 
 
 comedy 
 tragedy 
 
 In two ways you will see that the list seems not to 
 carry out what was said earlier. First, there appear 
 to be some linkings of forms that are confused — like 
 brilliant and certain, formerly and formally. This 
 is partly for convenience in printing and partly with 
 the hope that brilliant will make villian ridiculous 
 I whereas already has no power to make alright 
 ridiculous, but only to make it seem natural). Sec- 
 ond, the list is unemphatic. This is because it is a 
 mere record of what pupils already know. Every 
 form has had its day or its year on the blackboard 
 for special exposition. A noteworthy case is the six 
 possessive forms, which represent a gory field of 
 battle. Fox's will slaughter many a boy who can 
 spell hallucination without a quiver; Joneses' is 
 almost as deadly as a big howitzer. Those six forms 
 are a whole campaign in themselves. Insist that one 
 simple thing must be done for the singular— add 's. 
 Why this is so difficult heaven only knows, but 
 Burns's and Jones's are almost unattainable by 
 some. Though many writers dislike the cacophony of 
 Williams's and only a minority of speakers will say 
 
62 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Howells's novels, it is certain that modern usage pre- 
 fers to print the added s in all cases except for the 
 name Jesus and a few combinations of sake {good- 
 ness 9 sake). When pupils inquire, "But isn't Mr. 
 Jones' house correct 1" answer that it is easier and 
 safer to follow the invariable rule; for that is the 
 fact in school work. But you need not insist that 
 anyone should violate his sensibility. Insist on two 
 simple steps for the plural possessive. The first is 
 * ' Get your plural. 9 9 They will flinch and shy and be 
 astoundingly timorous. But gradually they will gain 
 courage to write Charleses. Then, second step, put 
 the apostrophe after the s, except in a few cases 
 where the plural does not end in s — such as oxen and 
 mice. 
 
 For five years the school that prepared this list 
 has used only the four hundred forms. It is an 
 astonishing method. Ten years ago I should have 
 called the man who proposed it just what you or 
 your principal or your advisory friend will call him 
 — a crank. It sounds preposterous, but is purely the 
 result of experience and cannot be discredited except 
 by somebody else 's conscientious trial for five years. 
 Month after month and year after year the pupils 
 are put through the same familiar pages. Spellers 
 have been abandoned. All spelling time is devoted 
 to trying to fix common forms ineradicably. Even 
 in this the failure is woeful. Of 'course it is. Im- 
 provement in spelling can be achieved only in pro- 
 portion to the cube-root of the effort expended. At 
 the end of the year only ten out of the twenty-five 
 boys in the second-year class can spell all the words 
 in the pamphlet. Nevertheless they are a better 
 trained crowd than was produced by the old method. 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 63 
 
 The most hopeless spellers miss only 10 per cent of 
 the words. After several reviews a test of thirty- 
 fur words is marked zero for two errors. 
 
 It is understood in the grading of themes and 
 written tests that there are three kinds of misspell- 
 ings: (1) unusual wojds, (2) words that the ideal 
 pupil would ha\ rved, but to which attention 
 
 has not been called, (3) words that have been spe- 
 cially dwelt on. Nothing is deducted for the first 
 kind, little for the second, but zero is the only limit 
 for penalizing the third. A third-year pupil who 
 writes ladys in an otherwise perfect hundred-word 
 test may get 80 per cent in September or 40 per cent 
 in June. For the violation of an invariable, familiar, 
 clearly-understood rule no marking is too severe. 
 And severity is the truest kindness. It often teaches 
 a stupid pupil in October what leniency would leave 
 untaught in June. 
 
 There is, I am sure, one advantage in intensive 
 spelling that no amount of spread-out work can 
 secure: i t establishes a nucleus. W hen a pupil has 
 reached the stage where dissapomt and finaly are 
 ludicrous, where they instantly recall the teacher's 
 invective, then that pupil is ready to be more ashamed 
 ransative or to detect and reform apropriation. 
 As long as he is taught that he is responsible for a 
 vast field of seldom-used nouns he feels abused, he 
 justifies his errors to himself ; but when he is strictly 
 liable for only a few square yards he cannot excuse 
 himself. He is then alive to errors; which means 
 tli.it his intellect has been quickened. When a boy 
 who used to look on Macauly with indifference has \ 
 oome to look upon it as an absurdity, then he has ' 
 taken a most significant intellectual step. 
 
64 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Such advances dignify the petty and onerous 
 teaching of spelling. And not in that homiletic sense 
 in which we are encouraged to sweep a room as if it 
 were God's work, but in that practical and scientific 
 sense in which the dissection of a mosquito builds the 
 Panama Canal. When you bring a pupil into a posi- 
 tion where buisness is ludicrous, you have made him 
 dread to be ludicrous in the case of other words ; you 
 have disclosed that pest of indifference; you are 
 preparing for a constructive work. 
 
 Limiting the work to such a small area may seem 
 intensive enough, yet even in this restricted space 
 one portion is much more valuable, more difficult, 
 and to be labored in more intensively than the rest. 
 It is the portion that includes derived forms, like 
 preterits and plurals. Don't think of the major part 
 of your task as a list of words. That is what you will 
 always be hearing and reading — how many thousand 
 words should be in our list, or how many hundred. 
 Even this chapter has been presenting a list. But 
 the most limited list is still a collection of mere units. 
 Much more important is a set of the few principles 
 that govern common changes of form. 
 
 To illustrate. The form stoped is a greater evil 
 than seperate because it shows ignorance of an 
 invariable principle whose application is required 
 several times on every theme. It means that the 
 pupil will go sluming and diping and that he will 
 be forever triping and sliping in a most ghastly way. 
 Ladys may not be worse than discribe, but it means 
 a woeful ignorance that is going to be displayed in 
 every composition; it signifies more illiteracy, a 
 more hopeless mental state. A ladle's hat certifies 
 that the writer is grossly uneducated, while probally 
 
■ 
 INTENSIVE SPELLING 65 
 
 proves no more than that he is careless. It is such 
 always-used principles that we must drive at. 
 Dissapear may be good evidence that the writer will 
 misspell several similar words that occur once in a 
 while; comeing is proof that he will misspell a hun- 
 dred that occur constantly. It is these derived 
 forms that multiply errors. When you establish 
 such a type-form, you wipe out a whole regiment of 
 the enemy. 
 
 The following rules and groupings are mostly 
 familiar, but some of the hints about what to expect 
 and how to attack may be useful. 
 
 i — AFFIXES 
 
 1. If a one-syllable verb ends in a single conso- 
 nant preceded by a single vowel, double the conso- 
 nant before ed. Stoped is the form that occurs ten 
 times oftener than other failures of this class. Make 
 pupils pronounce hope, hoped and then stope,stoped t 
 ami ask if they know what stope means. This is not 
 like exhibiting such wrong forms as wierd and! 
 n Ir i (/lit, which the pupil never sees in his reading and 
 which the teacher ought not to show him. Correct 
 forms like slopped and sloped, lopped and loped are 
 frequently seen and have to be distinguished. 
 
 If the accent is on the last syllable of longer verbsi 
 the situation is the same. Illustrate occurred by\ 
 furred. Contrast it with cured and secured. Occured 
 and controled are the common ones. Many pupils 
 have no ear for the abstraction "accent on the last 
 sy liable,' ' and are puzzled about preferred and of- 
 fered. But if you pronounce prefer, with an exag- 
 gerated emphasis, they smile at the curiosity. Then 
 a good formula is: " Prefer ed ought to look just as 
 
66 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 queer to your eye as it sounds to your ear." Din- 
 ning-room is a form that sometimes survives the 
 most slaughterous attacks, and writting is very long- 
 lived. (Chagrined is the only correct form of its 
 kind.) 
 
 2. Drop a final e before a suffix beginning with 
 a vowel. The instinctive dislike of doing this is very 
 strong, so that while you very frequently see such 
 an error as comeing in signs, you will probably never 
 see shoeing misspelled. These oe verbs, and a few 
 rarities like dye and singe (to avoid confusion) are 
 the only ones that retain the e before ing. In Eng- 
 land it is kept very commonly before able, and we 
 all have to write mileage and acreage, but in 
 America we consistently write tamable, lovable, etc. 
 The exception is after a g or c "to preserve the soft 
 sound.' ' Ask how a pupil pronounces cable and 
 
 I gable; then force him to pronounce peacable and 
 changable. The commonest exceptions are ninth, 
 truly, judgment (almost universally printed so, de- 
 spite dictionary warrant for the e), and argument. 
 The regular ones that have to be most contended for 
 are surely, arrangement, immediately, definitely. 
 
 3. Change y to i after a consonant : 
 
 (a) in plurals — stories (but proper names are 
 usually not changed — Henrys; and there 
 are a few abnormal forms like stand-bys 
 and drys) 
 
 (b) in third singular — cries " 
 
 (c) in past tense — cried 
 
 •(d) in comparison — happier, luckiest 
 
 (e) in adverbs — easily, luckily 
 
 (f ) before ness — business 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 67 
 
 Probably not more than half your class can learn 
 that last word until they see the demonstration: 
 busy+ness=business. 
 
 4. Change ie to y in ti/inf/, lying, etc. 
 
 5. There are three irregular preterits in aid: 
 laid, paid, said. All other ay verbs are regular, like 
 stayed, delayed. u Delay' ' is not a compound like 
 4 * inlay, ' p and staid is so unusual that a college exam- 
 iner once marked it an error. 
 
 6. Three eed verbs: exceed, proceed, succeed. 
 Others are regular, like precede and the noun pro- 
 cedure. 
 
 7. There are no adjectives in full except newly- 
 coined, hyphenated words. They are always like 
 useful. 
 
 8. Pupils use the double I in some common 
 adverbs very grudgingly. The most abused are 
 finally, accidentally, usually, and really. 
 
 9. Adjectives in ic have to take on an al before 
 the ly. Publicly is an exceptional form. 
 
 10. Probably everyone in your class can spell 
 appoint and knows that the common prefix is dis, 
 yet a fourth of them will repeatedly misspell disap- 
 point and disappear. The same form of emphasis 
 is needed for re+commend, mean+ness, etc. 
 
 11. Usually al forms an adjective and le is a 
 noun ending. Principal and principle look simple, 
 but— 
 
 12. A few verbs like mimic and picnic require a 
 A; before ing to preserve the hard sound of c. 
 
 13. Eight common nouns ending in o preceded by 
 a consonant form their plurals by adding es: echo, 
 hero, negro, no, potato, tomato, tornado, torpedo; 
 also the game of dominoes, usually jingoes, and the 
 
68 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Scotch jo. Most others must be os, and all others 
 may be. The rule is usually given the other way 
 round, but there is dictionary warrant for os in 
 every case except as stated above. In all our dic- 
 tionaries os is understood when no plural is indi- 
 cated. 
 
 n — CONFUSIONS 
 
 1. Certain, captain, and villain often appear with 
 the i before the a — and then reappear frequently 
 after you have had ruffian and Christian exhibited. 
 
 2. There is no generalization for the el and le 
 nouns. The best I can do is to make sure of a few 
 common ones in el, heading the list with angel. 
 
 3. An apostrophe shows where letters are omit- 
 ted; no letters are added to form an abbreviation. 
 Could anything be simpler? Could a sensible child 
 ever require a second caution about e and no e in 
 haven't and didn't P He could. Many require five 
 or ten. 
 
 4. Use no apostrophe for the possessive of a per- 
 sonal pronoun — its, yours, hers, theirs. Its is the 
 one most commonly wrong. Whose is difficult for 
 some to acquire. Indefinites (one, another, etc.) 
 have the apostrophe. Be cautioned in advance about 
 a way some children have of putting an apostrophe 
 into a plain plural. 
 
 5. There is a strong tendency to hyphenate certain 
 solid words, especially together, altogether, without, 
 and nevertheless. 
 
 6. In view of what I know after eighteen years 
 of experience I think the value of the miscellaneous 
 hints in this paragraph is not less than twenty dol- 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 69 
 
 lars. One boy with a good mind persisted through 
 ■ whole year in writing omit with two m's in spelling 
 lessons. Oppinion is a parallel case. Boys from 
 most cultured families will most marvelously per- 
 sist in pr chaps and preformance. Boys who have 
 known ex and capio for three years will in English 
 sometimes except an invitation. For school pur- 
 poses affect is a verb and effect is a noun ; never put 
 them together for comment. " Don't despair; we 
 can destroy the enemy' ' may teach three fearsome 
 words with one effort. Avoid any exhibiting of 
 forms that do not exist, like diden't, caption; it is 
 dangerous to write occur ed or picnicing on the board 
 unless they are audibly derived as strange monsters 
 from cure and ice; if you hope to teach angel, do not 
 write angle in that recitation. Pupils are mentally 
 stone-deaf to the difference between occasion 
 and occassion, picnicking and picnicing; only by 
 forcing them to use their tongues, by making them 
 say cassion, by insisting that they pronounce that 
 wonderful new word occassion, will you get any- 
 where at all. A boy will calmly pronounce picnicing 
 in the orthodox way ; he has not felt the appeal until 
 you make him say successively ice, icing, nicing, pic- 
 nicing, or mice, micing, mimicing; he will balk at that 
 last step and be unable to pronounce his own spell- 
 ing. Turnes is not very common; showes is fairly 
 frequent; ashes flourishes in its loneliness with a 
 vigor that you will finally learn to stand in awe of. 
 S apprise has more lives than a cargo of Kilkenny 
 cats. Led has no life in it ; only by constant nourish- 
 ment and zealous care can you keep it breathing. 
 Alright is as resistless as Tammany, and for aught 
 I can see is going to establish itself; it defines topp 
 
70 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 in my German lexicon and appeared in Scribner's 
 for April, 1915. 
 
 7. All displays of erroneous forms are danger- 
 ous. Wrong idioms have to be spoken and discussed, 
 for they are often met in real life. The wrong spell- 
 ing is very seldom seen in real life. Don't show it. 
 
 8. Always require the hyphens in such compound 
 adjectives as six-cylinder, snow-clad, easy-going. It 
 is marvelous to see how pupils who persistently 
 omit this necessary link will refuse to give up the 
 useless hyphen in today and will persist in to-gether 
 and with-out. As to other compounds custom is 
 variable ; it is a matter of how old and familiar they 
 are. Baseball has long been solid ; basketball is very 
 recent. You can find no rules and you need not 
 worry; but encourage the hyphen, especially when 
 the second part acts on the first (a pile-driver is 
 for driving piles) ; and encourage the solid form if 
 it is at all permissible. ' l Close up your compounds ' ' 
 is ajjpqd motto. 
 
 """U! Some groups of forms cannot be reduced to 
 a rule. There is a whole book devoted to able and 
 ible — without any resulting formula. Until some 
 patient genius can phrase an inclusive statement 
 about ance and ence we must be lenient with inde- 
 pendance, or depend on special emphasis for such 
 of this class as are being used constantly. Capital- 
 ization is not worth worrying about beyond the most 
 obvious and general rules. For example, the prob- 
 lem of the K's in " God's in His heaven' ' is hardly 
 worth comment, but the I in "We came to an Inn" 
 deserves censure. 
 
 10. At this point I am expected to plead for 
 simplified spelling, but it is hard to be interested in 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 71 
 
 such a slight revolution. I have no prejudice against 
 any amount of new forms; allow boys to amuse 
 themselves with thru even if they know nothing else 
 about reformation. But neither can I get up enthu- 
 siasm ; for so few of our troubles in secondary work 
 are touched by the proposed changes ; the Board is 
 not altering describe and separate and too. Their 
 program might remove five per cent of my troubles, 
 but might very likely add five per cent; because 
 (here is the great point) most pupils are almost 
 deaf to these phonetic differences that are as audible 
 to philologists as the loud-sounding sea. 
 
 If thirty very familiar words are dictated for a 
 spelling lesson, it is nonsense to mark off only five 
 per cent for each wrong word. That would be 
 encouraging carelessness. Ten per cent would hardly 
 afford much discouragement. Twenty per cent is 
 mild enough for early in the year. Nothing is too 
 strict after several reviews. This is not harshness, 
 however; it is true kindness; for lenient marking is \ 
 like Baying "Naughty, naughty!" to a burglar. 
 
 Suppose you have put a (lass through all these 
 common forms by making them copy the lists from 
 the hoard, keep them in a notebook, and review them 
 several times. Then you will do well to begin a 
 campaign of dictating sentences, for the pupil who 
 spells replies in a list of twenty words may spell 
 reply s when his attention is distracted by ideas like 
 this : "It is surprising how he loses his self-control. 
 If his rich uncle asks whether the moon is made of 
 green cheese, he blushes, hangs his head, and replies 
 that he never was there." Use whimsical or lively 
 or colloquial sentences. Get up little paragraphs 
 that tell an anecdote. Read these entirely through 
 
/ 
 
 72 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 first, then dictate slowly in small sections. Dicta- 
 tion of this sort can be made to review points of 
 idiom and punctuation. 
 
 Mark the misspelled words and return the paper. 
 The errors must be corrected. Now, here is a small 
 point that counts for much: Don't allow each word 
 to be written out ten times. That seems not to 
 accomplish anything. I know of a teacher's requir- 
 ing a boy to write out since five hundred times in 
 the afternoon — and finding that in the evening the 
 boy had not learned how to spell since. Require a 
 list of the misspelled words ; require this list to be 
 written ten times. The reason why this is a better 
 method is (I am guessing) that when the pupil begins 
 his second list his mind has been off on other business, 
 has had to attend to paid, cautious, and extremely; 
 so that when it recurs to luckily it has to notice all 
 over again, has to focus once more on what has been 
 out of sight. 
 
 Strange as it may seem, this chapter is not 
 intended to discourage, but to furnish comfort. It 
 is better to know what kind of difficulty we are 
 encountering. Thor was filled with chagrin at his 
 failure to lower a big drinking-horn; he was com- 
 forted when it was explained to him that the horn 
 was attached to the ocean. Spelling is not a mere 
 dish at the feast of learning; it taps the untried 
 deeps of psychology. Don't grow black in the face 
 and strain frantically when you find it so weirdly 
 impossible to get rid of dissapear. Keep cheerful. 
 You can get fair results with a fair amount of work. 
 
 If parents or a principal twit you because your 
 pupils spell poorly — show them that " since" story. 
 
 Probably the next teacher you consult after read- 
 
INTENSIVE SPELLING 73 
 
 ing this chapter will smile and tell you that there are 
 many spelling cranks in our profession; that the 
 dryasdusts are by instinct insistent on this soulless 
 littleness. But observe that my notions have been 
 imposed by a wisdom from above. The readers of 
 Yale entrance papers used to be instructed to con- 
 dition any candidate — no matter what graces of 
 style and appreciation he showed — if in the course 
 of an hour's writing he had misspelled four words. 
 1>. slnnan themes at Illinois are conditioned for two 
 misspellings. Those are high authorities on the 
 essentials of an English training. Their voices must 
 touch our trembling ears. They know what they 
 are talking about. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WHAT GRAMMAR IS ALL ABOUT 
 
 That closing remark about spelling is a good open- 
 ing for the chapter on the most jejune of all subjects 
 — English grammar. In 1909 the National Com- 
 mittee sent a questionnaire to schools and colleges, 
 as a basis for recommendations about entrance 
 requirements. One topic was : Shall there be a sep- 
 arate test in grammar? Only 45 per cent of the 
 schools favored it, while 60 per cent of the colleges 
 voted aye. This was not " Shall we have a gram- 
 mar requirement V 9 , but " Shall we have a separate 
 test?" The college instructor who is indifferent 
 about that kind of foundation is a rarity. If he has 
 anything at all to do with composition, he soon finds 
 out what mischief is caused by ignorance of the ele- 
 mentary anatomy of the mother-tongue. Plenty of 
 secondary teachers are indifferent about grammar, 
 giving only a grudging assent to a review in the first 
 year of the high school ; but the men higher up vote 
 a heartfelt and almost unanimous yes. 
 
 This sort of contest about living soul-stuff and 
 dead mind-stuff is as old as any art. But the archi- 
 tects and painters and musicians have been wiser 
 than modern teachers of English. In a volume of 
 criticism of some famous painters, written by a 
 painter, there is little said about charm and emotion 
 and loveliness and depth of feeling. Howells makes 
 
 74 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 75 
 
 a remark in some novel about the pitiful quality of 
 this emotion-talk that a non-painter uses in com- 
 menting on a picture. No — what the professional 
 notes is the selecting of boards, the mixing of colors, 
 the deftness in outlining, the study of lighting and 
 Perspective. An art teacher (I speak ignorantly, 
 but will take the hazard) insists on a foundation 
 of anatomy and mechanical drawing and sketching 
 dull plaster models — dry and soulless exercises. A 
 good music teacher works with finger exercises — dry 
 and soulless. Your architect must be drilled in stress 
 and strain and shear, which are perfectly arid, 
 unlovely things. 
 
 It is much more than a comparison to say : A good 
 language teacher must lay a dry and soulless founda- 
 tion. That is, considered in itself it is unlovely; 
 considered with a view to what is to rise above, it 
 is beautiful. Did you ever look at a great pit where 
 an architect was basing a sky-scraper T It is ugly 
 and joyless. But it is the only way to secure those 
 lofty, decorative cornices. 
 
 If the teacher of any art desiccates his own soul, 
 or if he loses sight of what lies beyond and above, 
 or if he blinds his pupils to the real goal of 
 endeavor — that is a sad affair. Many enthusiasts 
 about Knglish ixrammar have doubtless !<>st the 
 ion. Yet even that form of earnesFl>lm<]ness — 
 if the choice had to be made — is better than the effort 
 to be artistic without cellar walls or sound notions 
 of perspective. 
 
 The first chapter speaks about the danger of this 
 artistic conception of English. We can seldom lift 
 our eyes so high. A few boys and girls study paint- 
 ing or the violin because of special ambition or tat 
 
76 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ent ; every boy and girl must study English. We must 
 teach such plain and fundamental stuff as all can 
 learn. We must instruct in those mechanics which 
 every novelist is keenly conscious of when he forms 
 sentences (he may not have a set of names handy), 
 which the orator felt in every period, which no 
 builder of the lofty rhyme can disregard — and 
 which the ordinary high-school pupil has no true 
 perception of. 
 
 Inspiring any young spirit is so dazzling a hope 
 that few can look at it without blinking. It is a hope 
 that sometimes beguiles teachers into the bog of 
 shoddy work. As a matter of fact we are safe if we 
 take Cardinal Newman 's ideal : 
 
 I hold very strongly that the first step in 
 intellectual training is to impress upon a 
 boy's mind the idea of science, method, 
 order, principle, and system; of rule and 
 exception, of richness and harmony. This 
 is commonly and excellently done by making 
 him begin with grammar. 
 
 We discover that two practical demands are made 
 of us. First, that we furnish a simple basis of gram- 
 matical notions on which teachers of other languages 
 can work. This much they have a right to expect. 
 It is a minor consideration and has little to do with 
 determining our aims; but sometimes you will do 
 well to find out what names and classifications are 
 used in Latin and modern-language classes, so as 
 not to have needless differences. The confusion in 
 terminology used to be so great that a national com- 
 mittee was appointed to draw up recommendations 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR J $ ABOUT 77 
 
 V 
 
 for uniformity. Their report,* a 60-page pamphlet, 
 may be of some help to you if you are not perplexed 
 l»y the array of formalities. 
 
 The other demand ought to underlie every plan, 
 every detail that is taken up : Build a fo undation for 
 Composition. If this is constantly iiTview, you will 
 have~noTear that you are teaching a formal subject. 
 "Formal" is the word. So damning is the epithet 
 that some of us hardly dare mention syntax approv- 
 ingly, for fear we shall be considered unfit to 
 commune with those that are of purer fire. 
 
 We cannot do more than dimly guess what horrors 
 would be revealed if we could gather into one report 
 a five-minute record from every grammar recitation 
 in the United States on a certain day. Willie in 
 Concord would be rehearsing the quaint truth that 
 "The definite article the points out one or more 
 particular objects as distinct from others of the 
 same kind." Susie in San Diego would briskly 
 declare that "Shall and should are often used in the 
 second and third persons in subordinate clauses to 
 express volition which is not that of the subject." 
 Perhaps thousands of children are learning the six 
 special irregularities of weak verbs, and hundreds 
 may be memorizing the ninety-six prepositions. 
 
 How could we expect that these crimes of ped- 
 agogy would not be committed ? The rules and lists 
 are given; they are surely not mere ornaments; 
 there is nothing to indicate that they are for refer- 
 ence only ; the teacher will not rashly infer that they 
 are incitements to evil ; not a hint is given that one 
 
 * It may be obtained by sending 20 cents to the secretary of the 
 N. B. A., Ann Arb<> jan, for the Report of the Joint Commit- 
 
 tee on Uniform Grammatical SonuncLr 
 
78 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 page is more valuable than another. If, for example, 
 we find twelve pages of shall and would, and one and 
 a half pages of predicate nominative, it is a fair 
 inference that the one subject is eight times as valu- 
 able as the other. Teachers do so understand the 
 emphasis. They must suppose that a renowned pro- 
 fessor has proportioned his matter according to 
 some well-considered scheme. Indeed, the preface 
 says that the book is "a means for continuous 
 study." Apparently the author — and all other 
 authors — believes that foreign plurals are as impor- 
 tant as passive voice ; and that an analysis of adverb 
 clauses as concessive, future conditional, etc., is 
 three times as important as the matter of whether 
 a clause is adverbial. The exercises indicate that 
 as much drill ought to be given on indirect questions 
 as on nominative cases. 
 
 Yet every secondary teacher of experience knows 
 that "continuous study" is fearfully wrong. In the 
 first place, he suspects that such classifications as 
 Abstract Nouns and Ordinal Numerals are of small 
 value in themselves. He knows, in the second place, 
 that time spent on genders and potential phrases 
 is robbing a class of thorough instruction in funda- 
 mentals. For he realizes, in the third place, how 
 long and hard is the process of making one gram- 
 matical truth take root. (Has any grammarian 
 ever realized that years of repetition may not per- 
 suade a pupil to use we shall in the plainest of in- 
 dicative statements? Not even the writers of our 
 latest rhetoric can say we should.) As a teacher 
 becomes more familiar with these rudimentary diffi- 
 culties, he learns the necessity of spending more 
 time on them, for he believes, fourthly, that they are 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 79 
 
 important So, leaving long stretches of text quite 
 untouched, he_ concentrates on rudiments. He does 
 not pretend that his wisdom is greater than the 
 author's, is perplexed at finding all authors against 
 him; but the facts of his little campaign are clear 
 before him, and without disputing the Higher Strat- 
 egy he abandons it and develops his own small plans. 
 The criterion by which he abandons or attacks is 
 this: Whatever seems essential in a rational pro- 
 gram of teaching composition is to be taken up 
 thoroughly. If our combined wisdom should finally 
 decide that nothing grammatical really functions 
 in the art of making good sentences, that a knowl- 
 edge of syntax is not comparable to perspective in 
 painting or to finger-exercises in music, then the 
 Study of grammar shall surely die, because it will 
 have so little excuse for living. The question is to 
 a certain extent debatable. I have not the least 
 doubt that a great deal of effort as expended now- 
 adays is a dead waste, for we don't frame sentences 
 by grammatical analysis. But above a certain point 
 
 acher cannol convey information about how to 
 make good senl >r avoid poor ones unless the 
 
 ils understand syntax. It is generally believed 
 today — T can see no possible reason for not believ- 
 
 — that a study of the simpler principles is neces- 
 sary as a basis for rhetoric, that most matters of 
 ( da Bffl tying forms are of very slight use. 
 
 The most elementary but most incorrigible error 
 in composition is the failure to know the difference 
 between a fraction of a sentence and two whole Ben* 
 i. -i ices. "No amount of ordinary correction seems 
 sufficient to eradicate it," says the University of 
 Illinois. The u half-sentence fault" and "comma 
 
80 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 fault" can be almost rooted out from an entire class 
 of pupils three years below college grade by an 
 f attack based on grammar. If it can be done other- 
 / wise — say by prolonged drill in " sentence sense" 
 without any reference to clauses, without reference 
 to the difference between where and there, he and 
 who — then that method of success ought to be pub- 
 lished. I have never succeeded — that is, with a 
 whole class — except by drill in clauses. "What is 
 a dependent clause? Like what parts of speech are 
 clauses used I ' ' When^a pupilj has finally learn ed to 
 tell readily whether these groups of words are used 
 like nouns, like adjectives, or like adverbs, he can be 
 drilled in pointing them, will call himself stupid when 
 he goes wrong on a theme, and will, if marked 
 severely enough, quit one kind of half -sentence fault. 
 A similar drill with verbals is necessary to remove 
 another kind. 
 
 If every teacher had clearly in mind when he took 
 up personals and relatives that his business was to 
 undermine sentence-errors, he would know how much 
 to skip and where to dwell. He would care nothing 
 for gender, person, and number, for thou wast, for 
 " self -pronouns. ' ' He would care much to show how 
 a relative is dependent, how it and its clause can be 
 removed bodily without destroying the sentence. He 
 would be interested in nominative and objective, for 
 he would be looking forward to the study of noun 
 clauses, to the time when pupils should see a that 
 clause as subject or object, not to be pointed even 
 by a comma — much less by a period. His heart could 
 firmly endure all the "formal" drill, because he 
 would know that it was not formal at all, but was 
 living rhetorical substance. He could have visions 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 81 
 
 of shapely sentences rising from the welter, could 
 hear old Effectiveness blow his wreathed horn — and 
 would not be in the least forlorn. 
 
 Suppose that we find on a theme: "Colonel Sell- 
 ers was a peculiar man, if he happened to make any 
 money, he would immediately give it away." What 
 appeal are we to make? Doubtless a gifted teacher 
 of long experience, who despises "formal" gram- 
 mar, can devise a way of explaining that the condi- 
 tional money-making looks forward to the statement 
 about spending, and that there are two separate 
 statements, and that a semicolon is necessary — thus 
 avoiding the horrid nomenclature. But he is only 
 doing without names what we average teachers, 
 appealing to literal minds, do with names. Grant 
 that his result is better for the soul of a bright pupil ; 
 we have still to ask : What about the total of good to 
 be obtained by a thousand ordinary teachers who 
 attempt to follow him in dealing with a hundred 
 thousand ordinary pupils? The question is of the 
 greatest moment, yet national councils have 
 hardly begun to ask it, and the answer will 
 be long in doubt. My own guesses are (1) that only 
 a small percentage of teachers make for themselves 
 any complete explanation of what a sentence-error 
 is, (2) that most of them have a horror of a gram- 
 matical treatment, (3) that in avoiding the clause 
 drill they wander amid a tangle of impressionism, 
 imt guiding pupils to clear understanding. In brief: 
 The unusual teacher's s uccess is due (though lie 
 may not know it) to an understanding of flans 
 the novice fails bccauge _he is ignorant_ ofJiQg-^o - 
 handle clauses. 
 
 The most disastrous ignorance in the realm of 
 
82 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 /clauses is a misapprehension of the nature of the 
 | so-called "connectives." A teacher who knows how 
 to distinguish in his own practice between independ- 
 ent adverbs and real conjunctions, who can use semi- 
 colons with the former and commas with the latter, 
 may never have so formulated his knowledge that he 
 can present a scheme of it to others. He cannot find 
 a clear, analysis in any grammar. The grammatical 
 surveys in rhetorics are misleading, indicating that 
 the adverbs then and consequently are as subordi- 
 nating as when and so that. One admirable text 
 lumps together yet and indeed as connectives "before 
 which a semicolon is preferable." This is just as 
 untrue as to teach young people that sleep is "pref- 
 erable" before morning and evening. Pupils must 
 be taught that indeed is as independent as it, that yet 
 is a conjunction like but, so that they may know 
 assuredly that a semicolon is necessary with one 
 word and is never essential w T ith the other. This is 
 the fact of normal composition in schools, just as it 
 is the fact of a normal pupil's life that he must sleep 
 before morning and may sleep in the afternoon if 
 peculiar circumstances make it advisable. 
 
 I know by bitter experience how petty, how con- 
 troversial, this appears to artistic minds. A dozen 
 times since I began this chapter I have thought, 
 " What's the use? You might as well try to interest 
 this inexperienced teacher in the rat-proofing of New 
 Orleans. ' ' And that very simile has given me heart 
 to take up the pen again. For diseases that waste 
 our national vigor can be contended against only 
 after some dirty-aproned physician has dissected 
 rattus or stegomyia. My laboratory may smell of 
 dead yets and indeeds, but I verily believe that they 
 
WHAT GRAMMA if is AMOUT 83 
 
 the camera of dread contagion, and that if ire 
 know abort them we shall give Dp exorcism and t'umi- 
 
 ion, and shall gain health and prosperity by 
 terminating pests. Half the college students in the 
 aonntry are debilitated in their sentence-making 
 organ. Is this a visitation of divine wrath! an 
 nndinirnosable illness? a "miasma" against which we 
 fthonld burn sulphurous wrath? or an unescapable 
 contagion which we oimht to alleviate by a diet of 
 literary ambrosia? My test-tubes assure me thai 
 the plague is directly traceable to a bacillus, ignorun 
 tm orammatica. I have demonstrated it on tens of 
 thousands of themes; it always breeds true; its pres- 
 ence in a human brain always develops sentence- 
 errors ; when it is removed from a pupil, he no longer 
 \\ rites sentence-errors. My anti-toxin is not a 
 panacea. It no more produces graceful sentences 
 than any specific remedy causes general bodily 
 vigor. It does no more than rid the system of one 
 malady. 
 
 I have no recipe for increasing the mental robust- 
 ness of the race. Just as it may be true that our 
 
 ■rage of physical fitness has been lowered by arti 
 ficial aids against disease, so it may be true that 
 the injection of grammatical accuracy results in the 
 ultimate weakening of esthetic vitality. I have never 
 observed the least indication of such after-effects, 
 nor can I conceive that they will occur. But that 
 point ifl not here at issue. Nor arc we debating 
 whether sentence -errors really signify in the sight 
 of Heaven. To me personally the difference between 
 
 omma and a semicolon is less than nothing. I 
 only feel that if a youth is unable to grasp the dis- 
 tinction he is mentally unworthy of a diploma — or 
 
84 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 else his teacher is unworthy of a salary. I note 
 that the colleges and tax-payers demand that such 
 knowledge shall be imparted, and that we are not 
 meeting the demand successfully. "What follows is 
 not a symposium of heart-throbs, but a method of 
 deserving a hundred dollars a month. 
 
 An inevitable cry of dismay must be forestalled: 
 "Oh, this is an apotheosis of drugs! This will 
 encourage novices to herd their pupils out of the 
 pleasant pastures and confine them amid antidotes 
 and syringes;' ' Peace! No medical thesis ever 
 turned a lover of green fields into a worshiper of 
 microbes. Anyone who can be turned from the 
 paths of good sense by this chapter is already unfit 
 to teach English. 
 
 One principle is to be forever in mind: Pupils. 
 
 X Trrngj Tmnw whflt words dn jn rptiIptipps That 
 
 "Colonel Sellers was a peculiar man, if he happened 
 to make money ,, will illustrate. What does if do? 
 It joins its clause to ivould give. A pupil who has 
 been taught to find out instantly what if does is pre- 
 pared to understand why the comma before it is the 
 saddest of blunders. Logically the comma is right, 
 because what follows is subordinate in thought, 
 explaining how the Colonel was peculiar. The 
 Frenchman may indicate this subordination by a 
 comma. We are not allowed to. Another illustra- 
 tion is "A plague upon them, they're rotten.' ' 
 Unless a person knows how plague is used there is 
 no way to inform him that a mere comma is not 
 acceptable after them. Our pointing in such cases 
 depends upon grammatical dependence or independ- 
 ence. And those arbitrary syntactical distinc- 
 tions are never revealed by any amount of drill 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 85 
 
 in such mental states as " non-committal present 
 conditional/ ' 
 
 In it > normal use if is always a conjunction, but we 
 should discredit the notion that a word is any- 
 thing in itself. The letters t, h, and e sometimes 
 form an adverb and sometimes an article. To teach 
 that "concerning may be classed as a preposition* ■ 
 
 : o damage the youthful mind, because it conveys 
 the impression that a word is something in itself; 
 whereas it really is a preposition if it does preposi- 
 tionarworK . * * w hat does it do i Tnen what is it ? ' ^ 
 Any deviation from this line of attach is turning a 
 poor child's logic topsy-turvy. To expound "infini- 
 tive clauses' ' or "infinitives as modifiers' f or 
 "intransitive passive" (sic) is to double on our own 
 tracks, eluding and baffling the pupil. Very few 
 English forms are anything in themselves. Asked 
 is nothing till you know what it does, but must be 
 seen in action, to sleep is probably not an infinitive — 
 and so on forever. There is hardly such a thing as 
 a n intransitive verb. I read in my text that * ' Roared 
 what?" would be an absurdity, but Shakespeare 
 made somebody * ' roar these accusations forth. ' ' To 
 classify roar as intransitive and then to say "here 
 used transitively" is to spoil our own efforts. 
 "Wliat docs it do? Then itjs transitive here." 
 
 This truth about verbs is hardly credible to some 
 persons of middle age who were brought up with 
 texta modeled after the Latin, for in Latin a verb 
 is usually transitive or intransitive in itself; it is 
 that kind of verb. Reference to dictionaries is decep- 
 tive because they seem to announce that a verb is 
 hy nature one kind or the other. But try to find a 
 dozen verbs that are not entered as both transitive 
 
s 
 
 86 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 and intransitive. Such lugged-in Latin notions 
 originally distorted our texts and are still potent 
 causes of misstatement and wrong emphasis. The 
 treatment of mood has been a process of forcing 
 square English facts into round Latin holes. Think 
 of defining case of English nouns as " variation in 
 form. ' 9 Even the great and sensible Matzner devoted 
 pages to the genders of our nouns, yet gender hardly 
 exists in English. Since Latin grammars display 
 elaborate schemes of conjugation, our grammars 
 have done the same ; we have paraded principal parts 
 and declensions and all manner of paradigms as if 
 English forms were unknown and our task was to 
 commit them painfully to memory. Every pupil has 
 known the forms all his life. What he does not know 
 is how to describe the functions of words. 
 
 Not all classification of forms is worthless, but 
 learning about kinds is of small value compared with 
 learning about functions, and the difficulties of teach- 
 ing a few necessities of syntax are so great that no 
 ordinary school has time for anything more. Not 
 one of us realizes how hard it is to make a whole 
 class able to distinguish between subject, object, and 
 predicate nominative. Scores of times I have seen 
 normally bright pupils in a third year of review trip- 
 ping over "up flew the windows' ' or learning all 
 over again why a gerund is not a participle. 
 
 What are those few necessities ? We might almost 
 reply, "Whatever will explain clauses.' ' You can 
 never know the nature of clauses until you under- 
 stand the uses of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and 
 relative pronouns. You cannot tell a clause from 
 an independent sentence until you have studied per- 
 sonals. You cannot know about nouns and pronouns 
 
WHAT GRAMMAB IS ABOUT 87 
 
 except in connection with transitive and intransi- 
 tive verbs. Phrases will always be clauses until yon 
 study prepositions. Clauses will never be clauses 
 until you investigate conjunctions. And there you 
 are. Through every inch of the drudgery you can 
 see clauses. Familiarity with them will breed some 
 ease in writing complex sentences, and so make style 
 less childish. Knowledge o f them will put counter- 
 feit sentences out of c ion. In your toiling 
 with subject and object you have a purpose, a pre- 
 vision of how you are going to destroy such monsters 
 as "What you say, doesn't count, it's what you do." 
 Ellipses are not futile puzzles if you are providing 
 against "Why not, there's no danger." You can 
 even behold above the meanest adverb a light which 
 shall show young intellects why they must not let a 
 weak adverb clause stand all alone between periods. 
 
 What have you supposed you were going to do? 
 B ; i i se a dust for no particular purpose ! If you know 
 that every motion is going to help the next genera- 
 tion to command a more decent style, shan't you 
 feel that your occupation is less like devilish goose- 
 stepping and more like godly labor! 
 
 Your year's course begins with recognizing the 
 p arts of speecH . They are not meaningless COUUleTB,— 
 buT parts of a vital physiology. Definitions are 
 merely brief statements of uses: a word used as a 
 name, a word whose business is to modify nouns and 
 pronouns, a word that has power to make a state- 
 ment. Then you take up each in turn. Disregard- 
 ing such relativities as "cognate object", "obi- 
 
 rvice," you attend only to real uses — subject, 
 vocative, indirect object, adverbial objective. In 
 themselves these topics are exactly as inspiring as 
 
88 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 a heap of bones ; but a good physician can see all the 
 way from the power of naming bones to the power 
 of saving lives. Verily so can you if your eye is 
 not dim. When Thomas learns that Royal George 
 is not the object of down went, and then for three 
 successive weeks hears that Barbara Frietchie is not 
 the object of sprang, a wonderful conception begins 
 to grow in Thomas's mind: "I needn't begin every 
 sentence of my own with the subject." Incidentally 
 he will be prepared to adopt such conventions as 
 using commas with vocatives or appositives, and 
 not using them before objective predicates. 
 
 Must we hack our way through all these construc- 
 tions f Probably yes — alas ! Why ? Because unless 
 Thomas is responsible for every use he will not 
 understand you some day when he has written ' ' The 
 Judge was tall, dark-brown hair," or "When a boy 
 is seriously hurt in football, even a broken arm or 
 leg." You will point reproachfully at hair or arm 
 and ask its construction; he will reply, "I guess 
 that's one you didn't teach us." 
 
 Accept any explanation that could possibly be 
 deduced by a rational process. In "It cost a dollar" 
 the noun might be called adverbial. And keep in 
 mind always that the analysis which long habit 
 makes obvious to us is essentially hard. Can you 
 present off-hand an irresistible demonstration of the 
 antipodal functions of the two following verbs? 
 "She seems a goddess", "She resembles a goddess." 
 
 Thence to those words that take the place of 
 nouns. All the parade of ' l compound ", " demonstra- 
 tive", "indefinite," is a show of phantoms, only to 
 be glanced at. "What do they do?" Just what 
 nouns do — except those relatives. Everything about 
 
T^adn^ tftljf-tuc s 
 
 WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 89 
 
 pronouns is too easy, too vacuous to spend effort on 
 compared with those relatives. They are weak by 
 nat u iv, small, parasitic, unable to stand alone. They 
 can be graphically charted by writing them in very 
 small letters on a line slanting down from a big 
 antecedent. This is not kindergartening; it is a 
 primal fact about sentences. If a child establishes 
 the mental habit of drawing a ring about a relative 
 clause, he can always corral his relative construc- 
 tions ; if he has formed no such habit, he will be for- 
 r turning loose upon society such mavericks as 
 "I have something here that as long as I keep it, 
 I'll be unhappy." Nor have I observed that such a 
 sense of restraint ever stiffened a lively style in the 
 least Would Stevenson have been more charming 
 if he had allowed his clauses to stampede t You will 
 . never waste time by additional exercises in relatives, 
 for no class ever knew them infallibly. It is doubt- 
 ful whether you should touch upon relatives as 
 descriptive and restrictive. The distinction is the 
 most delicate and difficult in the whole field of rhe- 
 toric, the hardest to formulate, the hardest for illit- 
 erate minds to grasp. It must be mastered before 
 clauses can be properly pointed, but "touching 
 upon ' ' will accomplish nothing. Unless you can pre- 
 sent it fully, you had best not take it up at all. It 
 is a rhetorical distinction. 
 
 As you have had nothing to do with 4< adjective 
 pronouns," so you will not speak of "pronominal 
 adjectives." We must play no game of now-you-see- 
 it and now-you-don't. By their functions ye shall 
 know them. With the exception of possessives^ To 
 call these adjectives might help modern-language 
 instructors, but it is doubtful whether we can afford 
 
90 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 to do so; for it creates the contradiction that pos- 
 sessive nouns are nonns, but that possessive pro- 
 nouns are adjectives. And consistency is precious 
 in elementary grammar. We must advance con- 
 sistently to participles. If you realize that they are 
 the goal, and that a knowledge of them will prevent 
 sentence-errors, you can handle adjectives with zeal. 
 
 In adverbs a definition will be useful. (You will 
 find that occasionally adverbs really modify preposi- 
 tions and conjunctions: "right on that spot, stand- 
 ing just where he told us. ' ') You will feel very little 
 interest in the different kinds of meanings, or in 
 irregular comparisons, or yes and no, or expletive 
 there, or uses of the superlative. You are concerned 
 with "What is it doing V 9 You will wish you could 
 tear out that leaf that tells about "relativej^dy£rj)^" 
 for it exposes a child to the plague,"abuses and mis- 
 leads him. They are conjoining words. Interroga- 
 tive adverbs are adverbs. 
 
 The ideal text would alternate lessons in verbs 
 x and constructions of nouns, for they are inseparable 
 matters. You must join what the text has sundered. 
 Four-fifths of your time on verbs will be spent_rn_ 
 distinguishing betwen intransitive and passive, 
 object and predicate nominative; one-fifth on all 
 other matters. For sequence of tenses in composi- 
 tion will never be influenced by parsings, and sub- 
 junctive mood is not defined alike by any two 
 grammarians. A statement or question of fact is 
 indicative, a command is imperative, a mere condi- 
 tion of mind is s ubjunct ive 1 — 116 more but so. And 
 be willing to leave mood quite untaught until you 
 have made doubly sure of the necessities. 
 
 Prepositions — what delight have they promised 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 91 
 
 you! You can find them almost inspiring if you 
 anticipate coherent modifiers and the clearer notions 
 of clauses. A phrase is always a clause to Thomas, 
 and until he can distinguish you have no language 
 by which to explain some matters of arranging, vary- 
 ing, and pointing. It is not that, grammar makes , 
 good sentences, but that it f m,a>e? pna«i ble the j om- ' 
 municating of ideas about forming sentences. So 
 y onr object is to delimit prepositions from adve rbs 
 on the one hand and conjun ctions on the other. "Tney 
 a lways have obje cts, never modif y anything, but 
 f o rm phrases that modify. IAke lH Hot ' ' an adjective 
 used iiKe a preposition"; it is a preposition. YoTT 
 never weary of inquiring what the object is and what 
 the phrase modifies. And you look into the seeds of 
 time and see an epoch when "in which he sat in" 
 will be monstrous, and when a phrase will not be a 
 sentence. 
 
 There is a sense in which all this study is prelim- 
 inary to conjunctions, for conjunctions mean clauses, / 
 and clauses mean the approach — as near as mechan- 1 
 ics can go — to decent sentences. Your energy will 
 all be directed at "What Hn^a if do*" One form of 
 answer, one invariably, must be insisted on; any 
 other will leave the class in a haze: "It attaches its 
 (la use to one word." It may join a modifier or an 
 object, but only when we know to what one word and 
 for what purpose can we answer " TujyL_wJiaJLJrind 
 j&iil" When and where are no guarantee of what 
 the clause is. "How is the clause used?" In "Use 
 such powers as you have" as joins a clause to the 
 adjective such ; therefore the clause is adverbial, no 
 matter what your text declares. It is doubtful 
 whether as must ever be called a relative pronoun. 
 
92 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 There is in your text a section which ought to be 
 excised by a national board of censorship. Some 
 day it will be. It is that paragraph which asserts 
 that some adverbs are conjunctions. Still is not a 
 conjunction. However is not a conjunction — never 
 in a secondary school. Nor is nevertheless nor more- 
 over nor then. If this dictum is a flat denial of the 
 whole thesis, then the thesis must go to smash. We 
 face an ugly, illogical fact, a social taboo that is 
 superior to all reason. The fact of custom is that 
 we do not point these words with commas as we do 
 though and unless. We place a deadly entanglement 
 in the path of progress if we so much as whisper the 
 possibility that these independent, adverbs might in 
 any event ever conceivably be called conjunctions. 
 No, we must shout the contrary. And as we vocifer- 
 ate we may see opening before us a highway of real 
 sentences on which pupils may safely travel to that 
 Promised Land in which there are no sentence- 
 errors. 
 
 A verbal used like an adjective is a participle; a 
 verbal used like a noun is an infinitive. TUat ought 
 to be the limit of definition, but unfortunately a 
 National Committee asks us to call ing infinitives 
 gerunds. So be it, then. But assure your class that 
 the difference is purely formal, that you are dissect- 
 ing only adjective uses and noun uses. Never swerve 
 from that. Never use the confusing " participial 
 infinitive" nor "infinitive clause" nor "infinitive 
 modifiers," nor "complementary" nor "purpose"; 
 spend little time on phrases, tenses, or "pure adjec- 
 tive." Drive at "Is it noun or adjective?" Every 
 infinitive is used like a noun: "complementary" is 
 a direct object; "purpose" and "modifier" are 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT 93 
 
 objects of to, and the phrase modifies. "Every par- 
 ticiple must modify something. What is it? Why, 
 then, is it dangling helpless in your sentence T M 
 
 There is the program — to deal with no mere forms, 
 to ask what words do, to keep before us the vision 
 of better sentences. 
 
 A text to put this into effect would have quite a 
 dilTerent appearance from our present grammars. 
 It would do in form what most experienced teachers 
 do in practice: offer hardly any text, offer a thou- 
 sand sentences to work with. Its few simple defini- 
 tions would be mere titles for colloquial comment 
 on a few principles. The comments would be brief, 
 serving only to introduce the illustrations. And the 
 illustrations would be nothing but introductions to 
 the only part that counts — exercises. Probably nine- 
 tenthfl of the book would be sentences so grouped as 
 to afford easy preliminary drill on one topic, then 
 on two topics mingled, every exercise including some 
 sentences that contain no illustrations of the topic. 
 This is not a policy of puzzles ; it is insurance against 
 heedlessness — a highly important bit of tactics. The 
 fences would be taken mostly from stories and 
 
 criptions, so that they should seem human, some- 
 what interesting, and so that their meaning should be 
 obvious at first reading. We cannot reckon how 
 unreal we have made grammar with our selections 
 from Tennyson and Emerson. (And possibly have 
 done something toward making literature odious.) 
 It is more profitable to examine a live idiom like "I 
 don't know who did it" than to whirl toward AizraePs 
 outposts with "As night to stars, woe lustre gives 
 to man." 
 
 Does it sound like a program of easy incomplete- 
 
94 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ness? It would be quite the contrary. For it is 
 harder to be thorough in a few fundamentals than 
 to hurry through a thousand non-essentials; more 
 complete to know all of something than to know only 
 a little about some things. 
 
 Does it sound like a great lot of work for a small 
 result? It is true in one way that a year of drill 
 in syntax does not furnish much useful knowledge; 
 many a skilful writer who in the truest sense under- 
 stands his mother-tongue knows nothing of gram- 
 matical formulas and would not have his skill per- 
 ceptibly increased by a course in syntax. Grammar 
 drill actually counts for very little in training a pupil 
 to use the language correctly, for there are very 
 few opportunities (like "if I'd have known' ' or 
 "between you and I") to appeal to reason. It is a 
 fact that though a man has all knowledge of diagram- 
 ing clauses, so that he can analyze unfalteringly the 
 maziest sentence of Pater or James, he may never- 
 theless be unable to compose one interesting period. 
 In spite of the various hints given above as to how 
 grammar may be applied for obviating careless con- 
 structions, it must be admitted that such applications 
 come only now and then, could be made without all 
 the preparatory analysis. Grammar probably trains 
 the intellect no better than a dozen other subjects 
 that have greater cultural content. What on earth 
 does grammar do? It prepares a pupil to 
 learn when he has reached the end of a sentence and 
 to be instructed in punctuating that sentence. Is 
 that a small result? It must look positively tiny to 
 you; it appears insignificant to some experienced 
 educators. That is because you measure size astro- 
 nomically. To an astronomer the solution of a quad- 
 
WHAT GRAMMAR IS ABOUT ' 95 
 
 ratio equation is an achievement about the size of a 
 pea ; to a grade pupil it is larger than the moon. The 
 child is trained for years, slowly advanced from one 
 simplicity to another, before he can begin algebra. 
 Some day the world will realize that we have been 
 regarding the solution of written-sentence forma- 
 tions from the astronomer's view-point, have been, 
 as it were, taking subtraction for granted and merely 
 glancing at decimals. As a result our children have 
 only the dimmest notion of what a sentence is ; the 
 children become youths in high school, and still have 
 the dimmest notion of what a sentence is ; here they 
 are exercised in the higher calculus of English with- 
 out knowing what plain quadratics are ; and half of 
 them proceed to college quaternions before some 
 sensible director of freshman composition requires 
 them to learn why x 2 + y 2 cannot be factored. Al8 
 Professor Thomas of Minnesota says about ordinary 
 college freshmen: "They have been left in total 
 ignorance of the nature of a sentence. . . . The 
 whole theory of punctuation still remains in worlds 
 beyond their ken." Freshman instructors at Wil- 
 liams have to devote the first weeks of the college 
 i to drill in the rudiments of punctuation. And 
 punctuation cannot be taught without a knowledge of 
 clauses. 
 
 If quadratics is a "small" result in mathematics, 
 so is a knowledge of clauses "small" in English. 
 Not otherwise. 
 
X I, 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 TEACHING GRAMMAR 
 
 / One precept must be graven in your mind : Noth- 
 ing is true simply because your text says it is true. 
 A marvelous collection could be made of untruths 
 that have been solemnly rehearsed from one genera- 
 tion to another. One example is Dr. Johnson's guess 
 that "had rather" is a vulgarism — an absolute fals- 
 ity that lived unresisted for a century and a 
 quarter, has been thirty years a-dying, and is not 
 dead yet. Only five years ago an Atlantic contrib- 
 utor inveighed against the ignorance of an age which 
 had no more feeling for grammatical propriety than 
 to use ' ' no one but me. ' ' She argued that i \ me ' ' was 
 wrong. All such things-that-aren't-so arise from 
 logical brains that argue. Grammar admits of no 
 argument — at least Professor Whitney convinced 
 most thinking Americans that it doesn't; and since 
 his time a host of thinking professors have been 
 beating into us the notion that reasoning about 
 grammar is an utterly fatuous futility. Perhaps 
 you have some conceptions about this or that usage 
 as wrong * l because. ' ' You will constantly encounter 
 prepossessions against respectable idioms ' ' because ' ' 
 of some ratiocination. The only way to know about 
 respectability is to know the facts of usage — has it 
 been, or is it now, commonly employed by educated 
 people f 
 
 English grammar is always furnishing surprises, 
 things you never thought of before. If you teach it 
 twenty years, you will not get entirely beyond the 
 
 96 
 
 _./*.. ..i~- ^ ^iiswvrui* J2S jlr 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 97 
 
 unexpected. But the great body of usual explana- 
 tions is not hard to acquire. The best guide for 
 teachers that I happen to know is Grammar and Its 
 Reasons by Mary H. Leonard. It is clear, sensible in 
 its methods, remarkably complete, and always sound. 
 The most thorough and reliable text is Whitney's 
 Essentials of English Grammar, which, though 
 designed as a textbook, is really a manual crammed 
 full of information for the teacher. Kittredge and 
 Farley's Advanced English Grammar, though mis- 
 leading in some of its statements, records some 
 facts of idiom that other authors have been too 
 timorous to include. Armed with these three volumes 
 you can bag almost any idiom that rears its fearsome 
 head. Should you by any strange chance ever wish 
 to go further in quest of facts from our literature, 
 use Matzner's three- volume Grammatik. Even if 
 the German comment is hard to read, the great 
 stores of quotations are easy — and they are what 
 o units. Otto Jespersen's volumes of syntax (in 
 Knirlish) will he another tremendous collection of 
 quotations, very originally and entertainingly 
 grouped. It may be many years before this is 
 completed; the first volume (1914) does not cover 
 mueh of the field. 
 
 English constructions are hard to reduce to an 
 orderly scheme. After a person has been arranging 
 an<l explaining them for five years he is astonished to 
 find unsolved perplexities confronting him every year 
 for the next five. They are specially numerous in 
 common idioms and colloquial language. Be pre- 
 pared to be " stuck* ' at any time. It is fatal to pr 
 tend knowledge, because you may make a pronoun e 
 ment that will later be disastrous. The best way out 
 
98 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 is: "I've never thought of that. I want to make 
 , sure. I '11 teJLyjajJg mojpgow. ' ' if in the rush of a 
 recitation you make a ruling that later recoils upon 
 you and shows that you were wrong, acknowledge it. 
 Get straight again. There is no other way to keep 
 the respect of the class. But of course you must dis- 
 play as little ignorance as possible. Often you can 
 see the trouble coming and can avoid the encounter; 
 Often the puzzle is of no value to the class, and you 
 can say that you are omitting the oddities. Try to 
 have it understood from the beginning that English 
 syntax is not like arithmetic: a teacher of other 
 subjects knows an answer to every question that can 
 arise ; in every elementary grammar there are ques- 
 tions that lexicographers cannot agree about. 
 
 At many points in the course there will be options 
 as to how you classify or explain. Make it clear to 
 the class that some of the schemes are arbitrary, 
 that the matter is handled otherwise in other books 
 or other schools, but that for the sake of uniformity 
 it is necessary to require some one scheme with any 
 one class. Always try to give credit for, or at least 
 to excuse, a recitation that shows an analysis which 
 might have been taught somewhere in the world. 
 Sensible headwork, even if the result is laughable, is 
 better than mere devotion to an arbitrary standard. 
 If a pupil says that trotting in "he went trotting 
 along the sidewalk' ' is a modifier of went, this is 
 a notion that has reality in it; it is not to be con- 
 demned unless it conflicts with a standing, invariable 
 ruling that participles never modify verbs. The 
 . word really does convey the impression that he went 
 "in a trotting fashion"; it may truly be called 
 adverbial. But we get a clearer, more consistent 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 99 
 
 outline of English syntax if we insist that participl es 
 a re always used like adjectives, and that henc e 
 t rotting is a form of predicate adjective after 
 innt . 
 
 ^This is one of hundreds of examples of how hard 
 it is to frame a plain and consistent outline in which 
 the " always* ' is not to be continually criss-crossed 
 by the "sometimes, however.' ' That undeviating 
 outline is really a necessity. It does not narrow you 
 or your subject or the pupil ; it is simply the skeleton 
 of the Generally True; it is the support for gram- 
 matical concepts. When it is mastered — and not 
 before — a pupil is entitled to debate of might-bes 
 and in-realities. You and the pupils will keep in a 
 much happier frame of mind if you recognize that 
 the stiff outline is a useful device, not a subject or 
 an end in itself. 
 
 The actual work with miscellaneous sentences 
 all that really counts. You need hundreds of them. 
 Sometimes you will be driven to the use of other 
 books for material, such as a history or even an 
 algebra or the Bible. Copious exercises is the word. 
 
 A natural approach is to take a preliminary sur- 
 vey of the different parts of speech in this order: 
 nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, preposi- 
 tions, conjunctions. It may be well to leave infini- 
 tives and participles till later. This kind of work 
 goes swimmingly. When the lesson is all about 
 adjectives it is easy to select thorn. Even long verb 
 phrases can be picked out handily when the lesson 
 is all about verbs. Be warned that this is mere seem- 
 ing, and that when you mix things up the class will 
 seem to have got nowhere at all. 
 
 "A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun." 
 
100 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Very well. Then the italicized words in the follow- 
 ing are pronouns: "Each had his knapsack", "One 
 never knows his own faults." Next we learn that 
 " An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pro- 
 noun, ' ' and we tackle the sentence : ' ' Each man ran 
 for the other side." Since we are concentrating on 
 adjectives, we shall probably get fair results with 
 each and other. But now we review a mix-up of pro- 
 nouns and adjectives, encountering: "Each one had 
 thought the others were lying about that other 
 boat." Protests will be heard. "Yesterday we 
 called each a pronoun." "The book says that each 
 is a pronoun." 
 
 You think that you will drive them to cover thus : 
 "Yes, but what is a pronoun? How is one used? It 
 doesn't modify some understood noun, does it? You 
 couldn't say 'each one man/ could you? No. So it 
 stands for a noun, then? Exactly. And what is a 
 pronoun? Then one must be a pronoun? What does 
 each do? Modifies one. Any word that modifies a 
 pronoun is a — what? So each is an adjective." 
 
 Isn't it easy? It is also easy to go through the 
 rigmarole tomorrow, and next week, and next month. 
 I have known bright boys to need a repetition after 
 five months of almost daily megaphoning the same 
 old idea. It seems a notion contrary to normal 
 mental processes. 'A spade is a spade. If you use 
 it for poking the fire it doesn't become a poker. A 
 word ought in the nature of things to be something. 
 This calling it one thing today and another tomorrow 
 is not fair. 
 
 How is it used in the sentence? Start out strong 
 with" that, and never let up. If a pupil, unprompted, 
 by good headwork, argues that one modifies an 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 101 
 
 understood noun, and so is an adjectivt', he blight to 
 be commended. It could be so classified and taught. 
 Even in the case of others, where an $ is added that 
 never is added to an adjective, it is better — early in 
 the course, that is — to commend for a piece of real 
 reasoning than to discredit for not taking the s into 
 account. But when your system has been clearly 
 announced, made clear by practice, then the reasoner 
 must bow to the needs of uniformity. 
 
 Y ou come to adverbs. "An adverb is a word that 
 modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.' ' 
 Shortly you come upon : * ■ He got almost into port. ' f 
 The pupil reciting finds no adverb, and argues that 
 almost modifies into, which is neither verb, adjective, 
 nor adverb. Give him a cheer. A more stupid child 
 could have guessed that almost modified got. The 
 fact is that we really feel that it was "almost 
 into," and not "almost got." I think the definition 
 needs extension. 
 
 It is as hard to define a preposition as to state 
 formally which your right hand is, yet it is almost as 
 easy to distinguish between an adverb and a prepo- 
 sition as between right and left. Ajerepfisilion is 
 
 BUS pici0U8ly like ft n adver b; if inHipwfftg \\rt\t\ } plnrww 
 
 < u ., but it always has an object; "That was inat l ike 
 him ^V 77 ! sat next the door." It is well to insi st 
 that a preposition never modifies anything; it is th e 
 pr epositional phra s e that modifie s. 
 
 A preliminary skirmish with conjunctions is bond 
 to be unsatisfactory. The coordinating kind are 
 easy, but the subordinating — those connectives that 
 join clauses to single words — are a large subject and 
 are not apprehended until after a good deal of work 
 with clauses— of which more anon. 
 
102 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 •The' K nrst 'time over" work you must make clear 
 to the class is just sucli a general glance as a stranger 
 in a big city might take by long street-car rides, or 
 an explorer would try to get from some high hill. 
 You could learn more rapidly about a maze of streets 
 or a jungle if you first got a general idea of the lay 
 of the land. 
 
 One text, by an able man, proceeds from general 
 notions of subject and predicate to particular syntax. 
 Some able men do not believe in diagraming. Hardly 
 one point in this chapter but is controverted or dif- 
 ferently handled by a longer experience than mine. 
 You will every week be forming convictions as to how 
 you will go to work another year. That is right. 
 But refuse to be guided by theories of what ought 
 psychologically to be the best methods. Nothing Is 
 so false as a theory of how minds may be expected 
 to work ; nothing is so true as sympathetic observa- 
 tion of how they actually have struggled, of how this 
 pedagogic trick got results and that one failed. 
 
 The following job lot of comments, cautions, and 
 tactics is selected on the basis of: What did I least 
 understand when I began to teach? 
 
 The most literate young mind I ever tried to in- 
 struct — it read Chaucer late at night and it wrote 
 masterful themes — could not be securely taught in a 
 whole year of grammar drill the difference between 
 a direct object and a nominative after to be. I 
 shouted, "You cannot have an object of is" and 
 whispered dramatically, "There is no such thing as 
 an object of was." Even dull boys in the class 
 learned to snicker with anticipatory pleasure if this 
 lad was called on to give the construction of the noun 
 in "This might have been a palace.' ' To the end 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 103 
 
 he never really conceded that the nouns after became 
 and had been called were not objects.* I know a 
 bright fellow who only four years before he became 
 a teacher in a good preparatory school was still 
 prone to put an accusative after sum. Every fall 
 u ••■ have a class of small boys (corresponding to the 
 eighth grade) who are vigorously bombarded from 
 the outset by forewarned teachers, both of Latin and 
 English, with the refrain, " There is no such thing 
 as an object of esse", "To be never can take an ob- 
 ject." We look forward with assurance to the neces- 
 sity of keeping up the fire for months. This is an 
 unco thing in pedagogy. There must be a better way 
 to teach predicate nominative. If you can discover 
 tlio way, you will benefit mankind. 
 
 That word after the verb always looks like an ob- 
 jeet "Up flew the windows.' ' The best formula 
 to rescue windows from that secret power that 
 "flew" them is to insist on answering the question, . 
 "Who or what flew!" Insist that before a pupil 
 recites (it requires only a second or two) he shall 
 
 ask himself the question, "Who or what ?" If 
 
 y<»u are told that in "Down sank the Koyal George" 
 Royal George is the object of sank, put your in- 
 formant through this catechism: "WTiat question 
 di<l you ask yourself? Well, who or what did sink! 
 Then what is the subject of sinkl Then in what case 
 ifl Royal George ?" If you keep unflaggingly at this, 
 yoB will be doing more for that group of young 
 brains than merely showing them about a subject 
 nominative. 
 
 inative absolute (as in "the weather being 
 
 •(Don't infer from that masterful tlieme- writer 's case that gram- 
 mati< :il training is not of value for composition. Suspend judgment.) 
 
< 
 
 4 
 
 104 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 fine") can be handled with double effect after some 
 study of participles. It is doubtful whether it should 
 be taken up before. 
 
 The possessive as an object of of ("that whim 
 of my father's") is a queer thing. Announce that 
 it is queer. For once the object of a preposition is 
 not in the objective case. 
 
 The clue to an indi rect oh ject is that it expresses 
 "to or for whom" without a preposition. If "he 
 handed me the card," me is an indirect object; if 
 "he handed the card to me" me is the object of to. 
 This is confusing to children who have been studying 
 the Latin dative. 
 
 An objective predicate ("They made him king") 
 always occurs with a direct object, showing what that 
 object was made to be, was called, etc. 
 
 Aji ad verbial ob jective ("We walked a mile") is 
 usually a measure. "Do it some other way" is an- 
 other species. Consider the two cases : "We weighed 
 a pound of sand ", " The sand weighed a pound. ' ' In 
 the first the pound is being weighed ; in the second 
 pound merely shows how much. 
 
 An appositive is " set alongside a noun or pronoun 
 to explain it 7> ; it is usually set off by commas ; it is 
 1 ' adponoed ' ' to that other noun or pronoun. 
 
 Personal and demonstrative pronouns give no par- 
 ticular trouble, except for the two peculiar uses of 
 it. Expletive it is a dummy subject; the real 
 subject lurks on the other side of the verb. Imper- 
 sonal it has no conceivable antecedent; there is 
 no other subject. The only kink with inter rogatives 
 is, "You can't know the construction until you have 
 put the question into the form of a statement." 
 "Who are you?" becomes "You are who." Then 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 103 
 
 we see that "who is the object of are," and are later 
 led to see that it is predicate nominative. 
 
 But relatives! Suppose yourself, in a rather em- 
 barrassing situation in which you are anxious to 
 appear to advantage, confronted with this demand: 
 4 ' l-'orm a congeries of postulates so arranged that 
 number two, in which number one is involved in a 
 limiting capacity, shall be involved in a limiting 
 capacity in number three, which is to be unin- 
 volved." There is nothing hard about that, because 
 you have a complete set of linguistic notions into 
 which you can promptly transpose these not unusual 
 terms and, unless you are pitifully flustered, can ful- 
 fill the demand in an instant. Yet the scholastic in- 
 tangibility of it, if you can imagine it thrust upon 
 Borne mature mind that had educated itself without 
 knowledge of dependent clauses, may feebly illus- 
 trate the lack of appeal which "relative clause* • 
 makes to the average fourteen-year-old boy. 
 
 Draw a picture for him. It was in my third year 
 of teaching that I rushed to the board, in a desperate 
 mood, wrote in huge letters "THE MAN HAS 
 GONE," and then, inside a loop connected to 
 man, wrote in small letters "who was here." There 
 was a graphic exhibit of the bigness and in- 
 dependence of the main clause, and the small, ad- 
 jectival l»<>ndage of the relative clause. I have used 
 it ever since. 
 
 This, like other eccentric schemes suggested in 
 these pages, may not appeal to you. A man to whom 
 I am mucli indebted once told me of a device which 
 did not strike me favorably. I can't use it But I 
 should certainly have taken it up — should have taken 
 up anything— if I had not had another. 
 
106 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Keep constantly before the class the essential idea 
 that a clause contains a subject and verb, and is ijse*!^ 
 like a single adjective, or a single adverb, or a single 
 noun; that relative clauses are adjective clauses, be- 
 cause they are always attached to, always modify, 
 some noun or pronoun. Whenever you can make a 
 pupil perceive this clearly you have conferred upon 
 him a priceless gift — a bit more courage in tackling 
 Shakespeare's sentences. 
 
 You will moil in vain in the opening days with re- 
 latives unless you follow the plan (or its equivalent 
 in some shape) of "picking out the relative clause.' ' 
 "What is the clause?' 7 must be the unfailing ques- 
 tion. Consider "He who hesitates is lost." The he 
 and the who are forever going to be entangled until 
 the pupil learns to ' ' take that clause out of the sen- 
 tence, ' ' and to put it one side, like a dissected organ, 
 and then — never till then — to examine its functions. 
 At first your class will dig out "who hesitates is" 
 and hold it up, all dripping, for scrutiny. Insist that 
 we must have only one leg — not a leg + half a body. 
 Which is, being interpreted, one subject and one 
 verb, with their modifiers. (Or at first you may prac- 
 tice on bare subject and verb.) 
 
 When this dissection can be performed, then you 
 may unfold the precious truth that the construction 
 of a relative is always found in its clause, never is 
 mixed in the least with any shred of the sentence 
 outside that clause. After driving this home you 
 may cautiously take the next step: A relative's 
 gender, person, and number are always found en- 
 tirely outside of the clause — i. e., they depend on the 
 antecedent. 
 
 A pupil can decide whether that is a relative by 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 107 
 
 fading out whether it makes sense to substitute 
 n-int nr uifiirh So far as I know it is never safe to 
 trust him to decide in any other way. 
 
 Relatives always scm to a class to be in apposi- 
 tion with the antecedents. The answer is that they 
 are not * * put alongside of in the same construction," 
 but are subjects or objects, are not in any sense 
 appositives. 
 
 Have nothing to do with sub-classes of adjectives. 
 The use of classifying at all (and the same is true 
 of adverbs) is slight. But it is necessary to get at 
 the distinction, between an adverb and a predicate 
 adjective. If you are discussing ' ' The heavens grew 
 dark," don't argue that "dark is an adjective." 
 Dark is nothing per se. How is it used? It doesn't 
 describe the way in which the heavens grew; they 
 didn't grow in a dark manner. They grew to be 
 dark. So of seem, appear, look, become, etc. 
 
 Waste no energy over such a retained preposition 
 as "This is being talked about." Never allow it to 
 be called a part of the verb phrase; if it must be 
 spoken of, it is more like an adverb— it has no object. 
 Reserve your time and energy for the obvious prepo- 
 sitional use in "What are you talking about?" 
 
 Transitive and intransitive is one of the throe de- 
 cisive battles of grammar. It Is so bound up~with 
 predicate nominative that it is a good plan to sand- 
 wieh the two topics. The worst cause of stumbling 
 he definition, often taught in schools, that a tran- 
 sit Lve verb is one which takes an object. Excom- 
 municate it. Pronounce a formal anathema against 
 the cursed thing. A transitive verb in the active 
 voice always has an object, but never allow the mat- 
 feer of "an object" to be associated with "transi- 
 
108 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 live." I keep the following scheme on the board 
 every day and require the class to refer to it as they 
 recite : 
 Transitive 
 
 active — always an object. 
 
 passive — subject is acted on, no object. 
 Intransitive 
 
 subject acts, but there is no object. 
 
 No Voice. 
 
 Grammarians regularly speak of intransitives as 
 active, but this is so confusing in elementary work, 
 so destructive of the very distinction we are erect- 
 ing, that it is best to insist on "has no voice' ' for 
 class work. 
 
 An active verb is considered a normal, decent kind. 
 Passives and intransitives are confused. The steps 
 to take in every approach are : 
 
 (1) What is the subject? All is hopeless guess- 
 work without this beginning. 
 
 (2) Is the subject acting, or being acted on? 
 
 (3) If it is acting, is there an object? 
 
 Don't analyze verb phrases into component parts. 
 In "This might easily have been sooner finished" 
 might have been finished is the verb. 
 
 Attack the conjugations thus : Apply the three fol- 
 lowing tests ; if any one fits, the verb is regular ; if 
 no one fits, it is irregular. (1) The past tense ends 
 in a d or t which is not in the present (made, had, 
 brought). (2) The principal parts are the same 
 throughout (hit). (3) The vowel is merely shortened 
 in the past (bleed). The subject is a non-essential, 
 not worth going into detail with; but the general 
 notion is useful. 
 
 Subjunctive mood really exists in English in a few 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 109 
 
 formal or archaic uses like **if it were", "may it 
 be", "though he have." These are real variations 
 in form to show that the verbs express mere coudi 
 tion or thought. Beyond this there is only a welter 
 of subtleties, a flux of contradictory opinion. If left 
 to your own devices, have nothing to do with any- 
 thing but the few realities. If you are required to 
 teach subjunctives, stick to one simple formula : Does . 
 it clearly indicate a mere condition of thought? 
 Many cases are debatable ; there are fewer subjunc- 
 tives than you may suppose. Probably the following 
 are indicative: "I could have shot it with perfect 
 ease" (=the fact is that I had power to), "I may 
 be wrong about this" (=the fact is that there is such 
 a possibility), "Perhaps you would like to stay" 
 (=the fact perhaps really is that). The following 
 would usually be called subjunctive, because they 
 clearly show, or the context shows, that the verb is 
 qoI indicating a fact: "If only I could have shot it", 
 "I might have gone to bed sooner", "Wouldn't he 
 have enjoyed that!" Few will ever object to your 
 method if you limit subjunctives to: (1) real sub- 
 junctive by its form, (2) mere prayerful hope or 
 exhortation that does not sound the least like fact,- 
 (3) a condition that is clearly a case of speaking 
 abonl what would be true if the facts were otherwise. 
 
 Infinitives and participles must come last, because 
 they are resemblance-words, with no new character- 
 istic of tlx'ir own; and work with them is really im- 
 possible until their prototypes are understood. They 
 are words derived from verbs, having all the powers 
 except the great one of making a statement, and 
 used like nouns and adjectives. 
 
 Any verbal used like a noun is an infinitive: to 
 
\ 
 
 110 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 do, doing, to have been done (unless you de- 
 cide to distinguish gerunds). The essential of all 
 drill with infinitives is to explain their constructions 
 as nouns. * ' Complementary ' ' is worse than nothing 
 in English grammar. "Used like an adjective' ' (as 
 in "the thing to do") is a sledge-hammer for batter- 
 ing the foundations you have so laboriously laid. An 
 infinitive is always a kind of noun. These so-called 
 adjectival and adverbial uses can always be ex- 
 plained as phrases in which the root infinitive is the 
 object of to. The working formula for pupils is: 
 Does it make fairly good sense to substitute for and 
 the ing form? "That is a queer thing to do" be- 
 comes "That is a queer thing for doing" ; "He went 
 to die for his country" becomes "He went for dying, 
 for the purpose of dying." This analysis is likely 
 to become a favorite — it is so easy. It must not be 
 allowed unless it can be defended by getting a "fair- 
 ly sensible" result. Don't accept this "object of 
 to ' ' analysis when another kind is possible. In "It 
 seems queer to have been loafing here all summer" 
 to have been loafing is the real or "logical" subject 
 of seems. In "He is to die in the morning" to die 
 may be called a predicate nominative. 
 
 All grammars discuss "subject of the infinitive," 
 and most are partial to it. I refused to teach it for. 
 many years, following Whitney's analysis; later 
 thought it might be the easy explanation for many 
 cases, especially with verbs of commanding and the 
 like; but have finally decided against it. "Subject 
 of the infinitive" is a Latinism. In "He asked me to 
 go" we do not feel that me is a subject; we feel it as 
 an object. If we discard "subject of the infinitive," 
 we do not have to contort so many English ideas to 
 
TEACHING QRAMMAB 111 
 
 . Latin framework. In " We considered him to be 
 
 honest" him is the real object; to be is a kind of ob- 
 
 tive predicate. In " ge urged us to go" to go is 
 
 the object ; us is indirect. In ' * He made me eat ' ' eat 
 
 is objective predicate, like "He made me an eater." 
 
 Probably ten per cent of these analyses of infini- 
 tives are not real analyses — i. e., they don't really 
 explain anything. Say as much to your class occa- 
 sionally. Our language is full of old worn-down 
 stubs and metamorphosed fragments of idioms which 
 cannot be neatly arranged in a cabinet as Latin 
 specimens can. School work in grammar is not con- 
 cerned with these except as interesting curios. They 
 are specially numerous in infinitive syntax. 
 
 The same kind of statement is true of participles. 
 They are always used like adjectives. To say that 
 a participle has an object or is modified by an adverb 
 clause is nothing to the purpose. What noun or pro- 
 noun does it modify? Not "How is it acted on?" 
 but "How does it act?" 
 
 So much for single words; now for phrases and 
 clauses. 
 
 It is best to reserve "phrase" for a preposition 
 and its object.* To call "running at high speed" a 
 phrase is misleading, or at least is such a generality- 
 haze as makes travel difficult. If you call "the sun 
 having risen" a phrase, you won't confuse a gram- 
 marian: hut you will not light the paths for un- 
 aoquainted t 
 
 In the same way it is more effective to reserve 
 
 •This sounds *Ike a deviation from the definition given by all 
 grammarians, but is not really much of a departure from I 
 practice. Whitney, for example, discusses nominative absolutes with- 
 out onee using " phrase," and employs the word only m "verb 
 phrase" and "prepositional phrase 
 
112 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 " clause' ' for dependent clause. "Main clause" is 
 not confusing. Teach them in connection with con- 
 junctions. A coordinating conjunction joins two 
 nouns or two adjectives or two phrases or two 
 clauses, yokes them as a pair, one being as important 
 as the other. A subordinating conjunction joins a 
 clause to some one word. You may never make real 
 progress until you write out that main clause in 
 huge letters and then, in a loop extending from the 
 modified word, write the clause in small letters. In 
 the case of subject clauses used after an expletive it 
 ("It is not likely that he will come") the conjunction 
 does no real conjoining, unless you say that it hitches 
 an appositive clause to it. The truth of this is 
 doubtful. 
 
 One oddity may be worth mention in this connec- 
 tion, just on the chance that it might prevent an 
 embarrassing moment in class. "I am told that he 
 is ill." That he is ill is a "retained obj ect," like 
 "He was given a medal." 
 
 Some are not in favor of diagraming the structure 
 of a sentence. One teacher who has critically ob- 
 served results in a long experience declares that 
 boys learn the trick of making a passable diagram 
 without acquiring any true understanding of struc- 
 ture. That phenomenon is something I have never 
 seen. Allow me to illustrate from algebra. A boy 
 might learn to "diagram" the cube-root process, and 
 then, by rote, without intelligence, apply his formula 
 and his blocks to any number of different problems 
 in extracting cube-root. He cannot learn any such 
 formula for the solution of miscellaneous problems 
 leading to simultaneous equations. Each one is a 
 separate exercise in diagraming by the use of x, y, 
 
TEACHING GRAMMAR 113 
 
 and z the conditions named, under which two or 
 three men run races or give away their money. Have 
 you ever heard that a boy learned the trick of arriv- 
 ing at his equations — his diagram, that is — without 
 a corresponding apprehension of what he was doing? 
 Of course there is such a thing as brainless luck occa- 
 sionally, even in stating problems; but only 
 occasionally. 
 
 It is difficult not to believe that when a pupil can t 
 sort out clauses and phrases and put them where I 
 they belong in a schematic arrangement, he shows a j 
 useful mental attainment — specially useful for his 
 writing. 
 
 The best diagram is the one that most simply dis- 
 plays the real Structure of a sentence. The plan fol- 
 lowed in the illustration below is to put the principal 
 verb below its subject, to list all modifiers under the 
 words they modify, and to place appositives, predi- 
 cate nominatives, and objects at the right of the 
 words that govern them. The sentence is : 
 
 4 * That same night of your desertion I came from 
 a friend's house — where I was excessively admired, 
 whatever you may think of it — and what should I 
 hear but that a lass in a tartan screen desired to 
 speak with me. ' ' 
 
 Begin with easy sentences. Don't be in a rush to 
 progress to hard ones. 
 
 In all your irrnmmar work emphasize at every 
 opportunity that you aim at practical, useful results, 
 that mere puzzles are not dwelt on. Perhaps while 
 you are dealing with verb phrases some pupil will 
 write "it* he had of been." There is your chance. 
 Aim at the essentials. In parsing don't waste time 
 with classes and panders and inflections. If time is 
 
114 
 
 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 short, it is better to know unfalteringly what an in- 
 transitive verb is than to have hazy ideas about in- 
 flection of the future perfect, potential mood, parti- 
 ciples in n as a mark of the old conjugation — and all 
 the myriad of formalisms. Keep perpetually before 
 you that vision of better sentences. 
 I 
 
 came 
 
 
 'that same night 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 of your desertion, 
 
 
 
 from a friend's house 
 
 
 
 1% 
 
 I was admired 
 
 - 
 
 
 (excessively 
 
 obj. 
 whatever 
 
 # 
 
 | you may think i 
 
 of it 
 
 i 
 
 should hear what 
 
 
 £ 
 
 \<* obj. 
 
 i lass desired to speak 
 
 with me 
 
 
 
 
 
 in a tartan screen 
 
 
 A heavy line ^ 
 clauses are used. 
 
 rill show graphically 
 
 how noun 
 
 we fe 
 
 
 object 
 
 
 ar that 
 
 you will not 
 
 1 i k e it 
 
 
 
 appositive 
 
 obj. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 JOHN WILSON'S IDEA 
 
 The teaching of punctuation can be made to serve , 
 i higher end than mere accuracy in using points; 
 !i be made to cause a betterment in the quality 
 of sentences, an enhancement in maturity and agree- 
 ableness of form. The claim sounds extravagant. 
 It seems at first view like a paradox to say that in- 
 >t nation in placing commas* will refine the writing 
 of sentences. As a theory no one could accept it. 
 But it is a truth, proved by long experience, arrived 
 at unexpectedly, found as a lucky by-product of a 
 process that used to be thought too mean for noble 
 minds. The fact is that after training in syntax a 
 thorough course in punctuation does more to improve 
 the quality of a n < !m< n- pupil's sentences than any 
 amount of spiritual exhortation. 
 
 Just why this should be so is hard to say. One 
 probable reason is that in our headlong, impatient 
 erica it is of the greatest benefit to a pupil to 
 have to do something exactly right. We hear the 
 despairing cry from every school and college that our 
 yoigng people are careless, incapable of concentrating 
 accurately, unable to enunciate, unable to phrase 
 definite answers, unable to compose by a prede- 
 termined plan. In 1!H4 the Harvard Board of ( Over- 
 seers ?ote<d that "the faculty be requested to devise 
 suitable measures to remedy this condition of af- 
 fairs" — the condition, namely, of the failure of 
 
116 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 students "to write correct and idiomatic English.' ' 
 The Graduate School of Business Administration of 
 Harvard reported in the same year that only 21 per 
 cent of its students (all of them college graduates) 
 received a passing mark when their reports were 
 graded as English, and that these were nearly all 
 C's; but only one year later, as the result of "ex- 
 plicit directions for writing," 60 per cent passed. 
 That is always the requirement if instruction is 
 really to instruct — that it be specific. A dramatic 
 coach who says "Act ! Why, you must act the part !" 
 gets no result. A composition teacher who says 
 "Write decently" gets no result. We must specify 
 what is to be done. Nor is it sufficient to lay down 
 a set of rules. They will accomplish nothing at all. 
 It is specific work with unpunctuated sentences that 
 brings improvement in style. I should guess that 
 the brain-process is one of gaining familiarity with 
 a great variety of sentence-forms, of getting a prac- 
 tical, definite acquaintance with the elements of a 
 lot of types which the pupil would not adopt from 
 his reading, but which he does learn to imitate after 
 he has been forced into intimacy with them. Pupils 
 are Egyptians in bondage required to make brick; 
 punctuation furnishes some straw. 
 
 I am no psychologist and vouch for no explana- 
 tion, but I do vouch for the fact of experience. Year 
 after year I have watched results similar to this: 
 Peterkin has no understanding of the difference be- 
 tween one sentence and two sentences ; he is given a 
 drill-book which takes him step by step, with plenty 
 of colloquial comment and illustration, through some 
 six hundred unpunctuated sentences culled mostly 
 from periodicals and novels; he flounders dread- 
 
JOHN WILSON'S IDEA 117 
 
 fully, because he " never had any of the darned stuff 
 before ' ' ; he goes through it all a second time ; there- 
 after he writes fairly respectable sentences. Granted 
 thai this process puts his soul in a treadmill, it must 
 be acknowledged that when he gets through the mill 
 his appearance on paper is much more that of an 
 educated gentleman. 
 
 It is instruction in the framing and pointing of 
 sentences that counts. In proportion as you dwell 
 on sentence-structure, enforcing only the simplest 
 and most general requirements for paragraphing, 
 you will have success. This is not the place to argue 
 that statement, but I will cite two witnesses in sup- 
 port of it, the two most effective rhetorics in the 
 market. The 1912 edition of one increased its un- 
 punctuated sentences five times; the preface spoke 
 of "the recent change of emphasis from the para- 
 graph to the sentence.' ' The other, whose 1910 
 << lit ion had an unusually large proportion of un- 
 punctuated matter, trebled this large proportion in 
 li> 14. This signifies something, is not an accident. 
 You must know what is now going on in this change- 
 able world of English, else you may be badly ham- 
 pered by starting with antiquated ideas that will 
 Interfere with your progress. A Yale professor of 
 literature was recently asked what the college would 
 like most stress put upon in the schools. "The sen- ' \ 
 tence" was his unqualified answer. 
 
 Of course there are elements of good sentences 
 that punctuation never touches, but it may almost 
 be said that these are beyond the reach of anything 
 but native talent. Variety of forms is directly stimu 
 lated, and unity is much emphasized. Suppose, how- 
 ever, for the sake of argument, that the pointing of 
 
r 
 
 118 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 other people's sentences gives no training in any 
 quality of force or beauty. The greatest considera- 
 tion has not been hinted at in that admission. The 
 point to be attended to is this : If you should classify 
 the illiterate blunders in a million words of college- 
 entrance composition, excluding mistakes of spelling 
 and syntax, you would find that the great majority 
 were of just the sort that the study of punctuation 
 tends to eradicate. I read each year more than two 
 million words of school themes, have been for eight- 
 een years classifying errors and studying remedies, 
 have observed what works and what does not, have 
 never had any fondness for theories, have not the 
 slightest affection for commas — and I affirm without 
 any hesitation that punctuation drill is what pro- 
 duces decent sentences. The condition is similar to 
 what we discovered about spelling: that the million 
 errors are not a million at all, but a few hundred 
 common forms incessantly reappearing. So of sen- 
 tence-structure : it is not a case of a million clumsi- 
 nesses, but of a few dozen common punctuation 
 blunders that incessantly recur. And just as inten- 
 sive spelling will remove the great bulk of offensive 
 ignorance, so the greater part of sentence-crudeness 
 will disappear after thorough work in pointing. 
 
 How does the ordinary rhetoric address itself to 
 this labor? By trying to persuade you and the pupils 
 that nobody cares much about those arbitrary sym- 
 bols. If it is a text that makes an honest effort, it is 
 probably sprinkled with untruths. "Two words in 
 apposition should not be separated by a comma" is 
 the first rule in a 200-page manual that I had to use 
 for many years. "Most of the slight pauses requir- 
 ing a mark will be properly served by the comma" 
 
JOHN WILSON'S IDEA 119 
 
 is from a book containing much good analysis and 
 sound advice. Another widely-used text requires the 
 pupil to state "What kind of pause the author indi- 
 cates by a comma." The ordinary text is a morgue 
 for the corpses of what were once live truths. A 
 capital book issued in 1912 announces that one use 
 of the semicolon is to introduce. Another, bearing 
 on its cover three mighty names, requires a comma 
 to separate a long subject from its verb. * * A colon, ' p 
 declares another Composition, "is used to separate 
 the different members of a compound sentence, when 
 they themselves are divided by semicolons' ' — an 
 affirmation that contains only as much truth as 
 "Horse-cars are used to convey the population of 
 New York City." Such dead things do no damage; 
 they are harmless. But it is harmful to teacher and 
 pupil to present them as of equal importance with a 
 rule for a comma before the conjunction but. For 
 their effect is then to make a school suppose that all 
 punctuation is as lifeless as themselves. 
 
 In another way the ordinary "section" does dam- 
 age — by so misstating the simplest truths that pupils 
 and teacher are led to regard the whole subject as 
 nebulous and mystical. For example, "To the mind 
 of the writer, this explanation has much to commend 
 it " is said to deserve a comma because the phrase is 
 out of its natural order ; yet such a rule would call 
 for a comma in "Over the door we hung a horse- 
 shoe," where no rational punctuator now advises a 
 point "Commas are used in a complex sentence to 
 separate the dependent clause from the rest of the 
 Bentenoe." Yes; also commas are not used for such 
 a purpose ; also if a man is lost in a city he will find 
 his way if he goes straight ahead — or turns. Here 
 
120 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 is the most elusive subject in the whole code (the 
 distinction between a restrictive and a non-restric- 
 tive clause) cheerfully committed to one vacuous rule 
 and illustrated by two sentences containing restric- 
 tive clauses ! Then the author adds, with an artless- 
 ness that all power of sarcasm is feeble against, "If 
 the connection is close, the comma is usually omit- 
 ted." Of the same astounding quality is the rule, 
 "Commas are used to separate the members of a 
 compound sentence when they are short or closely 
 connected," one illustration having the adversative 
 yet and the other having five very brief and simi- 
 lar imperatives without any conjunctions. Why 
 should we be told when space is precious that "the 
 dash is sometimes used with the colon"? It is equally 
 true by modern canons that it is poor taste to use it 
 so. Suppose that a pupil, having been taught that 
 "adjective phrases are set off by commas," writes 
 "I bought a couple, of newspapers"; shall we chide 
 him for knowing too much about grammar? It is 
 impossible to speak temperately of such futility 
 masquerading as instruction. 
 
 We have passed from untruths through chaos. 
 The third division of this indictment of the ordinary 
 "section" is its extreme brevity and resultlessness. 
 Even if it presented only the truth, presented all the 
 truth, what effect does such a summary conspectus 
 ever have? Does it really perform work in the 
 minds of flesh-and-blood children? Does it achieve 
 the difficult task of planting habits, or accomplish 
 the miracle of extirpating wrong habits ? If so, the 
 average teacher should be enlightened as to how he 
 may avoid his seventy-times-seven explaining of the 
 old familiar rule, his careful preparation for in- 
 
JOHN WILSON'S IDK A 121 
 
 troducing a new one. If many intelligent pupils have 
 to be hounded for years before they will habitually 
 place a comma before an adversative conjunction, 
 what infinitesimal tittle of influence is imparted by 
 the following: " When a series of distinct statements 
 all have a common dependence on what precedes or 
 follows them, they may be separated from each other 
 by semicolons M 1 A formal law, stating in three lines 
 the whole mystery of non-restrictive clauses, offering 
 no comment, supporting itself by the meagerest illus- 
 trations, seems directed at some eidolon of a student, 
 some pedagogic abstraction ; for mere human minds, 
 albeit with a literary bent, are likely to falter after 
 months of drill. Real results in actual young brains 
 are obtained only by protracted and earnest drill — 
 the kind of effort used by the supervisor of English 
 who wrote in the English Journal for September, 
 1914, about " sentence sense.' ' Experience had 
 taught her that true instruction is warfare, that the 
 " section 1 ' is merely a colored poster advertising for 
 volunteers. She said: "I wonder if other schools 
 have to fight [what does the 'section' know about 
 fighting?] as vigorously [how much vigor is there in 
 the 'section'?] as we do to eradicate [what grub- 
 bing for noxious roots does the 'section' do?] such 
 mistake as this : ' My little sister is very pretty she 
 has light hair and blue eyes."' Our "section" 
 either has nothing to say about such an unscholarly 
 negative or disposes of it with matadorish grace 
 thus : ' ' The comma should not be used instead of a 
 semicolon in sentences thus combined. ' ' What need 
 for a "section" to declare bloody war and "wage 
 it unremittingly for several years"? No need what- 
 ever. The "section" has merely to wave its wand 
 
122 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 and say, "Be tliou eradicated. ' ' It deals only with 
 magic, using cryptic utterances like "Sentences 
 should not be written for the purpose of illustrating 
 punctuation*' or "You can see from this conversa- 
 tion of Tom and Maggie, how punctuation marks 
 may suggest to the reader a number of things." 
 (That comma after Maggie suggests one thing to at 
 least one reader.) In the name of all that is easy 
 and idyllic why should teachers countermine in the 
 trenches and charge with bayonets if the pleasing 
 incantations of ' ! sections ' ■ really effect any results 1 
 
 Whence came all these untruths and easy incanta- 
 tions! From previous textbooks. Where did those 
 authors get their knowledge and their mistakes? 
 From still earlier books. If we follow up this cas- 
 cade, what source do we reach! First we shall come 
 upon Bigelow's manual, a storage reservoir that 
 irrigated all the punctuational fields of the country 
 in the 80 's and 90 's. Bigelow was editorial proof- 
 reader for the Riverside Press, a sort of Archbishop 
 of Commas for his generation, whose influence went 
 everywhere and went deep. Thousands of profes- 
 sors and editors hold today opinions that were first 
 fed by the waters of his dicta. But he was not a 
 source. He gave out no more than he received. The 
 stream runs back to John Wilson's Treatise of 1871. 
 Not that Wilson originated our usage. No man was 
 powerful enough to do that. He often protests 
 against the custom of his day, but he records it and 
 has to yield to it. His Treatise was not a source of 
 usage, but the one great source of ready-to-hand and 
 easy-to-copy exposition of usagre. 
 
 Wilson was an analytical Scotchman, who died in 
 1868. As a printer he had ideals ; as a theologian he 
 
JOHN WILSON'S IDEA 123 
 
 was a keen progressive ; he loved and helped to edit 
 Bums; he received an honorary degree from Har- 
 i; and all the days of his long life he studied 
 punctuation. He reverenced his subject because of 
 the assistance it could afford in developing a clear, 
 sound style. Unlike the makers of our modern 
 "sections," he could honestly testify that in the 
 preparation of his nineteen editions in forty years 
 "little aid could be derived from other writers.' ' 
 His second American edition in 1855 he thought 
 "the most complete of any on the subject that he 
 has seen." Not content with having made the best, 
 he continually amplified, revising and extending his 
 comments, enforcing his precepts with many pages 
 of illustrative sentences, and offering instruction by 
 
 cat many more pages of unpunctuated sentences. 
 The twentieth edition of the Treatise, brought out 
 three years after his death, is the great storehouse 
 which every succeeding text-maker has pillaged 
 without acknowledgment — often, no doubt, plunder- 
 ing at second or third hand, and so not even being 
 
 ire whence hit booty had originally come. The 
 little manual that puts "not" in its rule for apposi- 
 tivee is sheer burglary from Wilson's treasures. 
 That absurd perversion is taken verbatim, but the 
 editor had not the wit to retain a qualifying clause 
 cit* they may be regarded as a single phrase") 
 which shows that Wilson conceived his rule as a 
 
 tement of the exceptional case. Wilson is also 
 responsible (heaven only knows why he phrased his 
 rule as he did) for that commandment to "set off 
 adjective phrases by commas." It was Wilson who 
 dragged others to hideous ruin down by declaring 
 that "two clauses, one depending on the other, are 
 
124 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 separated by a comma." He could hardly have said 
 anything else if he paid deference to the facts of his 
 period. But in his comments he urges the avoidance 
 of a comma with a restrictive clause. His supple- 
 mentary exposition is always clear and thorough. 
 He maintains (what custom later overruled, but has 
 now returned to) that the second comma should be 
 used in John, James, and Harry. He perceived that a 
 comma ought not to be placed between a subject and 
 its verb; and he is sustained by the best modern 
 usage. He announces (though he cannot disregard 
 the universal opinion of his day) that punctuation 
 has for its primary function the separating of gram- 
 matical elements. Verbose and tiresome he may be, 
 but his system is complete and unimpeachable. He 
 justified his pronouncement that "the essential prin- 
 ciples of punctuation are as fixed and determinate 
 as the canons of syntax." 
 
 He has not convinced the world of the truth of 
 this. Practically every rhetorician in this country 
 has taken his arrangement of rules directly or in- 
 directly from Wilson, yet denies Wilson's funda- 
 mental notion. It is curious to see how a whole gen- 
 eration was willing to pillage the storehouse for 
 facts, but scrupulously refrained from even looking 
 at the central fact. The little things were easy to 
 carry away; the main thing was too heavy to bother 
 with. 
 
 Those who "borrowed" or "used freely" were 
 singularly forbearing in another way: they never 
 touched what Wilson would have called the most 
 valuable idea in his repository — namely, the itali- 
 cized sentence at the end of this paragraph. Prob- 
 ably the borrowers could not understand it. Possibly 
 
JOHN WILSON'S IDEA 125 
 
 it seemed wrong-end-to, and so they judged it was a 
 misprint, a damaged piece of goods — and left it be- 
 hind. Perhaps they were repelled by the four un- 
 necessary commas. More likely they were charitable, 
 feeling in their gratitude that they ought not to let 
 the world know how rabid poor old Wilson grew in 
 his later years. Since I have no reason for such 
 compunctions, I will reveal what he said : "Punctua- 
 tion has not received that attention which its impor- 
 tance demands. Let punctuation form a branch of 
 academical instruction; let it be studied after a 
 competent knowledge of English etymology and 
 syntax has been acquired; let the rules be thor- 
 oughly comprehended by the pupil. It is worthy of 
 remark, that, by habituating themselves to the prac- 
 tice of pointing, their attention will naturally be 
 directed to clearness of thought, and accuracy of 
 expression. p ' 
 
 This is not the ill-considered ranting of a hobbyist 
 nor the excitement of enthusiasm. It is the deliber- 
 ate, well-founded judgment of a canny Scot, of a 
 rational, careful, highly respected, conservative citi- 
 zen, whose intellect was stable and vigorous, whose 
 whole big Treatise does not exhibit one piece of false 
 analysis. Heed his advice so far as circumstances, 
 at Smithboro permit. If you are not allowed to select/ 
 a rhetoric that has many exercises, perhaps you can- 
 arrange to have printed and sold to pupils at cost 
 some strips of unpunctuated sentences. This is done 
 with good results at some preparatory schools. An- 
 other device, easier but not so effective, is to dictate 
 every day a good illustrative sentence from news- 
 papers or novels or your own brain. If punctuation 
 is not in favor at Smithboro, don't begin a campaign 
 
\ 
 
 126 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 for it. Keep quiet, do what you can, and bide your 
 time* Perhaps after a year or two you can have 
 your way, and you may even be instrumental in per- 
 suading grade teachers to establish a few rudiments. 
 A simple "Comma Book" has been used with telling 
 effect on eighth-grade pupils. That is where the 
 fight ought to begin. Those grade-years of writing 
 without reference to points are what make high- 
 school labor so herculean. 
 
 In teaching punctuation you will never get any- 
 where with abstractions. "Parenthetical" and " re- 
 strictive' ' and " disjunctive * ' convey nothing to the 
 average pupil — nor to the rest of us, for that mat- 
 ter. What do you really learn about " category' J 
 from this definition? "It is not an instrument which 
 the mind uses, but is an element in a whole which in 
 its unity the mind is." You can get nothing out of 
 that unless you previously knew what it means. But 
 you can learn something from this : "A category is 
 a way the mind sees things ; it sees one thing happen 
 after another thing ; it knows that a series of things 
 has kept happening one after another for a long 
 time ; it has to believe that the same series of hap- 
 penings is going to continue tomorrow, and the day 
 after, and so on ; and it can 't think of life except as 
 such a series; and this f act-that- we-can't-get-away- 
 from, this fact of happening-one-after-another, we 
 call Time. That is one category. There is another 
 one of Space." It is long-winded and very unphil- 
 osophical ; but it does work in a plain human brain. 
 Try always to be concrete, to talk of things, of 
 known facts, when you have to explain "paren- 
 thetical." 
 
 Try punctuation. Give it a full trial. The 
 
JOHN WILSON'S IDEA 127 
 
 only objectors to it, so far as I know, are those 
 who have never really tested it. The sentence-cam- 
 paign is a real fight, a long one. Any teacher who 
 
 has developed the punctuation strategy, who has 
 fought vigorously and waged war for years, knows 
 that nothing else he can do produces a tithe of such 
 fundamental benefit. Plentiful exercises with plain 
 human prose, not with the mystifications of oratory 
 and poesy, is a mighty engine against the grisly 
 legions of carelessness. You may mobilize your 
 forces of "orderly thinking" and inspire them with 
 devoted valor, but they are crude militia until Drill- 
 master Punctuation has trained them in tactics. His 
 task is long. He is harsh and unromantic. He must 
 begin with grammar and dwell upon it pitilessly. 
 Most recruits and taxpayers consider him brutal and 
 inglorious. But he knows what war really is. He 
 wins victories. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 WHAT IS A COMMA! 
 
 Punctuation is considered the least interesting 
 subject in the world, is never a topic at teachers ' 
 conventions, will cause every friend to look bored 
 and uneasy if suggested in conversation. This in- 
 difference is due to three causes: (1) the feeling 
 that punctuation is unesthetic, (2) ignorance of. the 
 fact that it is of prime importance, (3) ignorance of 
 what it is. Chapter I should have disposed of the 
 first cause and Chapter VI of the second. The pur- 
 pose of this chapter is to dispose of the third. The 
 title is chosen because an adequate exposition of 
 what a comma is reveals the whole sum of the knowl- 
 edge we are seeking, is in fact about four-fifths of 
 the total. 
 
 A clear understanding is marvelously hard to get. 
 Many persons cherish the most violent prejudices, 
 so that one principal of schools will wish to dis- 
 charge a teacher who uses no commas at the ends 
 of lines in addressing an envelope, and a secretary 
 of a state board of education will not allow any 
 commas at all in his printed reports; one man is 
 nauseated by a comma with a dash, and another is 
 grieved at the boorishness of omitting it. Such ex- 
 
 (treme feelings are exceptional. The more common 
 attitude is that nobody really knows and that every 
 person has to guess when it is time to stick in a mark. 
 The following professions of agnosticism were all 
 
 128 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA? 129 
 
 made by men of exceptionally good intellect, all 
 somewhat prominent as editors or educators: 
 
 Kveryone has to pick up a system for himselt"; 
 "I go absolutely by the way it feels ' ' ; * * I can 't 
 argue the questions, but simply know that in my 
 long proofreading career I have always done thus 
 and so, and am sure I am right"; "no comprehen- 
 sive code can possibly account for all the subtleties 
 and emphases of the uses of commas ' ' ; * * no definite 
 rules can be given"; u punctuation comes by na- 
 ture"; "I strive instinctively to be clear." Is there 
 in the whole range of human puzzles anything more 
 baffling than this unanimous assertion that nobody 
 can know what a comma is? I should not have the 
 hardihood to write this chapter if it were not for 
 three very good reasons: First, that all these agnos- 
 tics really do use commas in ahout the same ways; 
 •ml, that I am offering here nothing of my own, 
 hut am merely referringyou to a source of indubitable 
 authority; third, you will be saved any amount of 
 perplexity and blundering it" you know of a surety 
 exactly what a comma is. AVhen you have finished 
 the chapter, look up the Century's definition; you 
 can then be satisfied that you have acquired no ex- 
 ceptional or unreliable notions. 
 
 One caution may be necessary : don't try to prose- 
 lyte other teachers, don't argue with older heads, 
 don't strive to revolutionize methods or change text- 
 books, or show them what's what in Smithboro. 
 Teac h in the way you are asked to tea ch. If the 
 principal or the head of the departmenf thinks that 
 "tiffid rules" are destructive of the spirit, don't 
 oppose him. You might as well hope to persuade an 
 old man that hit religion is vain. "What follows is 
 
130 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 to inform you. Any teacher whose information is 
 thorough will in due time, if he is tactful and hard- 
 working, find that his ideas are effective without any 
 propaganda. Be skeptical about what follows. You 
 have only one writer's word for it, and you cannot 
 be sure of its truth until you have tested and 
 checked up for a year. If only this chapter prevents 
 your present conceptions from solidifying without 
 challenge and analysis, it will do much. 
 
 "What is a comma? The most recent and most 
 ambitious answer has been given in Educational 
 Review for October, 1915. The writer presents a 
 really able analysis, founded on observation, dis- 
 playing with acumen the essence of what authors 
 attempt with points. She makes short work of the 
 comma-shows-a-pause idea. Next she sweeps away 
 the criterion of syntax, because this is a dictum, not 
 answerable to reason. "By virtue of what inherent 
 quality," she asks, "does the vocative demand the 
 comma I If the amateur ranges in literature he will 
 learn that this construction often actually does ex- 
 press itself without a point." She says that rhetor- 
 ics are scholastic because they offer us a "synthesis 
 of practice," as shown by their customary expres- 
 sion, ' ' the comma is used. ' ' This will not do for her ; 
 she must seek out a "working principle; not a code, 
 but a real psychology, based on intrinsic character. " 
 Ponder that concept — the "intrinsic character" of 
 a comma. That means that a dot prolonged curv- 
 ingly downward to a point has an inherent psycho- 
 logical quality, a power implicit in that particular 
 shape, belonging to it in its very existence. This is 
 no distortion of her plain meaning, for she amplifies 
 the thought on many pages with such expres- 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA? 131 
 
 sions as these: "Each sign must perform its func- 
 tion by virtue of some immediate suggestive power, 
 or not at all", "marks peculiarly suggestive in 
 form", "the indeterminate curves of the interroga- 
 tion", "the quick expressiveness of the other signs", 
 "the comma, with its tiny hook leftward, creates a 
 suspension", "the colon is essentially dramatic in 
 effect, abrupt, definitive, revealing no suggestion of 
 subordination." 
 
 A mere man knows not how to treat that. As a 
 fancy it is admirable. Moreover the writer applies 
 her imaginings to the facts with rare discrimina- 
 tion, interpreting the designs of authors with sympa- 
 thetic skill. Hers is a competent mind and a seeing 
 eye. That is why her notion is worth exhibiting. 
 If she fables, what may not be expected from less 
 gifted reasoners ? If she is right, the whole world is 
 wrong; for the universal assumption has been that 
 our points are arbitrary symbols, that their use is 
 an artificial code, valid only because it is generally 
 understood by a large body of readers. But this 
 code she will not accept, because it "lies apart from 
 natural creative expression." Hence no one can 
 really know what a comma is unless he has that liter- 
 ary sensibility which reveals the connotation insepar- 
 able from a dot with a long tail. 
 
 We cannot believe that any symbol conveys a 
 message except to persons who are accustomed to 
 it. A dash, a dot, and a dash suggest to our author 
 suspension, decision, suspension; to some early 
 printers they would have meant nothing, comma, 
 nothing; to a telegraph operator they are the letter 
 K. Commas "cannot set off a word" to her eye, 
 but they actually do that for my eye. To her a dot 
 
132 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 symbolizes completeness ; to one who is familiar with 
 repeating decimals it represents interminability. To 
 her a semicolon is "a period made suspensive"; to a 
 Greek scholar it is a question mark. To her mind the 
 colon is dramatic; by "most" of Dr. Johnson's day 
 it was confounded with a semicolon. 
 
 ^ Such a child of fancy must be thrilled by the life 
 history of that poor colon. There he was "inher- 
 ently dramatic and definitive," of power to "charge 
 with final force"— and yet for 700 years before 
 -Gutenberg was born he had served as the smallest 
 divider; in the Mainz Psalter of 1459 he was the 
 slight mark between the ponderous commas that 
 terminated sentences; and for a century after the 
 founder of the Aldine Press was dead he could still 
 be found in this menial office. Even Johnson's per- 
 spicacity could recognize his nature only with a "per- 
 haps," and had to acknowledge that he was "not 
 very necessary, being used to mark a pause greater 
 than that of a comma and less than that of a period. " 
 To this day he does lowly duty in schedules and 
 prayer-books and arithmetics. Not until 1915 was 
 he known to have any intrinsic quality, and then his 
 nature was visible to only one bright woman. 
 
 To all the world besides he is inherently a mean- 
 ingless pair of dots. Only recently has he been 
 invested with an artificial significance, so that now 
 we see him wearing the livery of a footman who is 
 to usher us from the hall of a sentence into the draw- 
 ing room ; appropriate only in constructions that are 
 formal and dignified. This function has been 
 assigned so recently that the Century defines a colon 
 as marking "a discontinuity greater than that indi- 
 cated by the semicolon." Most readers of this 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA! 133 
 
 article have lived long enough to watch the process 
 tag spoil one particular oilier. 
 
 The whimsy of "inherent quality" will hardly be 
 dangerous in this form, for few will take it m 
 ously. But in another guise it misleads intellectual 
 men, who will tell you that they use the comma at 
 a given point in an undefinable way, feeling that it is 
 needed, feeling that it charges with emphasis the 
 
 ression that follows. They feel that their emo- 
 tion will he transmitted; are offended by the soulless 
 suggestion that no-comma conveys anything until the 
 world has agreed on a meaning. This curious fail- 
 ure to realize that the force of points cannot be cre- 
 
 1 by the individual is shown in the ease with 
 which we have credited the establishing of our 
 punctuation to one man, the founder of the Aldine 
 1 'ress. If ever a man was fitted for that superhuman 
 task, he was. In scholarship he was prodigious, in 
 zeal he was lofty, in energy stupendous; he founded 
 an academy ; he made of his assistants an even more 
 powerful institution; his press was an educational 
 fountain. From my youth up I have never doubt ed 
 that he "primarily developed" or was "a pioneer* ' 
 <>r that he " introduced.' * If the Century says so, 
 who dares doubt 1 Yet such a feat he never 
 attempted. Manutius no more introduced our 
 punctuation than Chaucer invented poetry. He was 
 not nearly so original as Chaucer. Indeed origi- 
 nality was farthest from his aim. As he wanted his 
 readers to understand easily, it was necessary to use 
 points in conventional ways that had been familiar 
 for — I don't know how long. Ko one has thouirht 
 
 it worth while to write the tangled history. We may 
 
 see modern-lookimr commas in Greek script of the 
 
134 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 sixth century and top-and-bottom periods in fifth- 
 century Greek. Doubtless the mystic strands of pre- 
 cedent stretch back unbroken through Alexandria 
 to the founding of Thebes. The encyclopedia takes 
 us as far as the third century B.C., when Aristo- 
 phanes, a critical editor of Byzantium, "invented" a 
 system. We might suppose from the introductions 
 to treatises that during all those centuries no direc- 
 tor of a scriptorium ever committed his code to writ- 
 ing, and that the art of punctuation was again 
 "invented" by Manutius, and that his grandson was 
 the first to record a printer's system in his 
 Orthographiae Ratio in 1561. We should have to 
 guess that the art swam into view like a comet at 
 the Bosporus, disappeared, and was never seen 
 again till it shone over Venice seventeen centuries 
 later. I have no time or knowledge to examine this 
 astounding assumption. It is sufficient for our pur- 
 pose to note that if we open a volume of medieval fac- 
 similes, we may see a French MS. of the seventh cen- 
 tury in which semicolons separate the sentences; 
 most of the MSS. of later date show sentences begin- 
 ning with capitals, ending with periods, and pointed 
 freely with colons. The early printers adopted pre- 
 cisely what the scribes had made familiar. Before 
 Manutius ever saw a printing-press, perhaps before 
 he had seen a printed book, three Germans produced 
 at Paris a volume whose punctuation looks remark- 
 ably modern, with its parentheses, its hyphens, and 
 its commas — to mention only the refinements. In 
 contrast to this a page of an Aldine preface of 1513 
 is a maze, so thickly is it strewn with commas, so 
 bewildering is the use of the period as both an end 
 stop and an internal point, so curious is the total 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA t 135 
 
 absence of the colon and the employment of a semi- 
 colon as an abbreviation for we. Manutius's page is 
 farther from the customs of our day than the page 
 of Gerinir, Kranz, and Freiburger of 1471. Later 
 printers were quite unconscious of what had been 
 44 established' ' at Venice. I have a beautiful piece 
 of Dutch typography printed 127 years after Manu- 
 tius was dead, in which the old-fashioned colons and 
 slanting lines declare that their masters are inde- 
 pendent of the Aldine Press. They followed a sys- 
 tem that was more common in their part of the world. 
 Every normal printer had to pass judgment on how 
 to make his books most easy to read. The marks 
 were few in number, but had been so long employed 
 with such diversity and contrariety by the scribes 
 that printers had to select from a bewildering mass 
 of precedent. Practice was a Chaos where Opinion 
 sat umpire and Prejudice was referee and Best 
 Usage was an unknown god, ignorantly worshiped 
 perhaps, but worshiped. Printers never so lost 
 their reason as to conceive that they could originate 
 anything. Their one hope was to guess at the prac- 
 tice that was most generally acceptable. After 250 
 years they succeeded in the extraordinary task of 
 agreeing on one fairly uniform code, in which a 
 comma marked the smallest degree of separation. 
 
 A common theory until after 1800 (it was never a 
 fact) was that a comma indicated a pause for oral 
 reading 1 . The new Britammoa says as much, and a 
 most reverend American trio would instruct our 
 youth in "indicating to the eye the pauses and the 
 modulations of the voice." This definition is usually 
 denied nowadays, but persists as vigorously as the 
 fear of unlucky Fridays. Very recently I was told 
 
136 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 by a man who directs the typographical policy of 
 a university journal that "a dash is used to prolong 
 the pause indicated by a comma. ' ' Nothing will ever 
 jar his calm certainty that this is truth. And it is 
 true that an oral reader will usually (by no means 
 always) halt for a comma and that the average pause 
 at a semicolon may be less than at a period. But 
 only a human metronome could possibly time himself 
 by the points. Any novel opened at any page would 
 prove in any psychological laboratory to any rational 
 observer that a spirited reader can render the 
 author's meaning properly only by pausing longer 
 at some commas than at some periods, and by not 
 pausing at all at other commas. The old notion is 
 beneath argument. Take up any book printed when 
 that notion was most common — say early in the last 
 century — and observe how many points are method- 
 ically placed where no reader ever thinks of pausing. 
 Remembering that most literature is pointed by 
 printers, inquire how many printers have ever meas- 
 ured time-spaces. Not only is all observation of fact 
 against this delusion; " authority' ' is overwhelm- 
 ingly against it. As early as 1842 Francillon, a Lon- 
 doner who reverenced authority, was not afraid to 
 say that "such rules [of pausing] are of little or no 
 value." Wilson, the father of American rule-books, 
 announced its falsity; and time would fail me to 
 quote the verdicts of Marsh and Bigelow and De- 
 Vinne and the Fowlers and Orcutt and Teall and 
 Klein and Manly. 
 
 The pause myth would not be worth attention if 
 it were not for an insidious faith which is corollary 
 to it — namely, that we may tell where to insert 
 commas in our writing by noticing whether there 
 
WHAT is A COMMA T 137 
 
 would be a pause in oral reading. Four times out 
 of five the test applies; the fifth betrays sprawling 
 ignorance. The test is a will-o-the-wisp that leads 
 to such boggy forms as " Springfield Illinois, is his 
 town," or "Hurry up Henry, you'll be late," or 
 44 That, was not to be thought of." It is exactly 
 comparable to the belief that you may tell win 
 to dig a well by noticing where a forked twig bends 
 down. Since the water-witch seldom fails in a favor- 
 able locality, many trust it so implicitly that no 
 geologist can persuade them of their folly. Neither 
 can any lazy writer who believes in pause-witchery 
 be convinced by a presentation of the dull facts of 
 syntactical stratification. Any open mind, if it is 
 willing to observe a little and reason the least bit, 
 can perceive what the truth is. 
 
 We are getting on. A r>omm» is q IiHIq qifrnal 
 showing disjunction that II nut oral. Of what kind, 
 then? Many have answered: "The purpose is to 
 indicate to the eye the construction of the sentence." 
 I have quoted approvingly a pronouncement that 
 "tin function is displaying grammatical 
 
 st ructu re." This may be true or false. If "construc- 
 tion" means kind of syntactical element, the defini- 
 tion is absurdly untrue. No author or printer ever 
 undertook to show that "this group is a preposi- 
 tional phrase* ' or "here is an adverb clause.' ' Yet 
 dozens of controversial paragraphs have been writ- 
 ton to assert or deny that points exhibit structure. 
 To assert what never was true of any printed page 
 is folly ; to deny the existence of what never existed 
 is folly. And since these writers are sensible beings, 
 they must be misunderstanding one another. There 
 is only one possible way of stating the case truly: 
 
138 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Commas separate syntactical elements and their 
 uses can be taught only to those who have a knowl- 
 edge of syntax; they do not separate for the pur- 
 pose of displaying grammatical relations. This is 
 so obvious that I know not why men argue the ques- 
 tion. Any long complex sentence so close-knit as to 
 need no punctuation will settle it. 
 
 Why, then, does a comma disjoin things! Because 
 they are not closely connected in thought. 
 
 Doubtless that formula is inadequate or illogical, 
 so that it can be picked to pieces. But this is not 
 a dialectic excursion; we wish to get somewhere. I 
 mean that subjects and complements are closely 
 related in thought to their verbs, and that restrictive 
 modifiers are conceived as cohering to what they 
 modify. If sentences had no other elements, it is 
 unlikely that commas would ever have been invented. 
 They are used to forewarn a reader of expressions 
 that are interjected, absolute, parenthetical, loosely 
 added, or set down as unconnected items in a 
 series — in short (it might almost be said) such 
 words or groups as have no structure. In this sense 
 the statement that "punctuation indicates construc- 
 tion' ' is strictly true, though some quibblers might 
 prefer to say "indicates lack of construction." 
 Whatever the term we employ, however judgment 
 has fluctuated from age to age, the central fact has 
 always been, apparent in every systematic effort, 
 that printers have tried to warn readers of words 
 that were juxtaposed but not interwoven. The desire 
 for clearness has been so strong that until fifty 
 years ago object clauses were regularly pointed, and 
 to this day many rhetorics advise the separating of 
 a subject clause from its immediately following verb. 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA t 139 
 
 Can lul writers of only a generation ago sometimes 
 used twice as many commas as would be tolerated 
 by a fastidious editor of today. Yet the principle 
 has never altered. It has forever been a question of 
 44 Is this element to be considered as loosely con- 
 joined?" 
 
 When an author inserts a comma, takes it out, 
 debates, puts it back again, he is engaged with some 
 nice distinction. It appears to be a matter of 
 commas. Hence he denies that punctuation is an 
 exact system, and pities any mind that entertains 
 such an absurdity. The fact is that he is not decid- 
 ing about a comma ; he is determining his meaning, 
 balancing two desirabilities: (1) linking his thought 
 closely, (2) disjoining his thought somewhat. It Is 
 a question of artistic effect, often a very delicate 
 one. But when he has made choice of which mean- 
 ing to express, the debate about a comma has disap- 
 peared. The mark goes or stays by mechanical 
 necessity. These entirely different processes, one 
 artistic and one mechanical, have been confounded by 
 rhetoricians, and hence the vehemence of their feel- 
 ing that 44 all these subtleties and emphases cannot 
 be codified." To be sure, the subtleties of meaning 
 cannot be classified. No fiat can render perhaps 
 always parenthetical or compel us to put a comma 
 before the and that joins the members of a compound 
 sentence. The law always reads in terms of if it is 
 parenthetical, if you desire to show that the two 
 members are not strictly coordinate, // a reader 
 might for the moment suppose that the and was join- 
 ing two words. The law seldom says, 44 Thou shalt 
 use such a point with sneh a word": but rather, 
 <4 When thou hast defined thy meaning to thyself, 
 
140 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 there is only one way to convey it." A verbal artist 
 will protest that he feels a dozen different shades 
 of meaning; he would like a graded series of commas. 
 But there are no such things. All we have is the. one 
 crude symbol to indicate disjunction. Once the sub- 
 tlety of his thought is analyzed, there is no subtlety 
 about putting in a comma to set off what is loosely 
 connected. 
 
 "By virtue of what inherent quality?" I know 
 not. A vocative or a nominative absolute appears to 
 me disruptive by nature. That may be a mere mat- 
 ter of association, like taking it for granted that bare 
 feet are inherently informal. I find it impossible to 
 get interested in such metaphysics. No one can tell 
 about the inherent quality of an artificial matter. 
 We are dealing only with certain facts of civiliza- 
 tion. The scribes did as a matter of fact inherit 
 preconceptions that were older than Aristotle, teach- 
 ings about absolute elements and minor portions of 
 a period, which had long been shown by devices 
 called puncta. The world has never departed far 
 from their scheme. Nor have we any interest here 
 in ideas about reforming usage, or in noticing how 
 original minds amend or discard usages. We are 
 looking at common custom. There is no denying that 
 able writers have used commas to show pauses or 
 emphases, and that groaning publishers have fol- 
 lowed their copy. Very respectable brains have 
 supposed that commas can be manipulated by indi- 
 vidual taste and have pleaded for the signals that 
 mean so much to those who hoist them. But what 
 about us who read? Possibly we are like wireless 
 ( operators who can receive a mixture of Morse and 
 "i Continental; perhaps we can guess at a conglomer- 
 
WUAT IS A COMMA1 141 
 
 ate of three or four codes. But unless it is to some 
 extent a prearrangement the most soulfully placed 
 point conveys nothing to us. For example, a critical, 
 level-headed editor recently spoke of "using a 
 comma to emphasize what follows 1 '; yet the rhet- 
 orics all speak of separation. And that "inherent 
 quality' ' article directly contradicts the editor, 
 declaring that "the mark from its form simply 
 tails to affect the expression by which it is fol- 
 lowed"; it states the complementary conviction that 
 "the emphasis of the comma is wholly given to the 
 matter by which the point is preceded." The dash 
 of fancies is more mirth-provoking than usually 
 comes to an essayist's hand, and a witty writer could 
 entertain his readers with it. Our purpose, how- 
 ever, is not to get fun, but information. If two such 
 highly intelligent witnesses negative each other, they 
 create an unescapable conviction that a comma no 
 more shows direction than a white light can mean 
 starboard to one skipper and port to another; that a 
 comma will not obediently mean what we imagine 
 it means; that we must humbly learn what it does 
 actually signify in rhetorical navigation. Or is a 
 sympathetic reader supposed to exercise some clair- 
 voyant power that we ordinary fellows lack? It 
 would be useful in reading illiterate themes, which 
 are always pointed inspirationally. Young writers 
 adore those rhetorical uses. They "kind of think" 
 that some stop is demanded at this place, and in iroes 
 a comma. Sign-painters often "feel" that this is 
 a good spot for emphasis, and in goes a comma. 
 The results are offensive to all who do not tli 
 selves employ wmmmi in those ways, but the pupil 
 and the painter are invariably unrocoptive of our 
 
142 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 criticism, proud that they are not hampered by rules. 
 These are extreme cases, but not caricature. They 
 remind us of the unpleasant likelihood that a comma 
 is absurd unless used in just the ways prescribed by 
 a considerable portion of humanity. 
 
 My whole skepticism about rhetorical use is like 
 the feeling Alice had in the Looking-Glass world 
 when Humpty Dumpty declared that "slithy" was 
 a portmanteau word, packed with a double meaning 
 — lithe and slimy. Alice, we are told, thoughtfully 
 asked another question. I am thoughtful and strive 
 to be polite when a man tells me what a comma 
 means to him. I shall now make a second inquiry, 
 more difficult and more important than what a 
 comma is : Where is the code for using it ? 
 
 If a man from Mars, noticing that our clothes are 
 similar in essentials but different in details, should 
 wish to conform to the best mode, he would be per- 
 plexed. Even if he disregarded the extremes of the 
 actor's loudness and the collegian's slackness and 
 the clergyman's severity, he would still see unrecon- 
 cilable differences in the garb of men of his own age 
 and status. Now they wear high vests at dinner and 
 again they show a broad expense of stiff or of pleated 
 bosom. In the same group of careful dressers some 
 leave the bottom of the vest unbuttoned, some wear 
 belts. Wiry do they differ? He makes bold to ask a 
 man whose vest is entirely buttoned, "How do you 
 decide this question of fashion?" The reply is, "Oh, 
 there's no rule; it's a matter of individual taste." 
 He asks a man with a pin in his tie, "Why do some 
 men not wear pins ? ' ' And the reply is, " Oh, there 's 
 no rule about it." But the Martian is a keen fellow. 
 He can demonstrate in a minute that there are rules, 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA! 143 
 
 very binding ones. No one leaves the top of his vest 
 unbuttoned; no one wears a flower in his tie. Al- 
 though these matters are slight, the rules against 
 them are as well known as the law against embezzle- 
 ment — and better observed. Yet every man he ques- 
 tions would scoff at the idea that there is any 
 "authority" for doing or not doing. Every one 
 asserts that he dresses as he likes. Not one has ever 
 looked into a code of fashions; every one feels 
 superior to a tailor's pictures or to a column in 
 fue. All the Martian can do is to notice custom 
 and follow as best he may. 
 
 This is the situation when a pupil is required to 
 i rite_coxrfict„sentences. He is a Martian, plunged 
 into an intricacy of conventions. And every text- 
 book declares, "Oh, there are no hard-and-fast 
 rules." Yet if he has the least discernment he per- 
 ceives all kinds of inviolable regulations. He is 
 puzzled. We offer him meager instruction. 
 
 The allegory is by no means a parallel. Clothing 
 is a joking matter; punctuation is serious for a pupil. 
 Fashions are forced upon us from infancy; punctua- 
 tion is not, except in the case of those who are by 
 temperament so observant that they acquire uncon- 
 sciously the prevailing customs of spelling and 
 pointing. This difference has never received proper 
 attention from pedagogues. Many an editor and 
 professor who never consciously acquired a single 
 rule can use commas with unimpeachable skill. He 
 has absorbed an accurate knowledge of the art with- 
 out formal instruction, and therefore protests 
 against teaching strict rules. But the majority of 
 pupils, whose senses arc alert for matters of cos- 
 tume, never distinguish between a comma and a 
 
144 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 period. They are from Mars and they must be 
 shown. A more vital difference between the parable 
 and the fact is that fashions in clothes vary from 
 i spring to antumn, while custom in punctuation is a 
 matter of generations. 
 
 Youth hardly sees the garb of a generation ago; 
 the commas of a past age are often before him. His 
 teacher may be more familiar with Irving 's stops 
 than with Kipling's, and hence is likely to suppose 
 that there aren't any rules. The most misleading 
 part of the parable is the correct dresser. We have 
 small respect for a human clothes-horse; we don't 
 wish to copy him. We do, however, respect the best 
 modern usage as to stops. It may be so elusive that 
 we doubt its existence, so mechanical that we get no 
 joy out of it ; but if we could lay hands on a certified 
 copy of Best Usage, knowing that it really deserved 
 its title, really was a consensus of the best taste of 
 our age, we should welcome it with gratitude, cleave 
 to it, use it. 
 
 Is such a code in existence ? Can we find any body 
 of uniform practice? Here is a list of the possible 
 sources of authority: 
 
 - 1. Pure Eeason. I cannot understand this, and 
 so cannot discuss it fairly. It would be fun to work 
 out a consistent interpungendi ratio if one had power 
 to foist it upon the world, but the work would be 
 dreamy romance. The only practical course is to 
 inquire: "What do commas mean to the men who 
 use them most?" 
 
 2. Instinct. If this sounds like sarcasm, listen 
 to the words of a teacher who inveighs against rules. 
 "There has been too much worship and too little 
 spirit in this matter of punctuation. Can we not 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA? 145 
 
 induce children to think so clearly that, when the 
 
 Qtenoe does demand a semicolon, it is to be n 
 not as a thing possessing grace in itself, but because 
 without it some comma may not possess sufficient 
 suggestive force?" This most attractive religion 
 n -presents the hope of many righteous persons. I 
 would give half my wealth if I could embrace the 
 ereed, but since I have never seen it convey truth to 
 illiterate minds, I must reject it. 
 y 3. Authors. How can we get at them? Evidence 
 of all kinds indicates that the majority (perhaps 
 four-fifths) leave punctuation to the printer. Few 
 of the minority would allow themselves to be called 
 " authorities.' ' When we cite authors we make the 
 assumption that they are as competent in pointing 
 as in diction. Any sensible disputant about the 
 meaning of words would agree in advance to quit 
 his opposition to an idiom if six authors of estab- 
 lished fame could be quoted against him. Words 
 are an author's medium; his taste about them is 
 significant. But as to that arbitrary comma-code, 
 perhaps he knows it and probably he does not. 
 j 4. Rhetorics. Most of these show considerable 
 faith in instinct and reason, most of them speak of 
 what authors do, every one prints laws that were 
 drafted by printers, nearly all rehearse rules that 
 died out of use decades ago. How can we look to 
 
 them? 
 
 5. Publishers. It cannot be denied that influen- 
 tial printers are the real developers of punctuation. 
 The producers of books always have been. The 
 younger Aldus 's Ratio was simplified for school use 
 by Dutch printers. In America it was a Boston 
 printer, Wilson, who developed a code so sound and 
 
146 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 comprehensive that for half a century his influence 
 permeated all rhetorics. Today the greatest influ- 
 ence behind our manuals is the judgment of a New 
 York printer, DeVinne. Publishers have always 
 been under the necessity of adopting some fixed 
 method of making their books easily intelligible. 
 They are sadly familiar with idiosyncrasies of copy, 
 and appreciate as no author can how those oddities 
 detract from effectiveness. Their office is to help a 
 writer to express his personality by using their 
 marks in only those ways that the world under- 
 stands. The author may make a portmanteau of a 
 comma; the publisher's business is to unpack. Rigid 
 and wrong he may be at times, but in the main he 
 is right. We could depend on any usage sanctioned 
 by a majority of thoughtful publishers. The diffi- 
 culty of compiling their judgments is that we never 
 know how much of a compromise between printer 
 and author is represented by any given book. The 
 only way to discover how publishers agree would be 
 to visit their offices, propose a questionnaire, tabu- 
 late results. This would be an extensive labor, per- 
 haps impossible; for some offices might be unable 
 to extend so expensive a courtesy to the curious 
 visitor. 
 
 Is there any sixth kind of guidance? These five 
 all reduce to one — publishers. If you could know the 
 practice of twenty good houses in any matter, and 
 should find them all agreeing, you would feel assured 
 that you knew the best usage. If eighteen agreed, 
 you could disregard the other two. Fifteen would 
 make you confident enough. Who would stand out 
 against a ruling that had eleven votes in its favor? 
 Not that any decision would be binding upon a man 
 
WHAT rS A C0MMA1 147 
 
 who nurses prepossessions, but that it would inform 
 HI teachable persons of what commas really do mean 
 to the great world that we hope will understand our 
 composition. 
 
 Just such a compilation of the practice of pub- 
 lishers is issued every month, sent everywhere, is in 
 
 vy living-room in the country. We may not ad- 
 mire the literary quality of the medium in which it 
 is to be found, but that has nothing to do with the 
 case. The dozens of publishers are zealous to dis- 
 play current literature in the most attractive and 
 easily understood way ; they employ men whose life 
 study has been to know w r hat points mean to the 
 world, to know what modern conventions really are, 
 to follow and conform to good usage. They are con- 
 servative enough to satisfy any professor. They 
 may not be strong reasoners, but that very fact 
 makes their counsel safe ; for a reasoner about any 
 matter of custom is the worst ignoramus. It may 
 also be said to their credit, as Prince Hal modestly 
 said of himself in comparison with Falstaff, "I lack 
 m nie of thy instinct.' ' They are the men who know. 
 You may deny them all literary taste, all wit, all 
 
 satility, and may shrug your shoulders at the 
 small -mindedness of any one; nevertheless they are 
 keen students of how to manipulate a few arbitrary 
 
 lbols so that a writer's feeling may be conveyed 
 with the least distortion. They build an arbitrary 
 code; there is no other possibility under heaven. 
 Any one of us could devise an infinitely more flexible 
 ami inclusive set of signals, but it would be a toy, 
 useless for communicating with our fellows. We 
 1 extend and improve the present code if only 
 the work! would make us dictator and obediently 
 
148 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 learn our novelties. Americans, however, are so 
 stubborn against useful innovation that they will 
 hardly adopt the metric system. I still have to sell 
 my potatoes by the clumsy bushel ; and I must con- 
 sent to have my mental wares measured by the 
 vulgar standard if I wish them transferred to other 
 people's brains. 
 
 Complete rules are given, to the last detail they 
 are given, in our scrupulous periodicals. Authors' 
 contributions are not evidence, for without a vast 
 deal of consulting we could not separate the igno- 
 rance of amateurs from an established policy. The 
 parts of each issue — notably the editorials — that are 
 known to be conformed to a system will furnish the 
 facts of usage as one office interprets them. Start 
 with the Nation. Though it will not furnish emo- 
 tional dialogue, a single number will show examples 
 of three-fourths of all the customs we may have 
 doubts about. To be specific, let us hunt for a comma 
 with a dash. "We shall not find it. The combination 
 is not to be found in the Outlook. The Christmas 
 Harper's shows not one case in the prose of eighteen 
 writers ; evidently the editors are severe against the 
 use. We cannot find it in the Saturday Evening 
 Post, nor in Scribner's unless copy has been fol- 
 lowed, nor in Life, nor in Collier's, nor in any (?) 
 newspaper. I have observed it in only three month- 
 lies and in a few college journals that prefer a staid 
 conservatism. 
 
 Will you decide that such a minority is right and 
 that the great majority is lacking in sensitiveness 
 for the finer nuances? Even if you cannot give up 
 the cherished practice for yourself, will you dare 
 advise others to follow it? Will you disdain such 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA 149 
 
 hority? Hear the words of one of America's 
 greatest scholars, Professor Marsh, who wrote in a 
 puristic period, who was so refined as to lament the 
 "corrupt" pronunciation of Cholmondeley, who said 
 of the cnide journalism of the 50*8: "There is no 
 agency through which man acts more powerfully 
 upon the mind of his fellow-man, and the influence 
 of the art of printing upon language and thought 
 has reached its acme in the daily newspaper." If 
 he were restored to life today, would he not feel 
 respectful toward our best weeklies! One of the 
 most conservative American editors of influential 
 magazines has declared that changes of punctuation 
 in periodicals begin with the newspapers, and an- 
 other that dailies like the New York Post and Times 
 are safer than the monthlies. 
 
 The present-day aggregate of clear-eyed, respon- 
 sive, conscientious typography has attained almost 
 complete solidarity. Notice a few examples of how 
 it differs from the rhetorics: it practically never 
 furnishes an instance of a semicolon before such 
 words as namely; it never omits the comma before 
 a vocative; only grudgingly and with a big IF will 
 it put a comma between a subject clause and its verb ; 
 it will not use a comma after an introductory phrase 
 except to show that the words are parenthetical; it 
 never tries to replace omitted words by a comma. 
 In these cases it shows the tendency to be rid of the 
 superfluous commas of our grandfathers. It is even 
 attacking (the newspapers are fairly assaulting) 
 the comma after an introductory adverb clause that 
 is restrictive in meaning. In one case the vote 
 is for a comma that rhetoricians are indifferent 
 about, before the conjunction but. This is practical- 
 
 IV 
 
150 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ly invariable, except for contrasting two words. 
 Every instance in which the manuals are contradic- 
 tory can be decided by submitting it to the only 
 court that has jurisdiction. A jury of twenty careful 
 periodicals with literary motives will give at least 
 a four-to-one verdict on any case brought before it 
 for trial. I may agree with one of those verdicts 
 and think another absurd; what I opine is not of 
 the least importance. I may rebel at such decisions 
 as are pure convention; the more fool I. In other 
 matters I am sane; why not in this one? Though I 
 may privately feel that lace at my wrists would em- 
 phasize my gentle breeding more than stiff cuffs, I 
 sadly defer to society's prejudice. I ought to do the 
 same in dressing my thoughts. 
 
 "We could do much more than settle the little cases 
 of " always yes" and "always no"; we could learn 
 to state simple principles which will instantly fur- 
 nish the "yes" or the "no" when we have defined 
 our meaning. For example, shall there be a comma 
 before andl (1) No, whenever it is clearly apparent 
 that and is joining two similar units, whether words, 
 phrases, or clauses. If the eye might at first glance 
 suppose that and is joining the following word, 
 whereas it is really adding a whole group of words, 
 warn the eye by a comma. (2) Yes, if the two items 
 (especially clauses) are to be shown as dissimilar in 
 time, mood, subject, or form of emphasis. (3) Yes, 
 if and is joining the last two items of a series in 
 which the previous items are not joined by and. 
 
 The sum of all such trifles is a trifle. This chapter 
 would be too trifling to print if its objective were a 
 sheaf of rules. My aim is very different. I have 
 in mind the fearful ignorance of college youths as 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA! 151 
 
 to what a decent sentence is. All instructors testify 
 to it and are horror-struck by it. They are all but 
 helpless before it, because the schools have given 
 them so little foundation on which to build. Most 
 of our colleges have to take violent measures to 
 secure some degree of improvement. Why have the 
 schools done so poorly? Because the textbooks say, 
 "No definite rules can be given"; because those 
 books that do present a fairly consistent code are 
 uncinphatic as to what virtues are cardinal, what 
 sins are deadly; because teachers who do not know 
 the facts of punctuation are thus encouraged in 
 ignorance and laziness; because back of all this 
 charming indifference to "hard-and-fast-rules" lies 
 a most pestilential indifference to the distinction be- 
 tween a comma and a period; and because the 
 anemia of that indifference produces in pupils the 
 extreme of heedlessness and sloth. Whether good 
 usage calls for a comma with and is the pettiest 
 thing in the world; whether this group of words de- 
 mands a period is the most important matter in the 
 whole range of formal education. Until the entire 
 body of law is known to be definite, is definitely and 
 emphatically presented in texts, is a definitely re- 
 quired part of every English teacher's equipment, 
 so long will college men be hopelessly indefinite as 
 to the distinction between part of a sentence and two 
 sentences. 
 
 All too well we can imagine the horrors of what 
 injudicious persons will do when set to teaching 
 punctuation as "a system precise in every detail.' * 
 Perhaps we must acknowledge that a large part of 
 them will regard a comma with and as more precious 
 than a lively simile. But that is the fault of teach- 
 
152 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ers. Punctuation is no enemy to life and vigor. Any 
 teacher whose nature would make him too zealous 
 about commas is damned already, is already injur- 
 ing young minds by the exercise of a dispiriting per- 
 sonality. We shall make him no worse by requiring 
 him to teach a precise code. We shall probably 
 make him better, for his mechanical mind will no 
 longer be deluded by the fancy that he is dispensing 
 a manna of grace and charm. And sensible teachers 
 will be just as inspiring as before; you can't put 
 their powers out of gear by asking them to impart a 
 simple body of useful knowledge. Indeed their 
 energy will be better directed if they are not in the 
 dark ; they will work with more assurance and peace 
 of mind. They will give our young citizens a much 
 better education. 
 
 I have no fear that they will repress Young Amer- 
 ica's spontaneity. I make no proposal to shackle 
 youth with commandments or consign it to dun- 
 geons of exactitude. In no way nor in the slightest 
 degree have I hinted at reducing freedom of expres- 
 sion. The severest teacher of the code might still 
 stimulate the fullest liberty of style. There is noth- 
 ing in any paragraph to discourage license of style, 
 if that is wanted in some quarters. I have no thought 
 of restriction. Yet I shall be so understood. There 
 will be readers whose preconceptions will cause them 
 to remark when they have skimmed through, "An- 
 other mechanic! Another man who would algebrai- 
 cize fancy and plot the flight of winged words !" 
 Not so. This is a gospel of freedom. Any author, 
 young or old, is hereby urged to set down his emo- 
 tions in phrases as original or graceful or lofty as 
 his imagination can body forth. There is nothing 
 
WHAT IS A COMMA 1 
 
 ' to hinder even ecstasy. The most bighly- 
 vi n >ught verse of Noyes or the most trenchant 
 phrasing of Kipling is conveyed more tellingly be- 
 cause these authors have pointed according to pres- 
 ent usage. I am only urging the necessity of recog- 
 nizing usage in dealing with commas. A writer ought] 
 to choose words, not by grace of Worcester, but by 
 knowledge of usage; so that his design will not be 
 ipeckled uncouthly. He ought to put them together, 
 not by courtesy of parsings, but by knowledge of 
 idioms; so that his design will not be askew. And 
 with a similar motive he ought to separate them into 
 srroups, not through fear of some "authority's" 
 precepts, but by knowledge of what points really 
 mean today; so that his design will stand out clear 
 and firm. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PRESENT USAGE IN POINTING 
 
 This chapter is not for use in class. Many of the 
 questions will never arise there; some of them you 
 may never need to bother your head with. It is 
 designed to furnish what I myself should have been 
 so thankful for, a handy but ample record of all pos- 
 sible ins and outs of punctuation. If some of it 
 strikes you at first sight as going too much into 
 details, remember that the dictionary's three col- 
 umns of sub-headed discussion of but was not in- 
 tended to be read at one sitting. For reference 
 purposes a summary must be complete. 
 
 The man who supervised the publishing of the 
 Century Dictionary, DeVinne, got out in , 1901 a 
 chapter on punctuation; the critical reader of the 
 Standard Dictionary, F. Horace Teall, published the 
 latest edition of his manual in 1914; two English- 
 men who abridged the Oxford Dictionary wrote a 
 long chapter in 1906; the University of Chicago 
 Manual was revised in 1915. Every rule that fol- 
 lows, every least comment, is in accord with one of 
 these books'; nothing of importance is in contradic- 
 tion to any one of them, for there is no material 
 difference between them. No observant eyes can 
 look about upon present usage without seeing just 
 what these men have seen. 
 
 It is in codifying that the differences occur. These 
 are partly due to the kind of readers addressed. 
 
 154 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 155 
 
 DeVinne wrote for compositors, having in mind all 
 conceivable kinds of printed matter; Teall is think- 
 ing of all kinds of writers. Again, there are differ- 
 ences due to the writers' training and kind of life, 
 and to their mental make-ups. They attempt one of 
 the most difficult of intellectual feats — to sort out 
 and give an exposition of an arbitrary lot of social 
 customs. If you have observed how some of the 
 best-informed minds may go astray in giving an 
 account of the uses of words, you will expect any 
 writer on punctuation to fail in some ways to be 
 clear or consistent or complete or shrewd in analysis. 
 Doubtless my arrangement ramifies into too many 
 particulars. If I were trying to inform the ignorant, 
 I should follow a very different plan. But you are 
 not uninformed; and, if I can judge by my own 
 wishes when I consult books of reference, you will 
 prefer a prolix completeness to a generalization that 
 lacks just that particular point you wanted to make 
 sure of. 
 
 A word as to the different manuals that may be 
 referred to if you wish to verify or to get a different 
 dew of what follows. Punctuation by F. Hoi 
 Teall (Appleton) is a product of long experience; 
 sound and sensible ; it follows the plan of ' * reducing 
 the number of rules to the fewest possible.' ' Why 
 We Punctuate b y W. L. Klein (Lancet Pub. Co7, 
 Minneapolis) is not a ready-reference manual, but 
 an acute analysis of the "reasons for the use of 
 marks." The King's English by H. W. and F. G . 
 Fowler has a most useful chapter on punctuation 
 wliielTgoes at length into many moot points, illus- 
 trating in i chatty style and commenting with a good 
 sense that never fails. It is not an orderly code tor 
 
156 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ready reference, but is a cornucopia of wisdom. 
 X The safest, most usable, and most compendious 
 guide is A Manual for Writers published by the 
 University of Chicago Press. Its authors are Pro- 
 fessor Manly, head of the department of English, 
 and John Arthur Powell, an editor for the Univer- 
 sity Press. 
 
 No faith on this globe is so firmly held as that an 
 all-embracing code cannot be framed. The first — 
 and the last — principal or fellow-teacher that you 
 consult will warn you against any hope of account- 
 ing in advance for " every possible case of doubt.' ' 
 Even Teall thinks that "probably it cannot be 
 done." The answer is: "Try to find the case that 
 this code does not clearly account for." Propose 
 to your adviser that he prepare a list of five doubts, 
 not that "could not" be provided for, but that are 
 not actually provided for in the following summary. 
 
 You will also be warned against "rigid rules." 
 The reply is that there is precious little rigidity 
 about these rules, that they cannot possibly hamper 
 or stiffen any sensible writer in the least. They 
 merely record what points signify in current usage, 
 and their only purpose is to enable a writer to have 
 free trade with his reader. Ignorance of them is a 
 very real restriction ; knowledge of them is freedom 
 from bondage. 
 
 Some of these rules (the vocative, e. g.) are pure 
 conventions, but are so universally observed that a 
 writer who disregards them may be thought ignorant 
 or presumptuous. Most of them, however, can be 
 applied only after we have answered the question, 
 "What is the meaning?" A writer who does not 
 know the code distorts the meaning that he wants 
 
USAGE IX POINTING 161 
 
 to convey. Hence in handling unpunctuated sen- 
 tences with a class the attack must always he, "What 
 di«l the author mean? What must he have meant!" 
 pupil can make out any case at all to prove that 
 those words in that order might mean what you 
 never thought of their meaning, he must have credit 
 He must even be commended. A situation of that 
 sort, where teacher expected one thing and pupil 
 proved that quite another was possible, is often the 
 most lively illustration to a class of the great prin- 
 ciple : \\ . must know what we are trying to express. 
 
 The exclamation mark is used after any form of 
 sentence to show that the writer is not asking a real 
 question or giving a real command or stating a fact 
 or wish, but is exclaiming emotionally. It is most 
 commonly used thus: Oh, what a sight it was! But 
 it shows the point of greatest emotion, and hence 
 there are these arrangements: Alas! this is all too 
 true. Good heavens! look at that! There is — alas! — 
 no other way. Sometimes a series of exclamations or 
 brief questions are printed without capitals. This 
 is because they are to appear as one sentence, as if 
 there were semicolons between. But no semicolon 
 or comma is ever used with the mark of exclamation 
 or question. 
 
 Indirect questions end with a period. I asked him 
 what he was doing. The period is not needed after 
 headings nor after words written in a column; in- 
 <l such a use is offensive to most modern printers. 
 8 period is not used after contractions written 
 with an apostrophe (i. e., the two marks are not used 
 with the same word), nor after 12th, 2nd, etc 
 
4 
 
 158 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 THE COMMA 
 
 Uses of the comma can be conveniently grouped 
 under three heads, of which the third is very com- 
 prehensive. 
 
 I. Yes, no, and all vocatives are set off. No, he is 
 not here. Yes, it is difficult, my dear sir, to keep 
 from laughing. Yes and no may be followed by 
 semicolons or even periods to show that they have 
 the importance of complete statements. No; that 
 appears to me quite improper. Yes. After long con- 
 sultation we have agreed. No comma is used between 
 and the immediately following vocative. Moon, 
 how farest thou? 
 
 II. Words, phrases, or clauses used as uncon- 
 nected, coordinate items of a series are separated, 
 (a) Two adjectives not coordinate in descriptive 
 value are not separated, because the first rather 
 qualifies all that comes after it. Pretty little flower, 
 queer old codger. This is extended to a series of 
 three or even four adjectives if the writer really 
 means to indicate that he is building up a modify- 
 ing mass instead of a series of like modifiers. That 
 sad patient living strength is an extreme type, (b) 
 There may be a series of pairs. We have to pay 
 extra for tea and coffee, cheese and salads, fruit and 
 sweets, (c) When and is used only between the last 
 two items, a comma must be used with it. Make 
 this graphic to a class by showing that without the 
 comma the series looks like x + (y + z) ; we want it 
 to look like x + y + z. (d) There is usually no comma 
 before and Co.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 
 (e) In general no comma is to be used after the last 
 item, because the meaning of such a comma would 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 159 
 
 be "this last item, or each item since the first, is 
 parenthetical*" Sometimes this effect is desired, as 
 in Cheerfully, even jauntily, he advanced to the 
 ■caff old. (f ) Repetition is a form of series, in which 
 the last item may be shown as parenthetical for 
 emphasis: The walls, the very walls, are woven of 
 dreams. 
 
 (g) Mature writers who know just what they are 
 about often employ a comma to separate independent 
 statements that are brief, similar, and obviously 
 parallel or contrasting in thought: The same mis- 
 leading statements continue to be made, the same 
 exploded falsehoods continue to be repeated. But 
 this use is a delicate balance of meanings, and can 
 <>r be tolerated in school. It is deadly there. 
 (See a further discussion under The Semicolon.) 
 Modern usage is chary of such a form, though it 
 much more frequently indulges in a series of three 
 sentences. If this is novel to you, if it seems unrea- 
 sonable, forbear all logic. Accept it. It is the fact. 
 In the Outlook editorials of one issue are: Belgium 
 was an international minor; Greece was an adult. A 
 letter from the Chamber of Commerce is always 
 read, accidents are discussed, and methods of pre- 
 vention are taught. It is unsafe to mention such 
 possibilities to a class, though it may not be neces- 
 sary to mark them wrong on a theme. 
 
 (h) In certain cases the comma is used with' co- 
 ordinating conjunctions in a series. One case lias 
 been explained (c, above). There are two others, 
 which must be prefaced by a classification. The 
 following are not conjunctions at all in a discussion 
 of punctuation, but are independent adverbs, to be 
 used after a semicolon or period: accordingly, con- 
 
160 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 sequentiy, however, indeed, moreover, nevertheless, 
 still, then, therefore. There is one big cause of con- 
 fusion out of the way. Interwoven with it is the 
 grammatical distinction between dependent and in- 
 dependent clauses. Thus for is regularly classified 
 as "independent," as equivalent to "and the reason 
 is"; while because is called "dependent," equiva- 
 lent to "for the reason that." Similarly though is 
 called dependent in a concessive use and independ- 
 ent when equivalent to but. Such demarcations are 
 the subtlest of puzzles, beyond the province of mere 
 grammar. They are refinements which, as Matzner 
 says, cannot be demonstrated in some cases. In 
 school use for is regularly subordinating, though is 
 coordinating. A generation ago so was hardly ad- 
 mitted to the Century as a conjunction; now it is 
 in the commonest use (fearfully common in school) 
 for so that, subordinating. With all these psycho- 
 logical values we need have no concern. All doubt- 
 ful or variant functions group themselves quite 
 naturally under III, 5, as subordinating. This sec- 
 tion deals only with those that link or contrast two 
 equal units. Those that link are and, or, and some 
 correlatives ; those that contrast are but and a num- 
 ber of others often used as equivalent : yet, though, 
 while, and sometimes nor and only. 
 
 (i) The link-words are not to be pointed whenever 
 it is easily apparent that they are joining two coor- 
 dinate items in a series. This often extends to the 
 two clauses of a short compound sentence. But if 
 the reader might suppose that these conjunctions are 
 joining the following word, while they really are 
 joining a whole group, warn the eye by a comma. 
 One or two of them had pistols, and a great many 
 
I SAGE i\ POINTING 161 
 
 muskets lay in a berth. The comma shows that and 
 does not join pistols and muskets. 
 
 (j) If the two items (especially clauses) are to be 
 
 shown as dissimilar in time, mood, subject, or form 
 
 tatniM nt, use a comma. This is often the case 
 
 with or. Do so at once, or you shall suffer for it It 
 
 nost noticeable when and is used with another con- 
 junction or an adverb: and 80 f and hence, and then, 
 and not. Occasionally two coordinate words have dif- 
 nt constructions dependent on thorn: Eat, and 
 drink this wine. 
 
 (k) The adversatives like but might almost be 
 said to demand a comma by their "inherent qual- 
 ity." I am only too well aware that this use is not 
 pointed out in rhetorics and manuals, hut it is evei 
 where scrupulously observed. "Comma before 
 conjunction but" is always to be insisted on. 
 The following from the Evening Post of one issue 
 show a universal practice: not theories, but things; 
 warmly human, yet critically stimulating. Rhet- 
 orics hanlly even recommend the following, but they 
 are required by our court: She is unconquered, 
 not because of patriotism, but because of the 
 Channel. Not only wasps, but all the bees. The 
 comma is not unusual even in poor but honest 
 parents. 
 
 (1) The handy half-truth for school use is " Put a 
 comma before the conjunction between the parts of 
 a compound sentence.' ' This is usually right and 
 never entirely wrong, though it countenances such 
 a needless comma as His father was Irish, and his 
 mother was Scotch. 
 
 III. Parenthetical uses can be displayed more 
 easily for reference by arranging them in five divi- 
 
162 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 sions, of which the fifth presents the most difficult 
 problem in rhetoric. 
 
 1. Appositives are set off. (a) Unless they are 
 customarily thought of or spoken as a solid phrase, 
 like the poet Milton, my son John, I myself, your old 
 wife Joan. This last is a very questionable example, 
 for it looks in print as if she were one of two or three 
 wives, (b) Titles and degrees that follow a name 
 are written as appositives. A. C. Wyeth, M. P. 
 J. Langdon Short, Ph.D. (c) An appositive may 
 have or before it. Mrs. Tulliver's teraphim, or 
 household gods, (d) Pupils always think when 
 studying grammar that an objective predicate is an 
 appositive, and they sometimes point it so. Duncan 
 made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. 
 
 2. The successive items of an address and of a 
 date are set off. Goldsmith was born at Pallas, 
 County Longford, Ireland, on November 10, 1728, 
 the fifth of eight children, (a) The comma before 
 the name of a state is usually said to show an 
 omitted in, but commas are not used nowadays to 
 show omissions. Moreover the " omission' * idea 
 does not account for the comma after the state; it 
 is "both sides" that needs emphasis, (b) No 
 comma is used between the month and the day of 
 the month, nor in such a form as in the year 1782, 
 nor between the number and the street, nor before 
 b.c, a.m., etc. (c) The majority of letter-writers 
 and nearly all stenographers put commas at the ends 
 of lines when such items occur as the heading of a 
 letter; almost as great a majority still use them in 
 addressing an envelope. But the use is old-fash- 
 ioned, is not in favor among those whose opinion 
 is worth most, and is sure to die before long. Such 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 163 
 
 commas accomplish nothing but unsightliness. Peri- 
 ods for abbreviations must be used at the ends of 
 lines. 
 
 Allan McCord, Esq. 
 14 South Avenue 
 Lancaster 
 
 Indiana 
 
 3. Words, phrases, and clauses used somewhat 
 parenthetically are set off. Specially common exam- 
 ples are however, nevertheless, too, then, indeed, in 
 fact, in the second place, it seems, they say. (a) How- 
 ever is nearly always parenthetical, but no expres- 
 sion is in itself parenthetical. There can never be 
 any rule about what must be done with this word 
 or that phrase; it is always a question of "Do I 
 wish to have this understood as parenthetical ?" 
 (b) The best judgment of today is to be sparing 
 about pointing such modal adverbs as indeed, per- 
 haps, possibly, because they are much more likely 
 to be close modifiers in the writer's actual thought, 
 and because if he insists on expressing himself with 
 so many jerky asides he tires us. In the following the 
 writers are most likely using the words parenthet- 
 ical! y : There is, indeed, no other possible reason. It 
 is conceivable, perhaps, that Jane lied. Scott may 
 have decided, possibly, that suicide was justifiable. 
 In the following the words are close modifiers: In- 
 deed you may. You can perhaps be of some assist- 
 ance. There may possibly be a better road. There is 
 a story of an eminent university official who called 
 up an editor's office to say that he feared he had 
 omitted the commas with a perhaps, his notion be- 
 ing that the word, not the thought, required point- 
 
164 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ing. (c) Always think of such words and phrases 
 as questions of "both sides.' ' Never discuss them 
 as introductory. If they begin a sentence, their 
 position does not necessitate a comma; it is a mat- 
 ter of whether they would have two commas if they 
 were transplanted to the middle of the sentence. 
 This "both sides" idea is most important also with 
 terminal expressions, as will be seen when it comes 
 to the dash. You and your pupils will always be 
 in danger unless your test is "How would it be in 
 the middle of the sentence V 9 ( d ) Phrases are never 
 pointed because they are introductory. Pupils are 
 passionately fond of that comma and can with diffi- 
 culty be reconciled to omitting it after even such a 
 brief phrase as In 1856 he sailed for Europe; much 
 less are they content with Through the plate-glass 
 windows of his office in the tenth story of the Metro- 
 politan Building we could see her funnels. But no 
 comma is called for after Building. The modern 
 notion is that phrases ought not to be "out of their 
 natural order," that a writer ought to place them 
 coherently, that commas would usually belie his 
 real meaning by indicating that the phrase 
 is parenthetical. (e) Occasionally a well-placed 
 phrase may happen to create a misunderstanding of 
 construction — e. g., In comparison with this more 
 expensive food means nothing, where at first glance 
 a reader might think it was this food. So the eye 
 might erroneously read greeting on the deck in the 
 following: But during all the greeting on the deck 
 lies the body of the dead captain. Modern usage 
 tolerates a comma in such predicaments if there is 
 real need of disjoining a modifier — not otherwise. 
 Real need is rare. In This, Gareth hearing and 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 165 
 
 King, of the Khyber Rifles the authors have done 
 
 is a doubtful service, (f) Etc. is always 
 
 red parenthetical; also conversational U 
 
 and why at the beginning of a sentence; and usually 
 
 versational now is pointed to distinguish it from 
 
 the adverb of time. Well, what do you say? Why, I 
 
 hardly know. Now, that is just the point. 
 
 4. Participial and other adjectival expressions 
 that modify in an appositive way are set off. But 
 Nat, fearing some trick, would not enter. My wife, 
 pale and trembling, clasped her little ones. Struck 
 by this answer, the judge paused, (a) Such parti- 
 eiples are extremely common in themes — altogether 
 too common. For pupils who have had Latin see 
 and hear ablative absolutes so constantly that they 
 Blip into the way of requiring all sorts of work from 
 an English participle, work for which our verbal is 
 not strong enough — e. g., Trudging along wearily, 
 after a sleepless night, no farm-house was anywhere 
 to be seen, (b) Participles are often predicate 
 adjectives or objective predicates and not to bo 
 off: The wind goes whistling. The rope could be 
 seen dangling. We found him hunting, (c) They 
 «>tten close modifiers: The man walking on the 
 other side sees us. (d) By a curious perversity 
 pupils who are careless about Rounding the buoy, 
 we started for home will put a comma in After 
 rounding the buoy we started for home or in Round- 
 ing the buoy was not difficult, (e) Sometimes an 
 word that looks like such a participle is in 
 ailing an ellipsis for a closely-modifying clan-' : 
 Coming down he felt all right (-"when ho was 
 coming down"), (f) Non-restrictive phrases are 
 to be set off: His legs were thick, like an alligator's. 
 
166 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 The scenery was placid, with now and then some 
 cottages. The room in which he sat, with its simple 
 furniture. The scenery was not "placid with cot- 
 tages ' ' ; the man did not ' ' sit with furniture. ' ' But 
 non-restrictive phrases seldom have a right to exist; 
 they usually result from ambiguous arrangement of 
 words, (g) In a sentence like the following the 
 comma is often omitted before the participle : He was 
 fagged out; but wishing to be polite, he began a 
 conversation. This is to show that wishing is not 
 parenthetical after but; it is appositive before he. 
 For school use, however, such a nicety should not 
 be mentioned. "Both sides' ' is your maxim. 
 
 5. Non-restrictive clauses are set off. Though 
 he was dishonest, he was loyal. We were led to a 
 little clearing, where the children had a play-house. 
 These often appear as introductory or terminal, are 
 often so classified; but ought to be thought of as 
 somewhat parenthetical, as "both sides" matters. 
 The great question always is "Does the clause modi- 
 fy closely V There is no universal formula for 
 getting the answer. The most generally applicable 
 test that I know is "Does the clause mean that 
 particular one or that particular kind oft" As a 
 matter of fact we adults "feel" that it is not re- 
 strictive, and our account of that feeling is likely 
 to be that there is a slight pause in reading. There 
 is a pause; that is a pretty sure test for us. But 
 this is vague, very often misleading, and it encour- 
 ages that deadly comma-shows-a-pause notion. 
 Again, we analyze our feeling by saying that the 
 clause is not so essential to the principal idea, that 
 taking it out would not detract essentially; whereas 
 the removal of a restrictive clause leaves a mere 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 167 
 
 grammatical skeleton like Make hay or No boy can 
 be popular. Hut this too is vague and is seldom use- 
 ful. For us and for the pupils there is only one test 
 that I have yet discovered: that particular one. It 
 applies to all varieties of clauses — thus: (1) "for 
 that particular reason", (2) "at that particular 
 time when", (3) "at that particular place where", 
 (4) "for the particular purpose of", (5) "with that 
 particular man who", (6) "in the particular way 
 thai" Examples are: ( 1 ) They fight because they 
 are attacked, (2) He came when we were sitting 
 down to dinner, (3) Look in the drawer where he 
 keeps his money, (4) He died that we might be 
 saved, (5) We finally detected the man who was 
 making the trouble, (6) They were grouped as 
 actors are at the end of a play. But notice how as 
 adds another idea in the following: They were 
 grouped with reference to an audience, as actors are 
 at the end of a play. A pupil who has learned that 
 brick of experimenting by saying "that particular" 
 before the antecedent of the clause may conquer a 
 mystery that would otherwise forever baffle him. I 
 speak of it at length because I searched so long be- 
 fore I found it, and after I had it for relatives was 
 still another couple of years in applying it to all the 
 others. 
 
 Pupils always hope for a rule that there must be 
 a comma before because, where, etc. There is no 
 such thing. The writer must decide whether he 
 means for the particular reason tlmt, at the par- 
 t tenia r place where. Bright students will see the 
 absurdity of "Don't go for the particular reason 
 that you might catch smallpox" or "He lived in 
 that particular Florida where there is never any 
 
168 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ice." When dull ones think these sound rational, 
 try the alternatives: " Don't go, and the reason for 
 not going is" and "He lived in Florida, arid there 
 is never any ice there." They are always to inquire 
 whether it seems more like that particular or like 
 and, whether it limits closely or is added on. The 
 "added on" test may prove more convincing for 
 such restrictive clauses as I have a ring which my 
 father used to wear. We found a restaurant where 
 there was no orchestra. Sometimes the truth is 
 readily apparent from the direct question — the fun- 
 damental one — "Does it modify closely? Does it 
 'run along solid' in meaning?" 
 
 If this seems to you like depending, after all, on 
 "Is there a pause?" be warned that it is nothing of 
 the kind. If you can leave the whole non-restrictive 
 problem half taught (and many schools have to), the 
 pause explanation is the primrose path. But it is 
 the path of endless error. Compare the time-halt be- 
 fore the two following clauses from Kipling and see 
 how debatable the questions of pointing remain : 
 
 And once from the north where he had doubled 
 back eight hundred miles. 
 
 "There is no holding the young pony from the 
 game," said the horse-dealer when the Col- 
 onel pointed out that vagabonding was absurd. 
 
 How you will pause, because you detect which clause 
 is restrictive, is not the point. What will the pupil 
 do when he is trying to find out which is restrictive ? 
 But as soon as you apply "from that particular 
 north where" and "at that particular time when 
 the Colonel pointed out," you will get light. I can 
 testify that the hour when I first saw the value of 
 
\»,i; in POINTING 
 
 this test marks an epoob in my experience. Before 
 that I could never make headway 
 
 (a) The following always introduce non-res 
 tive clauses: (1) as and (2) since showing a reason, 
 (3) for, (4) so and so that showing result. (1) He 
 refused to join us, as he was suspicious of our pur- 
 pose. The omission of this comma before "as that 
 
 a reason" is the sure mark of an uneducated 
 or unsensitive mind, and is an extremely common 
 fault in school composition. (2) Since there's no 
 help, come, let us kiss and part. (3) Don't hurry, 
 for you have plenty of time. (4) The porter had 
 been most unobliging, so we gave him no tip. The 
 natives were in an ugly mood, so that our plight was 
 really serious. So that showing propose may occa- 
 sionally be restrictive. The dance was cut short so 
 that we might take the midnight boat (i. e., "in 
 order that we might") « 
 
 (b) Some novelists and all secondary students 
 are excessively fond of additive whens and wheres. 
 In this manner we all sat ruminating upon schemes 
 of vengeance, when the other little boy came run- 
 ning in. Her object was to gain a small port about 
 two leagues distant, where she had provided a 
 vessel for her escape. If used, they must have the 
 comma, and the necessity for the comma can best be 
 shown by explaining them as equivalent to and then, 
 
 1 there. 
 
 (c) The relative that is usually restrictive, though 
 non-restriotive uses are not rare. This is the cat 
 that ate the rat that lived in the house that 
 Jack built. Whoever, whatever, etc., are ahraj i 
 
 trietive if they are relatives. Whoever did 
 such a deed ought to confess (in which whoever is 
 
170 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 a relative, having for its antecedent the understood 
 he that is the subject of ought). Whatever he puts 
 his strong hand to is sure to succeed. But in such 
 constructions as Whoever he is, I'm not afraid of 
 him the whoever clause is adverbial, modifying am. 
 
 (d) Noun clauses used as subject or object should 
 never be set off. That my colleague and I should 
 have decided to leave our usual guide at home during 
 the one successful trip of the year seemed a perver- 
 sity of fate. They may be long, the eye may need a 
 rest, there may be a pause, many editors still use a 
 comma after a long subject, most rhetorics prefer it 
 — in spite of all those pseudo-reasons the practice is 
 so antagonistic to present notions that it is surely 
 dying, is all but dead. Even in such occasional oddi- 
 ties as Whatever is is right it is better not to try to 
 make a comma do what it is not fitted to do. The 
 Century prints the quotation ' ' That that is is ' ' with- 
 out a comma. Noun clauses used as appositives are 
 not set off except for giving the effect of "namely" 
 or "as follows." The idea that the earth is round 
 was not original with Columbus. No saying was 
 oftener in his mouth than that fine apothegm of 
 Bentley, that no man was ever written down but by 
 himself. 
 
 (e) Clauses of comparison introduced by than, 
 so . . . that, as ... as are not pointed. He was so 
 much engrossed in his delicate task of measuring the 
 infinitesimal difference that he did not look up. 
 
 (f) The introductory adverb clause is about the 
 only matter in which present usage is not settled. 
 When the Mogul asks for the rents which were re- 
 served to him by that very grant, he is told that he 
 is a mere pageant. (An adverb clause is the only 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 171 
 
 kind that can properly be called "introductory.") 
 Introductory phrases used to be pointed, and to this 
 day there is a very prevalent feeling that if they are 
 long they should have the comma. But the modern 
 system knows nothing about relative length; it is 
 based on disjunction in meaning, and it rules that 
 after a coherent introductory phrase there is no dis- 
 junction. All signs are that the clause is going the 
 same course. Most careful weeklies still insert the 
 comma, but the newspapers are indifferent to it; and 
 newspapers have thus far in history infallibly shown 
 what the conservatives were going to do later. Their 
 < ditors are studious to make matter easy to read, are 
 more sympathetic, can venture to try experiments, 
 watch each other's style shrewdly, adopt readily 
 what proves advantageous. One of the most con- 
 servative punctuators in the country has declared 
 that what the dailies do now the weeklies will soon 
 be doing. Hence little attention need be paid to 
 pointing an introductory clause, though it is still com- 
 mon custom. I require it in exercises, but do not 
 follow it up much. Even conservatives will not find 
 fault with an uncommaed clause if it is in any sense 
 restrictive. Introductory clauses with as, since, and 
 though are always pointed, and if clauses usually 
 are. However, in the following example the if clause 
 is so close a modifier within the that clause that most 
 journalists would not like to break up the coherence 
 with a comma: The modern notion is that if a phrase 
 is out of its natural order a writer has been clumsy. 
 A -imilar case is s<>< m in The police, or "bulls" as he 
 calls them, are friendly. A comma before as would 
 be logical, but would deceive the eye by break tag 
 the continuity of the whole interjected expression. 
 
172 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 If an author wishes a comma in such a parenthesis, 
 he should use dashes to set off the whole. The police 
 — or " bulls/ ' as he calls them — are friendly. 
 
 (g) And even if you can't see why, do as I ask. 
 There would be reason in putting commas around 
 the if clause, but the reasons against it are stronger : 
 (1) The clause would look parenthetical, (2) and is 
 not joining simply do as I ask, but the whole con- 
 ditional complex idea. The comma after such an 
 initial conjunction is omitted. 
 
 (h) The main clause that introduces a direct 
 quotation is set off. f ' Quit worrying, ' ' said he, ! ! and 
 go to work." No capital is used after the interrupt- 
 ing words, but the beginning of the quotation is 
 capitalized. He shouted across the water, ' 'We've 
 lost an oar." No comma is used with another point, 
 such as a question mark. " Where are we?" he 
 whispered. "Oh, you scoundrel!" she hissed. An 
 indirect quotation is regularly left unpointed nowa- 
 days; quotation marks were formerly frequent in 
 novels. I declared that my only wish was to help 
 him. No comma or capital should be used with a 
 quoted expression that is used as a component part 
 of the sentence. The statement that we have "moiled 
 and pothered too long" is only partially true. 
 
 (i) Pupils of intelligence have often formed the 
 habit of putting a comma at the beginning of a line. 
 They will agree that this is absurd — and then do it 
 again the next week. 
 
 (j) "When in doubt as to using a comma, don't. 
 
 THE SEMICOLON 
 
 ^ The semicolon is used between the items of a series 
 if one of the items contains a comma. A civic digni- 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 173 
 
 tary, being ill, and fanciful in proportion, went from 
 doctor to doctor; and having arrived at death's door, 
 sent for Peter. This is not necessarily because of the 
 importance of the items, but in order that a sentence 
 may not appear divided into more parts than it 
 m tually contains, in order that the main parts may 
 be easily recognizable. The stock illustration is an 
 editorial type of sentence containing three members, 
 each of which has commas within it. Needless to 
 say, students seldom compose in that style. This 
 principle of the "one-commaed item" is applied by 
 heedful writers to compound sentences whose brev- 
 ity might not seem to require a semicolon. Glance 
 at the following: This must sound queer to you, and 
 even though I had leisure to explain, you might not 
 be convinced. It appears at first glance to consist 
 of three coordinate clauses, but in fact there are only 
 two. A semicolon before and is preferable, not be- 
 cause of the length of what follows, but because at 
 that point there is greater disjunction of meaning 
 than after explain. The idea could have been well 
 applied to the following, quoted from a writer whose 
 style is usually crisp and clear: More and more he 
 was being forgotten, though, he saw, and it was this 
 which troubled him. The same rule that was given 
 for a commaed series holds for a semicoloned seri< 
 if only the last two items are joined by and, the 
 semicolon must be used with it. I saved his life from 
 a bear; he mine in the Rhine, for he swims like a 
 duck and I like a hod o' bricks; and we saved one 
 another's lives at an inn in Burgundy. 
 
 Its great us<- is to show thai sentences grammati- 
 (•ally independent are closely connected in thought. 
 He can't hear; he's deaf. The >t niggle to plant that 
 
174 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 conception in young minds is harder and very much 
 more important than any other labor in composition. 
 We have seen that the principal objective of gram- 
 mar is that conception. It could almost be said that 
 the aim of all drill in punctuation is to know what 
 commas are, so that they will not be used to sepa- 
 rate sentences. No other idea in rhetoric has a tithe 
 of the importance that attaches to grammatically 
 independent, though connected in thought. It would 
 be difficult to overstate either the value or the diffi- 
 culty of establishing this notion as a habit of mind, 
 so that a pupil will jump if he finds himself about 
 to commit the high crime.* The work should be 
 done mostly in the grammar grades, and some time 
 it will be ; but at present college instructors have to 
 battle against sentence-errors. 
 ^ One device that helps is to present correct forms 
 in pairs: 
 
 < The deer paused; this was what I expected. 
 The deer paused, which was what I expected. 
 
 We needn't run; it's not late. 
 We needn't run, for it's not late. 
 
 Teach that the comma alone will never do; there 
 must be either a semicolon, or a comma with a con- 
 joining word. 
 
 The converse kind of sentence-error — pointing a 
 phrase or clause with a semicolon — is not so common 
 on themes. In unpunctuated exercises the most 
 usual sort of unwariness is with participial expres- 
 sions like the stores being so low that they feared 
 starvation. 
 
 *See the sixth paragraph of the Introduction for a striking proof 
 of the importance that attaches to this notion in French education. 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 175 
 
 Make these t\\«» nsei of tha gemicnlon pietuu'uqmr 
 
 by railing tbem tl„» "^QnMp.PMnfflfl" nru\ tlin "hqlf. 
 
 per^L" The most useful maxim is "A semicolon 
 never introduces anything." Pupils are fond of put- 
 ting it after J/ Kf and before a quotation. 
 
 much for pe< Only a few comments are 
 
 Enquired on usage. In it > * * half -period* ' function a 
 semicolon always signifies that what follows is to be 
 understood as having the value of an independent 
 predication, though it may not be one grammatically. 
 H. nee authors who wish to be impressive sometimes 
 separate a series of phrases, or even single words, 
 by this heavy stop. 
 
 Especially common (and often effective in skilful 
 hands) is the use before coordinating conjunctions, 
 and sometimes before subordinating words. Thi- 
 says to a reader, "Regard what follows as equivalent 
 to an independent statement.' ' But pupils must not 
 be allowed to put a semicolon before subordinate 
 expressions. Tell them that they may exercise their 
 esthetic judgment after they have graduated from 
 college. The word following is never capitalized. 
 Yet a semicolon is regarded as so much like a period 
 that dashed-off words do not require the second 
 <l.i-h. He had been defeated — as was expected; he 
 retrieved himself — which was not expected Before 
 a conjunction may be placed a* comma or semicolon 
 or period; it is a matter of the degree of independ- 
 ence that is to be indicated. 
 
 THE COLON 
 
 The colon formally introduces a list of particulars. 
 The following translation is intended primarily for 
 two classes of readers: first, for those who desire to 
 
 -* L 
 
176 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 obtain knowledge of its contents; second, for those 
 who — etc. For the pointing of an introductory- 
 word before it see the discussion under The Dash. 
 It is also used in a very significant way before a 
 sentence: it indicates that the following statement 
 is in apposition with what precedes, is explaining 
 concretely what has been put in general terms. But 
 the curse is at work: the severance between good 
 and evil cannot be closed again, and the tragic end 
 comes in spite of the efforts of Arthur and Launcelot. 
 This use contributes to precision in an analytical 
 style. A qapital after the colon signifies that what 
 follows is quoted or is of independent importance. 
 Right here a baffling question arises: How can any 
 inheritance-tax prevent a man from giving property 
 to his children before he dies? The colon is the com- 
 monest and best mark after the salutation of a letter. 
 A dash after it is unsightly and is going out of favor. 
 It is useful for introducing long or important quota- 
 tions. It always carries the connotation "as fol- 
 lows." The colon is omitted if it would have to 
 be combined with a question mark. What did the 
 candidate mean by beginning his composition as 
 follows? * 'Caesar! Julius Caesar! That ironic, 
 sartorial virgin of history !" 
 
 QUOTATION MAEKS 
 
 (a) There is no indication that single marks are 
 coming into favor. The all but universal practice is 
 to use single marks for a quotation within a quota- 
 tion. A quotation within a quoted quotation (if one 
 must ever write such a thing) has double marks. No 
 sensible author would write such a tangle as the 
 following, though it is logically possible: "Well," 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 177 
 
 d he, " why do you keep r< gating, 4 We heard the 
 old man cry, "Make way for liberty!" 'f " A typog- 
 rapher would balk at this and would go insane if 
 had to publish that row of terminations. 
 Such puzzles originate only in puzzled brains, (b) 
 Ordinarily quotation mark> are wfaride a mark of 
 interrogation or exclamation, but are inside if the 
 mark of emotion is not a part of the quotation. If 
 only yon had not said, "lam indifferent"! John 
 asked, "Did you hear me say, 'Come on'?" (c) If 
 the introducing words are at the end of a line, the 
 ma must be after them on that line and the quo- 
 tation marks at the beginning of the next lino, (d) 
 The greatest difficulty in themes is with such a quo- 
 tation as "Come in here," he said. M [i*i inner." 
 A comma for a period there has the primal, eldest 
 curse upon it. It is the unforgivable sin. (e) If a 
 speaker's sentence is interrupted, loft unfinished, use 
 a long dash and put the quotation marks after the 
 
 dash. "Look!" he gasped. "Well, did " 
 
 No period is needed. 
 
 PARENTHESES 
 
 Parentheses show an explanation of some word 
 or statement. Since a necessity of stopping to 
 explain suggests involved thought, our quick-mov- 
 ing, straightforward generation is impatient of 
 parentheses. They are at present being supplanted 
 lashes. 
 
 Except for enumeration in scholarly works they 
 always appear as a pair of marks following the mat- 
 that is being commented on. Hence thoir func- 
 tion is peculiarly plain, and there is almost complete 
 
178 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 agreement as to punctuation connected with them. 
 This was not always so. As late as 1881 Bigelow's 
 handbook enjoined the following pointing: Fifteen 
 pauls, (a scudo and a half,) buonomano included. 
 This is copied from the Eiverside edition of Lowell 
 of 1892. Nowadays we should never see anything 
 but Fifteen pauls (a scudo and a half), buonomano 
 included. Such a bit of ancient history would de- 
 serve no mention here if it were not that this puzzling 
 doubled comma still persists to some extent in con- 
 nection with a pair of dashes. The curious perver- 
 sity with parentheses has been duly buried; the 
 same perversity with dashes is dead, but not yet 
 committed to the grave. 
 
 The universal present ruling for parentheses is to 
 use exactly the same points, in the same ways, that 
 would appear if the parenthesis were removed. The 
 matter between the marks is punctuated just as it 
 would be if it were not parenthetical, except that a 
 sentence is not capitalized and that a terminal 
 comma is not used : (set on by Wakem, of course) . 
 Of course an independent sentence made parenthet- 
 ical between two sentences begins with a capital 
 and has its terminal point inside the second paren- 
 thesis. "Come here at once." (You can't imagine 
 my speaking so firmly?) "What have you done?" 
 Within a sentence there never can be any point just 
 lief ore the parentheses, except in some extraordinary 
 case, like If he comes, (do you) let me know. 
 
 Pupils seldom have a real need for parentheses. 
 Indeed they rather need to be discouraged from such 
 asides, because they easily fall into the way of using 
 an aimless "as I said before" or "I forgot to say 
 that." They will most awkwardly prevent ambig- 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 179 
 
 uity of pronouns by repeating in parenthesis the v« 
 noun for which they hive used a pronoun. And they 
 are very fearful that after they have been speak ing 
 of a character his name will not be known to apply 
 to him: hence they wearisomely append "that was 
 my hero 's name. ■ ' 
 
 THE DASH 
 
 Writers whose habits were fixed more than thirty 
 irs ago regard the dash as somewhat sensational, 
 i will employ it very sparingly or not at all in for- 
 mal composition. It has an emotional function, to 
 indicate abruptly -changed constructions or unex- 
 pected turns of thought. "I tell thee men will laugh 
 —ah!" She ended in a little scream. The — but, 
 pooh! — it is not for an old man like me, etc. 
 
 But in the last quarter-century dashes have been 
 almost universally adopted as a convenient mark of 
 I m i vn thesis. Unless Carranza should do what he has 
 never succeeded yet in doing — establish a competent 
 government and maintain order — the next duty 
 would be to occupy strategic centers. A pair of 
 <l.i>hes shows matter that is more necessary to con- 
 the real thought, that is less like a pure explana- 
 fciOD or an aside. Dashes are less formal than paren- 
 theses, do not show such aloofness. They have grown 
 in favor so much that nowadays almost every page 
 taid editorials furnishes examples. The common- 
 est form of this use is when the dashed-off matter is 
 at the end of the sentence. Two of the members have 
 opposed the action of the majority — Governor Mon- 
 tague and Representative Shirley. This is so fre- 
 quent in all editorials, rhetorics, and literature of 
 lay that it is thought of by many as a distinctive 
 
180 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 form. In reality it is only a species of the paren- 
 thetical. 
 
 It would be logical to use a comma after the second 
 dash in cases where the comma would be required if 
 the dashed-off matter were removed, as in If you can 
 — and I hope you can — , we shall be much pleased. 
 This would be exactly like the use with parentheses. 
 But the comma looks so remote and dangling that 
 printers were never willing to put it there; instead 
 they evolved a practice of reduplicating, placing a 
 comma before each dash. These commas were com- 
 pletely unreasonable and never assisted the eye, but 
 previous to 1880 few American publishers dared omit 
 them, and to this day there are unobservantly con- 
 servative people to whom the custom is very dear. 
 Yet the custom is thoroughly dead, though the 
 ghost of it may be seen lingering in the Atlantic, 
 the Century, the North American Review, and a few 
 college journals. The New York Evening Post, a 
 most conservative journal, abandoned the combina- 
 tion so many years ago that the present proofread- 
 ers know nothing about it. Another theory expressed 
 in some rhetorics is that a dash " strengthens ' * 
 the comma, yet even the Atlantic and the Century of- 
 fices deny all knowledge of such a use. In the spring 
 of 1916 the Atlantic quit the use of "strengthened," 
 and the Revieiv of Reviews abandoned the " comma- 
 dash' ' entirely. The combination is not tolerated by 
 the author of any good manual published since 1900 
 except Klein, and he admits a "quite general" usage 
 opposed to his preference. The dash should never 
 be used with a comma or semicolon. 
 
 The most singular way in which rhetorics have 
 lagged a generation behind actual practice is in ad- 
 
USAGE IX POINTING 181 
 
 vising a semicolon before such introductory words 
 as namely and < .//.. where present usage puts a dfl 
 
 tree this Wileoniaa rule ae trustingly as 
 
 ugh their highest duty was to be blind to facts. 
 Ono author recited this credo in 1D10, but omitP d 
 it in his edition of 191 \\ and two otlier good books 
 have rejected it. All must discard it soon, for it is 
 an utter untruth. 
 
 It originated quite naturally from such a form as 
 this: He is not popular; that is, he is not in the public 
 eye. Here the explanation is put in the form of an 
 independent, coordinate statement. That is may be 
 employed so, frequently to the extent of beginning 
 a new sentence. Similarly it may be argued that 
 < ///and words of that kind are elliptical for these 
 are by name or these are as follows. If they are thus 
 understood and if they are always employed at the 
 end of a sentence, a semicolon is a reasonable mark. 
 It is utterly unreasonable under any other condi- 
 tions. (1) If you should wish to put the apposit 
 matter within the sentence, you would have to sur- 
 round it with a pair of semicolons, as is actually 
 dope in a remarkable quotation in Johnson's Diction- 
 under )Hi»irlif. But no rhetorician has the hanli- 
 l to do this; in his own text he at once employs a 
 pair of dashes, putting a comma after the n<nn>hi. 
 There is one argument — namely, the increase of wages 
 — which is peculiarly appealing. And tide is the fact 
 modern usage. (2) If there is no nam* l>i (or any 
 li word as vie., f>>nif. ae) f the semicolon would 
 become monstrous, for it would then appear as a 
 mark of introduction, as a colon. Such a function it 
 has never had. No rhetorician will e it so in 
 
 hiswritinir. (3) To ii we must) that a >emi- 
 
182 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 colon never introduces, and then to teach that it 
 introduces a list of particulars with namely, is peda- 
 gogic crime. It is curious to see how several modern 
 text-makers forget their rule and exhibit present 
 usage in the body of their work by employing the 
 dash constantly before appositive constructions, even 
 before the very words that they have listed under 
 their semicolon rule. (4) The semicolon rule is con- 
 trary to facts. I have examined two yards of gram- 
 mars and dictionaries without finding such a use in 
 any book less than fifty years old. Of course it 
 appears not infrequently when an old-fashioned 
 writer's copy is being followed; even in Outlook and 
 Post it is seen occasionally to introduce the equiva- 
 lent of a statement. Otherwise it is a ghost of a 
 former reality. 
 
 The introductory word can be found punctuated 
 with every possible permutation of comma, dash, 
 and colon, but there is no body of usage to support 
 most of these variations. It is unusual to find the 
 colon before or the~cT*tsh after, and it is illogical. If 
 a handbook to which you are referring advises on 
 page 10 that a colon should precede viz., look on 
 pages 55 and 56, where you will see the colon quite 
 properly after viz. and thus, and always after as 
 follows. Namely (which I use to represent all such 
 words) need not be considered parenthetical, and 
 ofteifis not in scholarly works that have to eliminate 
 as many points as possible; personally I wish the 
 world had taken this cue from the scholars; but it 
 has not; in ordinary composition namely is paren- 
 thetical. The choice between comma and colon to 
 follow namely is entirely a matter of how formal the 
 introduction is to be. Hence we have the simple and 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 183 
 
 obvious principle that there is a big disjunction 
 fore namely (to point oil all that follows), an 
 small disjunction after namely (to set off that mere 
 word). This shows how ambiguous is the very com- 
 mon practice of using a comma both before and after, 
 which ought to mean that namely could bo taken 
 out without destroying the continuity. That is what 
 the commas really do mean in the following: We 
 have one great fear — the fear, namely, that you will 
 desert us. That is precisely what they do not mean 
 in the following: But it does indicate something else, 
 namely, an expectation that they can succeed. Both 
 the logic and the facts of present usage call for a 
 dash before this last namely and a comma after it. 
 A comma before and a colon after to wit and viz. are 
 common today, especially in legal phrasing; but the 
 comma is a weak mark for such a position. The 
 dash is normal. 
 
 Present usage reduces to one simple ruling: Put 
 a dash before and a comma after ; use the colon after 
 to show importance or formality. This is simple; it 
 is consistent with the facts and the reasoning of 
 modern usage ; it is always applicable, whether the 
 appositive matter is terminal or medial, whether or 
 not there is an introductory word. 
 
 Perhaps the most useful function of dashes and 
 parentheses is to prevent a confusing array of com- 
 mas that are performing different grades of duty, 
 as in He sometimes served a plain dinner, a veal pie, 
 or a leg of lamb, and a rice pudding. A dash after 
 dinner would show that that word is not the first of 
 four coordinate items. In the following each comma 
 •roperly employed, but the whole series is bewil- 
 dering: Only four Republicans, Coates, Grattan, 
 
184 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Holden, and Kissel, upheld him, the other four votes 
 coming from Grady, Frawley, and Sullivan, Tam- 
 many members, and Cullen of Queens. 
 
 Dashes, parentheses, and quotation marks are the 
 only points allowed at the beginning of a line. 
 
 Only occasionally will you encounter any punctu- 
 ation puzzle that is not definitely provided for above. 
 There is always the possibility of some absurd con- 
 struction which could be indicated only by absurd 
 pointing — e.g., Why do you ask, "May I come in?"? 
 In the first place, that last question mark is patently 
 nonsensical. In the second place, it is the construc- 
 tion that is faulty; no one ought to desire to show 
 that two questions end simultaneously. So always. 
 
 You may perchance be told that there are two 
 schools of punctuation — "open" and "close"; that 
 the former means getting rid of all possible points; 
 that its vogue is chiefly in slap-dash newspapers; 
 that the latter is more refined and is cultivated in 
 the college world ; that the author of What Is Eng- 
 lish? is a devotee of the open system. Very little is 
 heard of those terms nowadays, for they merely 
 described a revolution (begun in the 60's and con- 
 cluded in the 90's) against the copious Wilsonian 
 commas. I am a devotee of nothing but the safest 
 and soundest present usage. No jot or tittle of per- 
 sonal preference has been admitted to this chapter. 
 The code here presented is conservative, would have 
 to be called close. 
 
 Don't lug much of the treatise into class. It 
 doesn't belong there. It is only to furnish you com- 
 plete knowledge for emergencies, just as a dictionary 
 tells you thousands of things that never come up 
 in recitations — but they might. You need to know 
 
. EN POINTING 185 
 
 orehand. The tern big matters in school are quo- 
 tations l»«»th sides of DOS n -trictive matter; comma 
 before but, so, for, as; the difference between a 
 comma ami a period This last is worth much more 
 than all the rest together. 
 
 00) K>N RULES 
 
 [Except for period, question mark, exclamation 
 mark, and quotation marks. Numbers of subhead 
 ings do not correspond to the numbering in the 
 Chapter.] 
 
 COMMA 
 
 Never osed in connection with another mark of 
 punctuation. 
 
 I. Independent Elements Set Off 
 
 1. Ah and nh when these are followed by ex- 
 clamatory expressions. 
 Ye$ and no. 
 
 3. Xonns of address (not alter 0). 
 
 II. Items of a Series Separated 
 
 1. Unconnected, coordinate words, phrases, or 
 clauses (but successive adjectives are often 
 not coordinate in value). 
 
 2. Three or more (rarely two) short and simi- 
 
 lar independent statement-. 
 
 3. With and or or: 
 
 a. h< 'tween last two items if there is no 
 conjunction between previous it«>ms. 
 
186 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 b. Between clauses if it is needful to warn 
 a reader that the conjunction is not con- 
 necting merely two words. 
 
 c. Between clauses to show that they are 
 
 dissimilar in subject, mood, time, etc. 
 
 4. Before the adversatives but, while, though, 
 yet, not, nor when they introduce clauses. 
 
 III. Parenthetical Uses 
 
 1. Appositives, unless they form customary 
 phrases. 
 
 2. Appositive adjective expressions, especially 
 
 participial phrases. 
 
 3. Successive terms in dates and addresses 
 
 (these not being "coordinate items/ ' but 
 successive explanations — parenthetical) ; 
 not to be used at the end of a line in a letter- 
 head or on an envelope. 
 
 4. Any word, phrase, or very brief clause that 
 
 is to be shown as merely interjected : always 
 etc. ; nearly always however and such intro- 
 ducing words as namely, e.g. ; usually con- 
 versational why, well, and now. 
 
 5. Modifying prepositional phrases that are 
 not restrictive in meaning (these are rare). 
 
 6. Modifying clauses which are not restrictive 
 
 in meaning — i.e., which are equivalent to a 
 statement added with and : always with as, 
 since, and for showing a reason; with so 
 and so that showing result. 
 
USAGE IN POINTING 187 
 
 7. After introductory adverb clause: always 
 with as, since, though, and although ; usually 
 with if; otherwise not necessary if the 
 clause is to be shown as restrictive in mean- 
 ing. 
 
 8. The main clause that introduces a quotation, 
 but not in combination with a question mark 
 or exclamation mark. 
 
 SEMICOLON 
 
 1. Separates coordinate expressions if one of these 
 contains a comma — the " double comma" use. 
 
 2. Separates sentences that are closely connected in 
 thought — the * * half period ' ' use. 
 
 3. Shows that words, phrases, or dependent clauses 
 are to be regarded as having the importance 
 of independent statements. 
 
 COLON 
 
 Always equivalent to "as follows." Introduces a 
 list of particulars, or a sentence that explains 
 particularly a general statement. May be used 
 before a quotation or after such words as namely 
 to show that what follows is formally introduced, 
 as being long or important. 
 
 A semicolon between two statements means that they 
 ;iiv coordinate in value; a colon means that the 
 following statement explains or gives the par- 
 ticulars of the preceding statement. 
 
188 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 PARENTHESES 
 
 Indicate added information, not strictly essential to 
 the meaning. 
 
 DASH 
 
 1. Shows an abruptly changed construction or an 
 uncompleted statement. 
 
 2. Shows an appositive expression more abrupt or 
 interjected than would be indicated by a comma. 
 
 3. Useful for an appositive expression that contains 
 
 a comma. 
 
 4. A pair of dashes shows a modifying side-remark. 
 
 5. A pair of dashes is specially common for apposi- 
 
 tive matter introduced by such words as namely, 
 e.g. Such matter is commonly at the end of a 
 sentence, and hence only one dash appears. 
 
 Only dashes, parentheses, and quotation marks may 
 stand at the beginning of a line. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THEMES 
 
 One of the best high schools in the country used 
 to have an arrangement by which English teachers 
 were given a mathematics class in order that this 
 easier work might relieve the tedium of theme-read- 
 ing. It is a labor from which many teachers shrink. 
 If this chapter can show two ways of making it 
 lighter and more effective, your peace of mind will 
 be conserved and your energy better applied. 
 
 1 hiring the last few years there has been a great 
 deal of discussion about how to grade themes. Every 
 rimenter has produced an astounding result like 
 this: twenty themes were submitted to ten teachers 
 for grading; the marks on one theme varied between 
 25 and 90; two given themes were marked 60 and 90 
 by A, 80 and 50 respectively by B; discrepancies in 
 the same teaching force, among instructors supposed 
 to be familiar with a common system, showed bewil- 
 ingly variant estimates. The English world has 
 n puzzling about uniformity; about a criterion; 
 about some way of getting a body of intelligent teach- 
 ers to agree that a given theme is very poor, just 
 passing, Of very good. In universities where twenty 
 or thirty freshman instructors are reading one huge 
 of themes from one class for one kind of credit 
 it lias hem absolutely essential t particular^ 
 
 instructions, which readers have had to follow pre- 
 
 189 
 
190 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 cisely; any other procedure, any trusting to indi- 
 vidual taste, would be criminally unfair. 
 
 Yet the universal assumption until very recently 
 has been that a theme, like a story in a magazine, is 
 in the last analysis ungradable ; that it is an expres- 
 sion of a personality, making one appeal to A and a 
 very different appeal to B; that there is no possi- 
 bility of a uniform rating of its merits. Most editors 
 and superintendents and business men and clergy- 
 men still take it for granted that the mark on a theme 
 is a literary evaluation. Perhaps you have taken 
 that for granted. The first half dozen rhetorics you 
 examine will convey the same impression by speak- 
 ing of "self-expression" and "polishing our work." 
 The most ambitious effort to get some uniformity- 
 criterion, a scale devised by Professor Hillegas of 
 Columbia, is based on the same assumption. It is in 
 effect a set of selections graduated in literary merit 
 from the zero of a thoughtless child to the 100% of 
 a Hawthorne; with this set of selections the theme- 
 reader is to familiarize himself; then after a quick 
 perusal of any composition he can estimate that its 
 merit is nearer that of no. 7 than of no. 6, and hence 
 marks it 70. This is delightfully easy, is alluring, 
 and has received a great deal of attention from re- 
 viewers and conventions ; but I do not hear that it is 
 actually being used much. If it were a practical 
 device, it would be as handy as a gravity-bulb for 
 quick and precise measure of literary value. 
 
 That is just the point: it is largely an esthetic 
 measure. Is that what needs measuring in school 
 themes? Are we in the position of an editor decid- 
 ing whether an article is worth purchasing? He 
 thinks of four counts: strength of subject, charm of 
 
THEMES 191 
 
 style, coherence and emphasis of structure, accuracy 
 in rod) petty mechanics as idiom and sentence-struc- 
 ture Spoiling and punctuation are less than noth- 
 ing in his consideration, for a twenty-dollar-a-week 
 proofreader can attend to such minutiae. An editor 
 can easily revise poor syntax and diction if there is 
 not too much of it. As to orderly structure of the 
 whole, it is likely that any contributor who has a 
 message and some stylistic ability will have com- 
 posed his matter effectively, or that he could, at the 
 editor's suggestion, alter any carelessness of ar- 
 rangement. The editor is simply judging whether the 
 MS. offers an interesting expression of personality. 
 But every conscientious band of freshman instruct- 
 ors finds that it has to pass the opposite kind of 
 opinion. We have heard the explicit announcement 
 from Wisconsin and Illinois ; the facts are undoubt- 
 edly the same at any college where honest effort is 
 guided by clear apprehension of facts. We are not 
 concerned with elective courses whose objective is 
 literary knack; Ave speak of work required of all 
 freshmen. What is true for them must be more true 
 of the first years of high school. All pupils do not 
 have literary skill. Only a small percentage of them 
 have. Quite a proportion of teachers have only a 
 tincture of such talent. You very likely were on the 
 board of the Ulula and you have sent a story to 
 ibner's and an essay to the Atlantic. But you are 
 unusual. We average teachers have small hopes of 
 literary tame. If we strive to write gracefully, we 
 are apt to appear affected. If we suppose that we 
 must teach pupils to write gracefully, we shall teach 
 than atl. ( tation. We shall probably do a much 
 worse thing — convince them that we are insincere 
 
192 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 and that all our talk about Addisonian charm is pre- 
 tense. Our first business is care and accuracy. 
 
 It is well to say frequently to yourself and occa- 
 sionally to the class that you cannot require a pleas- 
 ing style, for that is an innate quality ; that you can- 
 not teach more than some faintest hints of what 
 constitutes a pleasing style, for that is unteachable ; 
 that perhaps a few in the class were born with a 
 degree of power that is greater than the teacher's, 
 just as every now and then some school football- 
 player is born to be a college player of more strength 
 than his present coach. What most do not possess, 
 what cannot be taught, you have no right to require ; 
 it is folly to require it. But what every ordinary 
 child can do, what his parents and employer insist 
 upon, what he must learn if he is to graduate, is to 
 avoid hideous errors of spelling and sentence-struc- 
 ture, and to acquire some ability to divide into para- 
 graphs and to proceed in a somewhat orderly fashion 
 to a conclusion. 
 
 One man's private judgment about this is worth 
 almost nothing. Don't take stock in the previous 
 paragraphs just because they are in a printed book. 
 There is some contrary evidence — for example, one 
 teacher of girls testifies that she divides the school 
 for English work, not by regular classification, but 
 by literary ability. I should guess that a majority 
 of principals and parents still think that themes 
 ought to be graded for style. Don't oppose the opin- 
 ion of those in authority at Smithboro. Find out 
 what is wanted and follow orders. Find out defi- 
 nitely, or definitely interpret for yourself, what is 
 the limit of deduction from an orderly and pleasing 
 theme for mere mechanical errors. Inquire for that 
 
THEMES 193 
 
 form of directions; decide clearly in your own mind 
 according to that form. If a theme is reasonably 
 well arranged and is not dull, it deserves 100 as a 
 piece of school literature; how much may be taken 
 off for mechanical errors if the passing mark is 70 T 
 The answer from the universities, from the college 
 board, from the careful preparatory schools, is 
 11 enough to make the mark zero." But the Smith- 
 bo ro school may be crowded, so that most students 
 must be promoted, and hence marking must be leni- 
 ent ; or, again, Smithboro may have an old-fashioned 
 horror of mechanics, so that the instructions may be 
 "never more than 30.' ' Then you are to resolve pri- 
 vately that you will never deduct for mere prosiness 
 and will seldom deduct more than 20 for ordinary 
 incoherence or lack of emphasis. One other prelimi- 
 nary question you are to get answered : How strict 
 is the grading in this school? C ompare notes with 
 c olleagues during tha npepfnff wppIts, so as to make 
 sure that your marks arc not noticeably high or low. 
 You have now assured yourself peace of mind by 
 taking theme-grading out of the region of guess and 
 mystery and worriment and setting up an arithmet- 
 ical standard. In so doing you are not professing 
 that you have equated charms and commas or estab- 
 lished a percentage basis for personality. You have 
 declined that impossible task. You have simply re- 
 fused to put English on grounds that no other sub- 
 ject stands on. You have safeguarded your own 
 f airness ; you will be able to tell both Willie and his 
 plexed mother just why the mark was E. If any 
 doubt of the justice of this arithmetic haunts you, 
 reflect that our whole system of rating intellectual 
 achievement is utterly inadequate; every year we 
 
194 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 refuse to graduate able citizens and give valedictory 
 honors to those who can contribute little to civili- 
 zation. But this is the best adjustment we can make 
 at present. We cannot hope to set up separate stand- 
 ards for English. Furthermore, you will be more 
 useful if you preserve your peace of mind, and only 
 by adopting one consistent, easy, invariable plan 
 can you feel sure — and make pupils feel sure — that 
 your grades mean anything or that there is any pos- 
 sibility of their improving. 
 
 In another closely related way you can conserve 
 your nerve-power: by not taking to heart all the 
 exhortation to * ' stimulate orderly thinking. ■ ' Every 
 English teacher does what he can in that way, ought 
 to accomplish something; but the total must always 
 be slight. Orderly thinking, like popularity and 
 good nature and charitableness, is not in the cur- 
 riculum. It is a rare gift. A congressman who 
 can think perfectly straight is everywhere looked 
 for and nowhere found. If most philosophers and 
 economists can really think straight, whence came 
 all the opportunities for reviewers to point out 
 how crookedly they think? No, the power to think 
 straight is not granted to most of us — much less can 
 we instil it. Except in one sense : we can impart a 
 good deal of useful instruction in setting down 
 straight the thoughts that are committed to paper. 
 We can, by reading good themes and orderly pas- 
 sages from literature or magazines, give common- 
 place minds some ability to substitute for a 3-1-2 or- 
 der the 1-2-3 order. And constant reference to good 
 examples will enable many pupils to show the reader 
 by connectives that the thoughts are coherently ar- 
 ranged. Education is at bottom a matter of drill in 
 
THEMES 195 
 
 imitating processes, and English can do no more 
 than to train young minds in following a few simple 
 models of orderly structure. It cannot confer any 
 power. We are not supermen to be charged with a 
 task so ineffably hard. 
 
 That idea of "following simple models of orderly 
 structure" has never been grasped in America, but 
 we are beginning to get hold of it. Most of us have 
 allowed pupils to write unoutlined, unprepared-for 
 themes, thus training them in disorder. Or we have 
 gone to the other extreme with elaborate subheaded 
 outlines that do not correspond to any normal frame- 
 work of a brief composition. P revision is what we 
 must learn — setting before children a scheme by X 
 which they may see in advance the progress through 
 the few main divisions. Simplicity is the need that 
 we must recognize — not sentences, not a dozen head- 
 ings, not elaboration of major and minor, but just 
 three or four or five titles of the natural groups of 
 thought. Of course the active minds should be 
 encouraged to vary this, to change it completely if 
 they wish ; and it should be understood that no one 
 is obliged to write out an outline in advance, for some 
 original brains will not be helped by that process. 
 But minds that get good results without a formal v 
 plan are planning informally. Whether the scheme 
 is written, is unwritten, or is formed unconsciously, y^^- 
 it exists ; a good theme always shows a design. The V" 
 ordinary high-school writer will learn more about 
 structure if an outline is suggested in advance. The 
 slow and the uninventive must be provided with the 
 simple plan which they will not originate for them- 
 selves. The best training for getting up an outline 
 is to read a good first paragraph of a theme and 
 
^ 
 
 196 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 inquire what its title might be — what one thing it is 
 all about ; what one thing the second paragraph is all 
 about ; and so on until four or five titles are displayed 
 in sequence on the board. What always needs em- 
 phasis, what will .produce conviction and cause im- 
 provement, is simplicity. A series of four brief titles 
 is proof that order is not merely heaven's first law, 
 but a mundane possibility. Providing an outline is 
 the surest device for securing at least the appearance 
 of "orderly thinking." 
 
 So much for the general theory. Later in the 
 chapter are some practical hints for outlining and 
 paragraphing. 
 
 Be skeptical about "placing before our classes 
 examples of literary skill which shall be at once 
 models after which to fashion their own work, and 
 an inspiration to ambitious effort." It would be 
 idyllic to follow that program if our classes were 
 composed of a few chosen girls who would make the 
 effort. But most of the boys will not feel the least 
 inspiration, will think you are unfair, and will sup- 
 pose that you are urging them to be insincere. If 
 you persist against those literal minds, you will wear 
 your heart out ; you will not get the esthetic result ; 
 you will perceive that you are encouraging outra- 
 geous carelessness, accomplishing neither the lofty 
 nor the lowly result; and then you will reproach 
 yourself and distrust yourself and waste energy. 
 Unless you can live on illusions, be blind to hideous 
 facts, and remain indifferent to the plainest duty, 
 the "literary model" plan will destroy equanimity. 
 If you have one clear, simple objective— decent Eng- 
 lish — your own mind will not be tortured about a 
 criterion. You will have the same kind of business 
 
THEMES 197 
 
 that a teacher has in any other subject, to require 
 care and precision in simple intellectual tasks. You 
 will not be striding the blasts or summoning spirits 
 into a circle, but will be engaged in a normal peda- 
 gogic employment. 
 
 Yet beyond and above this you have a chance that 
 does not exist in other subjects. You can encourage 
 interesting writing. You may — you should — have it 
 understood that a lively and entertaining compo 
 tion is worth more than a dull one. "Here is a 
 theme that is careless in spots, so that by regular 
 arithmetic it would be marked 50; but because it was 
 really amusing it was marked 70. ' ' You never know ^ 
 what spark you may kindle by remarking, "This 
 theme is so good that it ought to be handed in to the 
 Literaria board.' ' When you read a brisk begin- 
 ning or a surprising close, quote a happy bit of 
 invention or a neat turn or a clever bit of character- 
 izing, you are reminding the class that you are not a 
 comma-fiend. K< a<l as many good them es as_j ypu 
 can find time for, commenting on your reasons for 
 approval. It is generally good policy not to name 
 the writer , for that distracts attention from merito- 
 rious work to a complimented person — from the use- 
 ful to theTuTrmful. Ask t he class to give reasons f < i r 
 praisin g~of Mftjffi ng. Exhibi t faults fully, but beware 
 of ridiculing. This kind of criticism, if tactfully 
 managed, is the greatest possible incentive to write 
 interestingly; it introduces that vitally necessary 
 element of social approval. c 
 
 "Social approval is a large and valuable id. A, 
 worthy of a chapter by itself. A teach* r is si 
 ful in proportion as he secures the i rating — 
 
 pa thy of the class ; not striving to imp<>-.> eiti 
 
198 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Ms own judgment or a literary standard that is un- 
 known to the class; but bringing to bear the social 
 pressure, convincing pupils that they are required 
 to do only what their social group approves. This 
 thesis is soundly and convincingly presented in S. A. 
 Leonard's Eiverside Monograph, English Composi- 
 tion as a Social Problem. The idea is not to be 
 grasped in a minute — nor in a month. Have it 
 always in mind.* 
 
 Sometimes, especially early in the year, there will 
 be such epidemics of heedlessness that you may do 
 well to announce that there is no opportunity for 
 reading whole themes. Hold up the bunch and say 
 that half of them would keep the attention of the 
 class, that one of them is as good as some sketches 
 that have been sold for money, that three are better 
 than many college students can write, that you wish 
 you might read some of them — but that it is impos- 
 sible to squander time for pleasure as long as there 
 is so much wild carelessness to deal with. Then sail 
 into them for the rattle-headed spelling and the coun- 
 terfeit sentences. Keep them informed that commas 
 do not make a theme, that often a theme which you 
 mark is a much finer thing than one marked 90; 
 but that if you don't count off strictly for errors you 
 will leave them uneducated. "You have a gift for 
 saying things with snap; it's a talent that many 
 firms are paying good money for today ; cultivate it ; 
 I will help you to make it useful by marking every 
 careless theme zero." In any and every way that 
 your tact can devise show them that the strictness 
 with mechanics is only to keep them from being a 
 
 'Compare the very interesting experiment with social approval in 
 literature, the third extract in Chapter X, pages 232-238. 
 
THEMES 199 
 
 laughing-stock to a critical world. Ask them what 
 impression they would get of a stranger who began 
 a letter i "Dear sir youde ought to of let me sel you 
 them goods/ ' Insist that some of them would im- 
 press an employer almost as unfavorably. Try_Jo I 
 show them that a splotch of ignorance on_a _pag& is 
 as injurious as a stain on a white tie— no one can see 
 anything but the stain,. Bead them what an Ameri- 
 can poet, \l. II. Stoddard, said of Poe's original 
 handwritten copy of A MS. Found in a Bottle: 
 11 There was genius in everything they listened to; 
 there was no uncertain grammar, no feeble phrase- 
 ology, no ill-placed punctuation. ' 9 
 
 The mark after genius is not a colon. Stoddard 
 was not indicating that the genius was constituted as 
 follows, but that Poe had certain commonplace abili- 
 ties in addition to the great one. Keep the semi- 
 colon in mind when you decide just what theme- 
 reading is, and for school purposes regard what fol- 
 lows as the climax. If you know what you are 
 aiming at, if you have a single purpose, you will 
 remove the burdensome fear of "Oughtn't I to be 
 doing something else ? ' ' 
 
 The other way of lightening labor is similar : Re- 
 duce all correcting to the simplest arithmetical basis, 
 read once rapidly, deduct mechanically; don't fraz- 
 zle your nerves by trying to weigh what cannot be 
 ireigliedj nor tolerate any qualms about the queer 
 result of a low mark for lively writing and a high 
 mark for prosy work. The secret of fair and rapid 
 grading is to establish your "unit error," to indicate 
 the number of these in the simplest manner, to com- 
 pute in a few seconds what the grade is. Here are 
 the details of marking one freshman theme in the 
 
200 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 fourth month of the year. The unit for one class 
 may be changed several times a year, is different for 
 different classes and different schools ; but once you 
 understand the scheme you can see what value is 
 needed for the unit in your class. In the case of this 
 particular theme the class has been many times 
 warned about too and their, etc., has been drilled in 
 simple punctuation, and has learned again and again 
 of the atrocity of a sentence-error. Such errors 
 as omitting a comma before so and but, mis- 
 spelling its, omitting an apostrophe from a posses- 
 sive count five each. Such forms as ladys, J one's 
 now count two errors. Because to for too has been 
 unusually stressed and everyone knows what is 
 wrong the instant he sees it, it counts three errors. 
 You open the theme and begin reading, not expect- 
 ing to see everything that is wrong, not losing the 
 run of the little narrative, but marking whatever 
 you do see — that will be quite enough. The open- 
 ing paragraph is not indented ; the red pencil dashes 
 down a I about where the indention ought to be. 
 That first paragraph, only two lines long, is clearly 
 a mere introductory sentence ; down goes ' l No Par. ' ' 
 Then there is no trouble till the seventh line, where 
 you find orrange ; you dash a ring around it to show 
 that it must be corrected, but is not counted as an 
 error. Next you find "He said for me to come 
 right in and that he would cook us a supper for us." 
 That is a clumsy change of construction, very dis- 
 agreeable to you; you would like to write a note in 
 the margin dilating upon the awkwardness ; but you 
 do nothing of the kind, for the matter has not yet 
 been spoken of in class. You simply put a ring 
 around for us and speed ahead. On the second page 
 
Til K. Mi 
 
 is v W< 11, it happens that you have mentioned 
 
 this only twice, that you are not positive it ought to 
 count double ; one line goes under it. Near the end is 
 comming, and while it may deserve a treble line, you 
 Leniently underscore it only twice. The whole story 
 la decently arranged, reasonably well told; count up. 
 Two for the paragraphing, one for whd's, two for 
 I ming = 25 ; 100 — 25 = 75. Time of reading 275 
 words not over three minutes; after a year's experi- 
 ence, when you are used to the system and have 
 grown acquainted with the peculiarities of pupils 
 and have removed a large proportion of the first-of- 
 the-year carelessness, you can finish in two minutes. 
 
 It is more than likely that this strikes you as not 
 theme- reading at all but as mere addition of bits of 
 scum that fleck the deep waters as well as the roily 
 1 diddle. Part of your astonishment is due to not 
 dwelling enough on "the whole is decently arranged, 
 reasonably well told." That is a big assumption. 
 On many themes there will have to be structural cor- 
 rections: of general incoherence, or of monotonous 
 sentences, or of faulty time-order, or of mispropor- 
 tion, or of dwindling interest, or the like. But in first- 
 
 i r work such correction should be of the simplest 
 kind an d only in palpable cases . You will be estab- 
 lishing habits of irood tin-in.' planning, will have or- 
 derly arrangement much in mind; but these larger 
 matters require less attention than you think: the 
 small details are very much more difficult and im- 
 portant than might be supposed, even in the upper 
 classes. You are not doing college work, but are 
 four years below that. Memories of theme-criticism 
 in college may vitiate your labor. 
 
 You may marvel at the proposal to measure health 
 
202 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 and depth by counting misspellings. If so, don't on 
 any account accept this method. Don't workLaecord- 
 ing to any plan that violates your feelings. I know 
 very well that in the whole opinionated range of this 
 most opinionated of subjects there- is no place where 
 a man so insensibly slips into a habit (directed at 
 first by chance, confirmed without analysis) and 
 grows so accustomed to his opinions that he cannot 
 entertain any objection to them. You are urged not 
 to adopt anything that does not appeal to you. Be 
 wary — I will go so far as to say — about adopting it 
 if it does appeal to you. Think it over ; make experi- 
 ments. "B ut on no account theoriz e. A physician 
 smiles wearily when people theorize about ailments 
 and remedies, for he is so familiar with a thousand 
 forms of illness which reduce to a few of the simplest 
 causes of ill health. A patient 's most violent tooth- 
 ache is nothing in his estimation, but he is most 
 solicitous about that pin-scratch. This may be more 
 than an analogy when applied to the author, who 
 sees every month a thousand composition defects, 
 who has taught his thousand boys of all sorts under 
 conditions that oblige him to rate them according to 
 college-entrance ability, in conformity with the same 
 sort of rating for other subjects. He finds that all 
 the weaknesses can be reduced to a few simple kinds. 
 Fewness and simplicity are as much a mystery to 
 him as tetanus is to a doctor, but he has learned the 
 fact. A physician knows that the yellow on a tongue 
 amounts to nothing in itself, that scraping it off will 
 produce no health ; yet he sets about eradicating it. 
 He wants to produce such a change in the system 
 that the tongue will grow red. So a teacher is not 
 merely scraping off a symptom when he grades for 
 
THEMES 203 
 
 mechanical errors; he is correcting and vitalizing 
 a mind, setting up that carefulness which is mental 
 healt h. When you regard the little errors as an out- 
 ward certificate of an inward weakness, when you 
 have learned that they can be removed only by 
 severe and protracted regimen, when you have for 
 a long term of years observed how mental vigor is 
 increased after the evil symptoms have been got rid 
 of, then you may marvel at your present skepticism. 
 We need not depend upon a medical parallel. 
 From three quite different sources I learn that 
 mediocre dramatic talent is most assisted by train- 
 ing in clearness of enunciation. I cannot vouch for 
 this because I never tried it. But I do know by 
 experience with declamations that for several years 
 I failed to get best results because I went in for tone- 
 v. i nation and pauses and dramatic changes. Boys 
 of small ability — the great majority — were per- 
 plexed by my efforts. I gradually learned to say, 
 4 ' Make it clear. Take time to make every word 
 distinct" With mere articulation as my first pur- 
 pose I had a higher average of success. The same 
 sort of thing is true of all arts. Are young musi- 
 cians — even those of marked ability — taught to " ex- 
 press personality"! They are drilled and drilled 
 and drilled in finger-exercises and positions. Are 
 novitiates in painting and sculpture — even those of 
 special promise — exhorted to create with vivacity 
 and esprit? They study anatomy and perspective. 
 And they are selected individuals, drawn to the 
 itadioe by the urge of innate aptitude. Suppose 
 that all the students of a high school had to know 
 the rudiments of piano-playing or sketching a scene. 
 Sometimes I wonder — onlv wonder of course — 
 
204 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 whether the very fact that the average teacher of 
 English is not an artist in language may not explain 
 why we go to work so much more rhapsodically than 
 the teachers of other arts. Occasionally I wonder 
 how Milton and Kipling would teach English — after 
 ten years of experience. 
 
 I suspect they would concede something to liter- 
 ary ability, would admit that two variations of 
 strictly mechanical marking are proper: (1) To 
 deduct something (say not over 20%) for generally 
 faulty arrangement; (2) to reserve the right to add 
 a bonus (say not over 20%, or at the very most not 
 over 30%) for pleasing effectiveness. Then without 
 distraction they could affix grades that would mean 
 something in another school; they could with less 
 labor be four times as useful, since they could read 
 four times as many compositions; .they could per- 
 form a work for which the colleges would call them 
 blessed. 
 
 What should pupils write about? Always about 
 familiar matters in which they have a real interest. 
 It may occasionally happen that a class is so well 
 acquainted with a book that they will care to discuss 
 some character — what was wrong with Godfrey 
 Cass? was Banquo dishonest? If at any time you 
 are sure they have some thoughts which only lazi- 
 ness would prevent their caring to express, assign 
 such a topic; but in general don't. If you ever feel 
 sure that their minds really contain some elemen- 
 tary criticism, try that; but the experiment is of 
 doubtful utility. Give them subjects that they have 
 been interested in. Limit yourself further by the 
 consideration that though they were interested in 
 that tramp, they were not seeing him, as you were, 
 
THEMES 205 
 
 tli rough literary lenses; they were not calling to 
 mind the dainty character sketch or the dramatic 
 awesomeness of a wrecked life; they were not see- 
 ing through him to a pile of words about him. You 
 are always in danger of beginn'mir al the literary 
 enHjtfLa^snbject. Don't. Begin with tin- tiling in 
 itself. What did they notice? How did they feelT 
 Why <li<l they care? In all your explanations of how 
 to go to work, how to arrange a story or present a 
 picture, talk of things, of facts, of examples. You 
 get nowhere by reciting from a book, " Literature, 
 in order to be spontaneous, must derive its method 
 as well as its material from life." Such a marvel- 
 ously unsympathetic rigmarole comes from a mind 
 that believes that "the art of being natural when 
 we write is something that most of us have to 
 learn." This dictum is too sadly true when applied* 
 to the jargon that we teachers use in addressing chil- [ 
 divn. We have been so befumed in the charms of 
 studied spontaneity that we quite forget how to be 
 natural Think of telling a child that when his story 
 is once started ' ' his next question is how to proceed 
 60 as to hold the attention of his hearers." Suggest 
 no such question to him. Start with that thing, that 
 queer happening, that mighty good story, and attend 
 only to that "Studying the art of telling a story 
 naturally" is a vicious procedure, for it destroys all 
 naturalness and creates the belief that theme-writing 
 is a cult, an esoteric process of weaving intangibili- 
 ties according to an unseen pattern into an acro- 
 amatic abstrusity. Expect nolhing from the theory 
 of the t.'xt or your own expounding, (live examples. 
 What is done in the beginning of this extract? For 
 what particular purpose did the author start a pars- 
 
206 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 graph there? What was the concluding sentence 
 about? After we have seen that freckle-faced boy 
 outwit the policeman, shall we walk home a placid 
 mile and eat a placid dinner? That particular thing 
 that is done in a quoted paragraph they can imitate 
 or adopt or get the point of; the psychological con- 
 siderations that lead us to theoretical generaliza- 
 tions they cannot use. Nor can you; nor did any 
 artist ever profit by theories. It is the nature of an 
 inartistic mind to apprehend theories; it is the 
 creative mind which sees and represents things. The 
 normal child mind is never analytical; it is some- 
 what creative. It is worked upon by that particular 
 example. 
 
 Our young people are so fond of stories, read so 
 many, that most of them can by purely unconscious 
 imitation swing quickly through the "who", 
 "where", "when," and "why" in lively dialogue, 
 can keep the narrative moving interestingly, and can 
 terminate with a f ' snapper ' ' or significant sentence. 
 Tne X .prefer^ s^ojj-£writing to any other type. A 
 good device for suggesting a plot and a climax to 
 aim at is to read some humorous anecdote, requir- 
 ing them to lead up to the situation by getting us 
 better acquainted with the people and what they 
 were about. Description is imt^j^elljiked. Trv 
 to keep away from inventories like "my room" or 
 "a village street"; suggest life of some kind: a fine 
 dog, the man I admire most, the bleachers, a squall, 
 a crowded car, what makes Monroe Street interest- 
 ing. Give them a chance for a bit of action or sug- 
 gestion of narrative to help in placing the picture 
 before a reader. Don't assign "descript ion," but 
 ask for a picture of how^Tooked and what feelings 
 
THEMES 207 
 
 it aroused — remembering that this is an age of 
 oving" pictures. E xposition is least liked. 
 Usually it is necessary to give two or three topics, 
 so that all may be explaining the operation of what 
 they understand at first hand. A insist that 
 
 tli*- main effort in such a theme is to bring out clearly 
 what thr reader dors not know. Hence part of the 
 assignment should specify who the reader is to be. 
 haps he knows nothing at all, like the Hawaiian 
 below ; more likely he knows a good deal, as in the 
 16 of electric lighting. In either case a writer's 
 first concern, his whole effort, is to realize just what 
 it is that the reader cannot picture or understand, 
 and to make that clear, working up carefully from 
 what the reader does know. Tell them that school 
 texts often explain processes as if for people who 
 already know — thus: "In the first type of the ex- 
 pository paragraph which we shall study, the main 
 thoughts used to amplify the fundamental idea stand 
 to each other in coordinate relation." Tell the m 
 they must do hotter than that; they must really 
 "get something over" to a reader. If they are Lioinir 
 !! n Hawaiian hoy how to make a snow fort, they 
 mustn't talk about the "hoary meteor" nor about 
 ''the aqueous vapor of the atmosphere precipitated 
 in a crystalline form," nor must they suddenly begin 
 to roll up a ball. They must tell in human language 
 what snow-flakes are like, how snow looks in drifts, 
 how it cannot be rolled in zero weather, how feathery 
 flakes become icy missiles, how hig spheres of snow 
 can be made and oemented Most of the boys know 
 the lingo of the garage; tell them it means nothing 
 to you; yon must have plain speech. Wireless or 
 electric lighting or base-running rules or making 
 
208 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 bread or tangoing or stage scenery or sailing or how 
 we know what time it is or making honey or how 
 clams live — all must be explained so as to bring out 
 what is not known. 
 
 Give optional topics frequently, one for the liter- 
 als and one for the fancifuls. Or set one kind of 
 topic or one central situation which may be devel- 
 oped in any way they like. See whether you get good 
 results by letting each choose whatever topic he 
 pleases. Probably they will enjoy this free choice, 
 and the resulting variety is much more pleasant 
 reading. Often such license has to be limited — as: 
 "No journals of how I spent a week," or "No 
 trips," or "Anything but a. story." Warn them 
 against the pointless succession of "We got to a 
 
 hotel about eight that night. The next morning" 
 
 and so on for a series of samenesses. Developing 
 the little thing is always the best exercise. 
 
 In general it is safest to advise against any intro- 
 duction or summary or conclusion. Such things 
 may be needed in labored essays (though even that 
 is doubtful), but are a good deal worse than useless 
 in themes a few hundred words long. Pupils easily 
 get into the way of writing a preliminary nourish 
 and a puttering close. Urge them to begin at the 
 beginning and stop at the end. Read examples of 
 ways in which members of the class arrived at a 
 strong closing. 
 
 Whether to require an outline prepared before be- 
 ginning to write, whether to require notes, whether 
 to resort to similes of freight-cars and geometry as 
 an aid to good paragraphing, whether to advise furi- 
 ous writing and phlegmatic correcting — this sort of 
 thing I may have opinions about after another 
 
TIIK.MES 209 
 
 fifteen years. 1 have not arrived at much of any- 
 thingBofar. Bon have authors gone to work! One 
 has never blotted a line and another tempers ami 
 i iiirnds for years. Ibsen helped himself by toying 
 with a trayful of dolls and Sheridan could be forced 
 into writing a mile a minute. Rhetoricus may sort 
 out hundreds of little jottings; a Gettysburg Ad- 
 dress may be penned without one preliminary 
 memorandum. Some modern authors hire a hack 
 to do their punctuating; some, like Cyrano, would 
 not have their own pointing disturbed for five dol- 
 lars per comma. 
 
 Yet every one has kept his eye on unity, coherence, 
 and emphasis. Every one has had a plan — no matter 
 whether he committed it to paper or not. One per- 
 son is dependent on that written form, as an archi- 
 tect must first draw plans; another can no more let 
 his fluid scheme get on to cold paper than a spider 
 can distribute its liquid before spinning a web. You 
 have by instinct or habit developed a method of your 
 own. Insensibly this is what you will teach. 
 
 It seems to me that by all logic and psychology a 
 preliminary outline must be a good thing. But it 
 may be a mere make-believe that the writer has not 
 used ; it may even impede ready and fluent expres- 
 sion. Your textbook will chart the process as con- 
 fidently as though it were explaining how to lay 
 bricks. You will do well not to share this confidence 
 until your observation confirms it. The plainest 
 results can be exhibited from any set of themes. The 
 how-to-obtain is quite another matter. Contrast an 
 Interesting, prompt opening with a verbose and tire- 
 some one; contrast three sequent paragraphs with 
 ten tiny and planless ones; contrast the mere stop- 
 
> 
 
 7 
 
 210 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ping of a story with that bright climax that is worth 
 all the rest of the narrative. Examples can be 
 imitated. Theories and methods are ineffective. 
 For many years I never required an outline, but 
 thought I ought to. I am now requiring that on the 
 top of the first page there shall be a numbered series 
 of titles for each paragraph ; the directions are ' ' one 
 brief title for each paragraph, so that I can see at 
 a glance just why you divided as you did." This 
 has commended itself so strongly that I shall never 
 abandon it. Though I suspect that half the outlines 
 are simply added after the paragraphing is all com- 
 pleted, this does not worry me. The point is that 
 each young writer feels a responsibility for naming 
 some time just what he has been about. Perhaps 
 it does him more good to find out as he reviews his 
 theme that two paragraph titles are absurdly similar 
 or that the third paragraph demands two titles. The 
 plan results in better dividing — that's the whole 
 point. 
 
 And what about paragraphs? I don't know. No- 
 body knows. A decade ago they were the central 
 citadel to be attacked. Teachers directed all be- 
 sieging operations at them. Sentences were simply 
 outlying breastworks. Even today paragraphing is 
 the subject of monographs and long chapters. My 
 own feeling is this: reajly effective paragraphing 
 is the outward sign of an inward and spiritual con- 
 dition ; it shows sound thinking. No teacher, in any 
 subject, can do much to develop the power of sound 
 thinking. He can do no more than instruct a dull 
 mind in the forms of reasoning about triangles; can 
 go no further than developing to some extent the 
 knowledge of the facts of Latin syntax. Power to 
 
Til KM 1 211 
 
 think originally — well, what do you say! Now, a 
 me is a piece of original work. We can teach a 
 boy that it ought normally to appear in several divi 
 sions and can exact that appearance. We can do 
 more. W T e can train him (after a fashion) to stick 
 to one part of his subject in each chunk of composi- 
 ti'ii, to carry us from one to the next without too 
 violent a jolt, and to arrive at something better than 
 the middle of his subject. That is no mean result. 
 It is a great big one. 
 
 We take our youngest boys (corresponding to the 
 eighth grade or a first form) through that stage of 
 development at which they are able to leave an inch 
 of margin on the left (no slight achievement) and 
 to present a 250-word composition as not less than 
 i nor more than four or five blocks, each of which 
 is indented. We speak of these blocks as para- 
 graphs. We speak often of "one part in one para- 
 graph,' ' but do not go deeper into the philosophy 
 than to point out that "here you begin to tell about 
 what happened next morning' ' or "here a new per- 
 beghifl to do things" or "here you go to a dif- 
 ■nt place.' ' The next year we insist more defi- 
 nitely on having a reason for paragraphing. From 
 the beginning we discourage the one-or-two sentence 
 paragraph, especially the separation of that intro- 
 tory sentence of the first paragraph as if it were 
 an introductory paragraph to the whole theme. We 
 try to get separate paragraphs for dialogue, but 
 otherwise maintain that a 300- word theme would 
 seldom need six divisions. In the third year we keep 
 up an incessant command, "Name the topic." We 
 are always inquisitive as to why this division was 
 made or why no division was made there. 
 
212 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Take plenty of time when you assign the first 
 theme to give exact instructions as to form. Make 
 everything explicit, say it twice, leave nothing to be 
 taken for granted. There is to be a margin at the 
 left one inch wide, and there is to be no margin at 
 the right. There is to be a title set well up above 
 the first line, each word of which (except articles, 
 conjunctions, and prepositions) is to be capitalized. 
 Announce the required length as "not less than so 
 many words"; for if you say "pages," you will 
 have to accept half -measure from some. At the t op 
 of the first page there shall be "just one brief title 
 for each paragraph," numbered to correspond to 
 the paragraphs. Pages are to be numbered, are to 
 be arranged in the right order, are to be folded in 
 one way; the name is to appear on the side you 
 specify. 
 
 You gather up the sheaf the following day and 
 take it home to read. U se the very simplest marks . 
 Some schools publish an incredibly long list of sym- 
 bols to denote the kinds of errors. How many they 
 actually use, how accurately the students know what 
 they mean, I cannot say. Nor can I condemn the 
 P method, because I have never given it a trial. I 
 have, however, some indications that it cannot pay 
 for the extra care and time it demands. There must 
 be an advantage to the student in finding out what 
 is wrong. Not that I ever puzzle him. I never mark 
 a kind of error which has not been fully commented 
 on in recitations ; or if I do, I write a brief explana- 
 tion in the margin. Occasionally I have to make 
 sure that he sees the reason for a correction. If, for 
 instance, he has one parenthetical comma and has 
 forgotten the other, I draw a ring around the 
 
THK.MKs 213 
 
 comma, run a line over to where the other comma 
 ought to be, continue the line out to the margin, and 
 write "Two." I may draw a long line under a series 
 of words on either side of a conjunction and write 
 in the margin "Punct." Sometimes I may run a 
 line from an unpunctuated who or where out to a 
 "Restrictive! "in the margin, but I avoid most time- 
 killing memoranda and notes and queries and sting- 
 ing rebukes and humorous comments. Usually a big 
 lamation mark or a huge X or a huge V will do 
 more work. In marginal comments I seldom rewrite 
 anything or try to do more detailed criticizing than 
 just to say "Clumsy" or "Change" or "Rewrite." 
 (At the end of the theme I may write a sentence or 
 two of general criticism or of directions for recast- 
 ing or of encouragement.) I often pass over oddities 
 of diction. I sometimes judge that a form like Not 
 at all, that's not true is "really" a sentence error, 
 but that I will not count off for it; though I require 
 it to be rewritten with a semicolon. If there is only 
 one carelessness on a theme, or if there are two or 
 three rather slight faults in a good piece of writing. 
 I may mark "+=100," which means that general 
 Hence has caused the small blemishes to be ex- 
 cused. Similarly if the writing is generally heedless 
 I may count off somewhat more than the arithmet- 
 ical total or count up the smaller errors unforgiv- 
 ing 1\. I dash a ring around such queer things as 
 "the kens of the police", "to float on the currant", 
 "again once more"; but I am not much concerned 
 with them. Occasionally there will be in one sen- 
 t- nee a double error— e. g., "And, to my small 
 knowledge there haven't been many had wrecks on 
 tin \. w Haven." The phrasing is clumsy, mixing 
 
214 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 two idioms and conveying nothing; but that is a 
 once-in-a-great-while matter compared with "two 
 commas or none." So, to avoid a complicated lot of 
 correcting at one spot, I indicate the punctuation 
 and say nothing about the wording. The misused 
 comma may seem to you insignificant compared with 
 the clumsy phrasing, but it is really the greater 
 error in freshman English. Such a phrasing may 
 be typical of a careless mind, but is not a typical 
 form of carelessness. We must watch for the ever- 
 lastingly recurrent particulars, following the Law- 
 renceville motto that "The only inexcusable fault 
 is carelessness. 7 ' On the back of some themes 
 I jot abbreviated memoranda of what needs com- 
 ment before the whole class — of what is eternal and 
 typical. Then I give a harangue about "the same 
 old things that we have been hearing all these 
 months' ' — like laid for lay; and I try to get time 
 for some of the more common kinds of clumsiness: 
 "the body was cut and scratched with numerous 
 finger-marks • ', "refrains from hitting him with the 
 excuse' ' (with causes more absurdities than any 
 other word), "since they both were in each other's 
 company" (both is a constant nuisance). 
 
 . It is always the same old things. The more ex- 
 perience you gain, the more you will see that all 
 
 I avoidable awkwardness and all attainable graces 
 reduce to a few simple fundamentals. Do you strive 
 for maturity in sentences? Attack so, ceaselessly 
 putting on the board 50 that, and so; attack so he 
 could not, always suggesting and so could not. In- 
 veigh against the aimless repetition of words. It 
 passes all belief how a pupil never hears his own 
 sentences until you read them before the class ; how 
 
THEMES 215 
 
 month after month he will persist in saying "Then 
 w< came to a cliff; at the foot of this cliff"; how 
 he cannot give up that repeated noun; how after 
 you have three times trailed your red pencil across 
 one of his pages to show nine boats or ten rooms 
 or eleven Indians he will submit you a page with 
 <n schools on it. If you keep at him and keep at 
 him, you are revising his whole mentality, making 
 him attain to all the maturity he will ever be capable 
 of. Would you have variety in sentences? Don't 
 present any theory of monotony ; insist that all sub- 
 jects must not come first ; read the beginnings of ten 
 babyishly similar sentences on Tom Jones's theme. 
 Then plan to follow Tom up, to hound him, to get 
 finally a page on which four subjects are not first. 
 Bead a string of consecutive simple sentences from 
 Marian Chevalier's story, coming to the end of each 
 with a thud, showing what they sound like. Read 
 five consecutive compound sentences from Bob's 
 description, dwelling clankingly on that infernal and, 
 until the class hears what monotony is. Rehearse 
 and rehearse and rehearse some decent complex sen- 
 tences beginning with a dependent clause and closing 
 strongly. Hold up for laughter that aimless habit 
 of saying "Nothing at all was happening, when 
 suddenly something portentous happened." Inquire 
 and inquire and inquire whether they are not willing 
 to begin with a while or a just as. Those are the 
 operations that prevail upon dull minds to imitate 
 something approaching a mature and varied style. 
 It is always the same few old things in punctua- 
 tion. You might guess from Chapter VIII that a uni- 
 verse of complexities was before you. By no means. 
 No high-school pupil will ever look uneducated in 
 
216 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 'writing if he habitually attends to six perfectly sim- 
 ple matters : commas with nouns of address, commas 
 before words that mean but, comma before and 
 1 ' when the subject changes, " quotations, non-restric- 
 tive words, and a semicolon for grammatical inde- 
 pendence. The last is worth all the rest. Mark non- 
 observance ^.ve times as severely. Don't speak of 
 1 1 comma-blunders, ' ' for we have found that term 
 confusing; call them " sentence-errors.' ' Swear by 
 all your hopes of success loTiate~Tihem. Lay your 
 hand upon the altar and vow, by all that is sacred 
 in education, that you will eternally maintain feud 
 against them. 
 
 In slighter matters plan always to observe what 
 are the few recurrent ways of showing ignorance or 
 being tiresome. Study to avoid non-essentials, to 
 have nothing to say about your prepossessions, to 
 pass over some colloquialisms or downright slang. 
 As a non-essential I am inclined to classify shall. To 
 be sure I mark it, speak about it, ask for it ; but it is 
 a foreign idiom to most of the new generation even 
 in the plainest indicative. To require "He said he 
 should like to go ' ' is almost to destroy faith in your 
 ruling against had ought. As a prepossession I will 
 instance the case of a novice teacher who once marked 
 a parsing paper zero because an eighth-grade boy 
 had omitted periods, and a teacher of twenty-five 
 years of experience who insists that where cannot 
 mean ivhither, and my own self who for some years 
 fought needlessly against dove for dived. As slang 
 about which nothing need be said I suggest fake, 
 pinch, getaway, hike, exam, dinky — why write them? 
 To declaim against all ephemeral terms is to dis- 
 credit yourself. If they appear in sueh a dignified 
 
THEMES 217 
 
 setting that the class will see the humor when you 
 read the sentence, they may be worth a comment; 
 but a teacher who tries to taboo them as wrong perse 
 will only lose the confidence of unesthetic boys. (I 
 don't know about girls; perhaps they would be 
 docile.) In contrast to such not- to-be-noticed things 
 are a few tiresome words like near-by; nowadays 
 every drug-store, all trees, all streams, all theaters 
 are ' ' near-by. ' ' However is used too much, and half 
 the time as a mere loose linking, with no notion of 
 its meaning. Due to perpetually appears with the 
 meaning on account of; indeed it is so common that 
 I am wondering if it may not establish itself. Parti- 
 ciples are required to perform the most extraor- 
 dinary feats — as, " Rowing out about a hundred 
 yards, the stone was dropped overboard.' ' Some 
 young writers will insist that their initial a's and 
 w's are " meant to be large. 1 ' Others will most un- 
 accountably capitalize an occasional noun; most of 
 those who write latin will speak of an Inn. By some 
 similar cockneyism they will repeatedly refer on the 
 same theme to a man as which and a country or a 
 pet alligator as who. Be on the watch for similar 
 cases of faults that are persistent and common, so 
 as to get emphasis on them and not be wasting time 
 on what is unusual or non-typical. 
 
 One Of the best w fl yg in aflyfi oyogifllifc-AnH time 
 
 and tamper is to insist that syllables be joined and 
 words be spaced wide apart. Laboratory experiment 
 has shown that nothing else so retards a reader as 
 lessness with spacing. 
 When I deliver 1 ekly harangue on the wdek'fl 
 
 compositions, I aim at the simple, the necessary, the 
 same old things that were spoken about last week 
 
218 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 and that are going to recur a month hence. An error 
 thus denounced in public assumes an importance 
 that it may not have in private conference: the 
 snickers of the class are convincing. So far as pos- 
 sible avoid naming the offender. This makes him 
 resentful and — here is the real reason — distracts the 
 attention of the class from a principle to a personal 
 " sting.' ' The reading of extracts, good or bad, the 
 reading of a good theme, the scoring of a bad one — 
 all should be impersonal. 
 
 I very seldom require rewriting of themes, but 
 always have them corrected by the following time- 
 saving plan: the pupil first goes through his theme 
 numbering every mark I have made ; then on a sepa- 
 rate sheet, numbering to correspond, he writes his 
 words and sentences as they ought to be ; folds this 
 in the theme and at the next recitation hands in these 
 corrections. A pupil who is careful has little work 
 to do ; one who is careless would rather rewrite 
 entire. 
 
 In all your contriving and exhorting bear in mind 
 this little allegory: Once upon a time an apostle of 
 Apollo, carrying his violin, met a Wyoming sheep- 
 herder who was buying provisions in a grocery 
 store. "Let me play you this charming thing," said 
 the apostle, ' ' so that when you are back on the range 
 you may try it upon your shepherd's pipe." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 BEADING 
 
 Why do people read? If that seems too universal 
 to admit of an answer, narrow it down to a particu- 
 lar book and a particular person. Upon the reply 
 depends your whole conception of what it means "to 
 teach literature.' ' If the answer seems obvious, 
 close this book and ponder an hour before you open 
 it again. Any solution offered to you ready-made 
 is worthless, but your own earnest thought^ may be 
 as a light to your feet. 
 
 Do you happen to recall Whittier 's poem, The 
 Demon of the Study f When "she" read a tale of 
 woe, there were tears in her eye ; and a merry song 
 would make her voice as glad as an April bird's. 
 But the demon read hour after hour in the self-same 
 tone. He was a "reading fiend.' ' Whittier did not 
 know whence he came. We know. He comes from 
 that sense of duty about literature, that feeling that 
 we ought to read. All specializers in English have 
 read as a business and have felt that they ought "to 
 supply their most serious deficiencies." It has sel- 
 dom been an irksome duty. "The stout old man 
 with the greasy hat" has not taken the joy out of 
 Ehf Ode to the West Wind; he has not really ob- 
 sessed us ; many of us have been quite unconscious 
 of his presence. Whittier had more sensitive per- 
 ions. He felt that hidden motive — that Apollo's 
 wares are precious and that we must busily gather 
 
 219 
 
220 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 heaps of them — which impelled him to read and read 
 and read ; and he personified the impulse. All things 
 that bore the government stamp of the kingdom of 
 the muses were objects of the poet's desire. "She" 
 very likely had not the least use for The Rape of the 
 Loch or The Tatler. Probably there were weeks 
 when she did not read a page, and never felt one 
 covetous pang for the literary treasure she might 
 have piled up in those days. Whittier credits her 
 with being the right kind of reader. 
 
 Should there be any such thing as an " ought" 
 when it comes to reading? If a person finds no 
 pleasure in The Lady of the Lake, ought he to train 
 himself into a condition in which the poem is "not 
 so bad after all"? Should we as teachers feel that 
 pupils ought to like Two Years before the Mast, and 
 that it is sad if they prefer Potash and Perlmutter 
 to Sesame and Lilies? Or should we say that read- 
 ing is a pleasure, a luxury ; that when we make any 
 attempt to alter and educate tastes we are violating 
 the very spirit that makes literature valuable? 
 Even if we seem to succeed in luring the barbarians 
 from the Cosmopolitan to Thackeray, have we really 
 benefited them? Have we not merely adorned the 
 surface? Is it not a process of painting the leopard's 
 spots ? To put it concretely : if " she ' ' had not cared 
 for poetry and if Whittier had put her into his Eng- 
 lish class, would the results have been worth while? 
 
 I should never have known how vehement the 
 usual affirmative is if I had not once happened to 
 attend a certain "round tabje." The discussion 
 languished. The experienced teachers were hopeful 
 of nothing; the novices feared to ask questions. 
 After an embarrassing period of silence the hour 
 
READING 221 
 
 was saved by a girl's self-sacrifice. She propounded : 
 "Why is it that pupils don't like to read the 
 -sics?" There was a tempest. Every one of the 
 fifty-eight ladies was ready to rise and speak her 
 thoughts. For the life of me I could not guess why. 
 The query seemed to me as natural and as useless 
 as if in a Bible class someone should ask, "Why is 
 it that people don't like to be good?" I have seen 
 a class enjoy The Vicar of Wakefield, but not in the 
 sense in which they "like" the Saturday Evening 
 Post. 
 
 I was soon enlightened. The novice and I were 
 alone in a dark pit, and torch-bearers came from 
 every side. It appeared that pupils did like the 
 classics. One lady asserted that she could not recall 
 a single instance in her career of the failure of a 
 class to like a piece of literature. No others could 
 go as far as that, yet all thought the dislike was ex- 
 imial. Imagine such a question in such a com- 
 I >any ! Try to imagine my Whittier question in such 
 an environment. The base and cowardly cold-heart- 
 edness of it would have filled the room with tumultu- 
 ous pity. Worth while to try? Why, it was tragic 
 that anyone should fail. I caught no least indication 
 that the "worth while" question would have been 
 regarded as a sane one. 
 
 Perhaps it is not. It may be like asking, "Is it 
 worth while to try to save human souls?" Since it 
 is generally conceded that every person has a soul 
 and that there is a way to save it, a minister who 
 answered "no" would seem to deny his calling. 
 Most teachers invest their profession with this 
 sacred character. A boy who has been taught to 
 enjoy Shakespeare has been saved. 
 
222 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Probably you are already imbued with this notion. 
 You will find it breathing all about you from the 
 moment you enter on your labors, from every col- 
 league and every "suggestions for teachers." If 
 you meet with discouragements, remember that there 
 is a teacher in the world who does not know that he 
 ever induced one human being to like a piece of 
 literature. This confession may comfort and sustain 
 you, because it is likely that hundreds of teachers 
 are no better off. 
 
 "Why do people read? Excluding all of us who are 
 haunted by the fiend and all who read so as to be 
 able to say they have read (notice I shift to "they"), 
 why do people curl up with a book? Because they 
 are after pleasure, wish entertainment. No author 
 wants his work perused on any other terms. No one 
 who reads for any other reason is honoring the 
 writer. If a friend of yours never looks at a novel 
 that is more than three years old, you may feel sorry 
 for him because such a great lot of pleasure is denied 
 1 him. Do you try to convert him? Do you feel that 
 he ought to be saved esthetically? 
 
 That is where the whole world divides into two 
 classes, the missionaries and the others. If your 
 instinct is, having the light, to pass it on, your life 
 will be an effort to convert pupils to the beauties of 
 literature. 
 
 It is a noble instinct. The world needs more of 
 your kind. But there is a chance that you will be 
 more effective in proportion as you sympathize with 
 the other fellow. How about being missionaried? 
 Are you yourself most apt to be converted by the 
 person whose manner announces, "I propose to in- 
 fluence your soul"? As for me, my soul retires into 
 
READING 223 
 
 a corner at the first intimation of such a design. I 
 resent any effort to lure and proselyte my spirit, and 
 I have noticed that young people are singularly like 
 th< ir elders in the matter of mental autonomy. If I 
 see a friend getting five dollars' worth of pleasure 
 out of Siegfried or a league game, I may learn to 
 covet his source of happiness, may catch the con- 
 tagion; but not because of any effort he makes to 
 persuade me. People who whole-heartedly enjoy 
 their children or their tobacco never seem concerned 
 to convert bachelors or non-smokers. Genuine de- 
 li irl it never worries about influencing other people; 
 jei it is making converts all the time. The English 
 Leaflet 13 contains a whole gospel of "inspiring" 
 in one sentence: "I remember a very poor teacher 
 of literature who lived in an atmosphere so sincere, 
 so generous, so humanly sympathetic that her pupils 
 left her enriched and strengthened for actual liv- 
 ing." Somehow I suspect that this woman never 
 coached herself to inculcate a love. It is likely that 
 she simply tried to be honest and thorough in her 
 <laily business. 
 
 How responsive have you been to those intellect- 
 ual missionaries who have tried to kindle in you 
 some appreciation of their gospels of physics or 
 astronomy? Has your soul been roused to appre- 
 hend the culture offered by modern science, or do 
 you merely tolerate it in a benignant way? Have 
 you thoroughly realized that there is a mental ex- 
 hilaration in radium and Peruvian ruins and wire- 
 less and the fight against cancer beside which // 
 Pcnseroso is feeble! Three years ago a boy who 
 was not very keen for Milton's minor poems intro- 
 duoed me to a science book which had, if rightly 
 
224 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 read, more stimulus for the imagination than most 
 of ns can get from Paradise Lost. Literature is not 
 the only treasure on that strand where Newton and 
 Browning have to be met together if they are rightly 
 met. Goethe, whose emotions could be so profoundly 
 stirred by The Vicar of Wakefield, occupied his soul 
 with the theory of light. May a teacher of literature 
 not be in danger of assuming that the right kind of 
 spirit is absorbed too exclusively in Intimations of 
 
 I Immortality? of forgetting that the literature string 
 
 ( is not the strongest in the human harp? 
 
 But granting the full worth of this desire to en- 
 lighten, it must be ever borne in mind that no art is 
 so difficult as converting. Billy Sunday has a gift 
 that converts thousands; Bunyan and King David 
 could hardly save "themselves. One professor has 
 the knack of turning thousands of young men into 
 the paths of good reading; another can only feel 
 that stony-ground agriculture will not pay in the 
 long run. Imprudent and unsympathetic zeal may 
 do incalculable harm. The instant you step out of 
 J your own personality in an attempt "to inspire a 
 
 Hove of good reading' ' you wrong yourself and the 
 class. You may get a galvanic result — some reaction 
 that is jerkily strong — but you will set up no steady 
 current. You may plant seed, may add fertilizer; 
 
 - but God alone can give the increase. Thank Him 
 for it if you find He has given you the gift. Don't 
 get melancholy if you find yourself unendowed. 
 English literature has propagating powers of its 
 own. They tell me that nowadays great reliance is 
 put in medical missionaries, men who do not directly 
 aim at soul-saving, but who lay splendid founda- 
 tions. If we unfortunate teachers, of lesser talents, 
 
WADING m 
 
 will minister to the mere information of the harba- 
 -. we can feel that we accomplish something. 
 To !><• genuine, !<> be frank, never to allow that 
 taint of hypocrisy t<» enter into what wo say, will 
 insure against evil effects and never detract from 
 good work. Few persons can be perfectly frank 
 with themselves in this matter, much less with 
 others. In this very chapter, for example, after all 
 my revising, all abandoning of hedging statements, 
 there is an irreducible element of pretense and hum- 
 Iuilt. One dreads to appear a cold, denying spirit; 
 would like to echo what is so conventionally warm 
 And humane; is forever tempted to deceive himself 
 by imputing to himself motives which it is generally 
 supposed he ought to have. I speak of this because, 
 knowing that I am not an exceptional being, I must 
 suppose that others in their publicly expressed opin- 
 ion > and ail vice have had a little of my weakness. 
 And I think it may put heart into some first-year 
 Worker if 1 give him this hope that he is not such a 
 
 miserable failure after all. I am sure that in my own 
 Brat years such a word would not have lessened my 
 earnestness, and would have been a real source of 
 i fulness. You can do better when you are 
 cheerful 
 
 Sou have noticed thai there are persons to whom 
 babies will always go and persons who are the life 
 of a party. The most crafty scheming will not lure 
 the little onos, nor t he most eager determination add 
 party's merriment Bui patient study of bait 
 and pools may enable you to gel a little nearer to 
 the record of that feDon who alw.i the biggest 
 
 h of fish. Think of these cases when yon -it 
 iv a ela->. 
 
226 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 The English Journal reported three years awe- 
 some very interesting data that were collected in 
 Illinois and elsewhere. "What do pnpils enjoy?" 
 was answered from hundreds of reports of class 
 votes on the books read in school. The question- 
 naire was prompted by the feeling that we ought to 
 prescribe what pupils like, or at least that we ought 
 not to prescribe what they very generally dislike. 
 The same tendency has been apparent in the changes 
 of college-entrance lists. Lycidas was dropped, and 
 substitutes offered for Burke 's speech and Carlyle 's 
 Essay on Burns. It has been contended that this is 
 false pedagogy; that making things easy is a way 
 of making intellects flabby. Perfectly true of 
 the ordinary subjects, whose merit is that they are 
 hard. But Lycidas was not written to offer difficul- 
 ties; Johnson disliked it because it was easy. All 
 literature was designed to give pleasure. If it is 
 made an instrument of mental drill, it is — offer what 
 other defense you may — being perverted from its 
 function. That is the kernel of the whole discussion. 
 May it not be abnormal and wrong to try to teach a 
 love of literature 1 
 Examine yourself, for doing that honestly is the 
 i only way to find out about the other fellow. What 
 Aauthor were you ever "t augh t" to love? The man 
 who could teach me to love Sesame and Lilies 
 doesn't live. What percentage of teachers could 
 persuade you to love The Idler or The Alchemist or 
 The TasM Suppose that you are a great admirer 
 of Night Thoughts, what proportion of a hundred 
 teachers sitting at your feet could you convert to 
 your admiration? Ninety-nine would like the Dedi- 
 cation of Barrack-room Ballads, but that would be 
 
i; HADING 227 
 
 dm to youl Suppose that Mrs. Tingley took the 
 chair and hy her personal magnetism inspired ten 
 to love theosophy : should ymi think well of the con- 
 verts or long to emulate tin* converter! If you are 
 
 in a literature class, which kiwi of force do you wish 
 operant upon yourself, that of Mrs. Tingley or that 
 
 of the lf> '/trillion/ 
 
 The comparison ought not to be pushed. It is 
 unfair and scornful. N r it may be objects! 
 
 that we arc quibbling about a definition; that skill 
 in giving literature its opportunity to charm may be 
 all that is meant by u inculcating a low." Yet we 
 surely are discussing something immensely more 
 important than a definition. We arc speaking of a 
 stimulus, often a strong one, that some teachers give. 
 it in other subjects. One teacher has in- 
 spired many pupils with a devotion to algebra; 
 doubtless another has imparted an interest in Latin; 
 linly the right teaching of physics or geography 
 D rouses enthusiasm. The work of ministers is 
 more than an analogy: some of them are able to 
 inspire a love of religion. 
 
 Bere is the point, then, where I am expected to 
 smash comparisons with a logical battering-ram. I 
 have not the mental strength. It appears to me that 
 we are all alike; thai the highest function of all 
 
 • all decent citizens in 
 i> to in-pir e somebody with a love of somethin g. Ij 
 am S riting this chapter Just because 1 cannot see why 
 English teachers should think themselves specially 
 missioned to shed sweetness and tight on an 
 rwise dark and tasteless curriculum. We do 80 
 distinguish ourselves. College catalogues speak of 
 "developing a taste for good literature" when they 
 
228 "WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 describe English courses, whereas announcements 
 of music or history or art speak only of such unspir- 
 itual matters as knowledge or proficiency. The file of 
 Leaflets is pied with such gorgeous claims for good 
 English teaching as: "spiritual enlarging and 
 kindling ,, , "insight into character", "inculcation 
 of a love of books", "affection that springs from 
 delight." Did you ever see in discussions of other 
 branches any parallel to these ecstasies? 
 
 May we not properly apply a little skepticism to a 
 creed containing these extraordinary articles, and 
 scrutinize the evidence? Grajn^_Jhat_tlnsj^wjer 
 of ^ins piring ^xists^whal percentage o f high-scho ol 
 t eachers have it ? Half ofthemf Make a list of 
 those you know, putting a check after the names of 
 the inspirers. But perhaps this is unreasonable. It 
 may be fair to maintain that every teacher has some 
 spark of the kindling power, and that in his work 
 
 7 he ought to apply it to combustible minds. There is 
 the real issue : Should all teachers have for an object 
 what few can fully attain ? One of us ordinary per- 
 sons, with some skill in simple matters of knowledge 
 or clearness, can guide a class to a reasonable under- 
 standing of a book; if we are in a fine (and arti- 
 ficial) frenzy of making-them-love-it, much of our 
 work is vitiated ; the total effect of a recitation may 
 be a lesson in insincerity. Especially is this true of 
 women teaching boys, because the roughest boy is a 
 delicate galvanometer for detecting affectation. 
 
 How frank and deep-rooted is this love of litera- 
 ture which we are so conscious of, which we talk and 
 write about so much? It has always appeared to me 
 that the non-musical person who has trained himself 
 to enjoy sonatas is the one who declaims most about 
 
READING 229 
 
 loving music (and Leaves me cold); while one who 
 in his soul will rap my clumsy fingers — 
 tad idndk me. Aren't we English teachers in dan- 
 :• of appearing to be sentimental enticers if in our 
 b of steamships we play the pari of nrena on 
 Literature straits? 
 Only three years ago that question would have 
 d oonsidered blasphemous, Now you may hear 
 affirmative answers on all sides. I subjoin throe 
 s from the English Journal tor 1915. The 
 tii M describes the danger; the second and third are 
 different ways of facing it. 
 (1) A third misconception regarding English 
 work is that it is the mission of the teacher of Eng- 
 lish U) gel pupils to admire greatly a small list of 
 works of good literature of a particular type, and 
 thai when they do not specially care for these books 
 the work is largely a failure. But human life has a 
 wide diversity of feelings and interests, it is em- 
 bodied in personalities of every kind and type. If 
 literature La an expression of human life, or if liter- 
 ature is an appeal to human life, it must be as varied 
 as the life of which it is the expression or to which 
 it makes appeal If a certain type of literature does 
 not appeal to a pupil, it may be simply because the 
 outlook of his mind on life givefl it a range of intcr- 
 trieh that literature does not satisfy. 
 Not lorn: ago 1 had a conversation with a friend, 
 ian who has some position and reputation as an 
 
 educator, and in reply I enthusiastic wordi 
 
 ae on the value and significance of poetry, he said i 
 M 1 cannot brill If to care much for poetry. 1 
 
 not sec why a man should care to read such stuff 
 when he can read something worth while on as int 
 
i 
 
 230 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 esting a subject as evolution.' ' Much of what the 
 teacher presses upon the pupil's notice as the most 
 valuable literature this man rejected as mere stuff; 
 and yet he was regarded as a man of much intel- 
 lectual ability. We need to remember that a pupil 
 who in spite of all our efforts thinks that The Sketch 
 Book is dull, and Evangeline silly, and Ivanhoe slow 
 and uninteresting may still cherish some valuable 
 intellectual interests. _ Ro i and 8 . Keyser, 
 
 Jamaica Training School for Teachers. 
 
 (2) We teachers of literature find ourselves in a 
 different position from our colleagues. W e spea k of 
 literature as primarily a_ thmg_kLhe_£i2^ai^L. jQiher 
 departments treat their subjects as primarily things 
 t o be leaxne d. We expect our pupils to be interested 
 and delighted, from the outset of their work, and all 
 the way along. Our colleagues ask their pupils to 
 work and learn, and, if they hold out any hope of 
 pleasure, it is, "You'll like it better when you come 
 to understand it; it will be interesting when you get 
 farther into it." We have got our problem clouded. 
 We know well enough, we teachers of English, that 
 we have ourselves had to do real work to come by 
 some of our interests. And we know, too, that some 
 fields of literature, some books, some authors, will 
 never interest us. We don't see our task clearly, as 
 the teacher of mathematics sees his. He says to his 
 pupils, "Here is a piece of work to be done." He 
 is not likely to say anything about interest or pleas- 
 ure. If the pupil does the work, and enjoys it, so 
 much the better. But pleasure is not held out as a 
 bait. There is no cajolery about it. Now the danger 
 about cajolery is that, though it works well enough 
 
READ] 2:u 
 
 when it succeeds, it is worse than nothing when it 
 fails. Unsuccessful cajolery reacts against 
 author like an unsuccessful lie. And lying is ■ diffi- 
 cult business, Hamlet's remark to the contrary not- 
 withstanding. 
 Now many of our indirect attempts to arouse in- 
 est and pleasure react against our influence 
 because they fail in this way. What wonder that 
 the pupil comes to disregard our judgment, question 
 our intellectual weight, distrust our sincerity? Such 
 a lock is to be read " tor pleasure." The pupil finds 
 it dull, even though it be a great novel, like Henry 
 iiond. ]!<• has been misguided; he has been 
 told of an intellectual garden of bliss, and, lo, he 
 Bads no such place, only a waste of stones and 
 ashes. 
 
 Why not assume a different attitude? Why not 
 say, rather: Here are some typical books of various 
 kinds. They are chosen because they have been 
 approved, not only by those who make courses of 
 study, hut by generations of those who know, and 
 like, and even those who write, books. They arc an 
 important part of the intellectual property of the 
 race to which it is your fortune, good or bad, to be- 
 long. You arc expected to know them, and others 
 like them, if you are to become educated — even mod- 
 erately educated They are as much an established 
 part of your educational obligations as science, his- 
 tory, mathematics arc in your present grade, or as 
 arithni' phy. and Bpelling were in your 
 
 Ymu are expected to know them for 
 reasons of abort the Bane sort that you are expected 
 Iress neatly, to speak clearly, to I od man 
 
 rS, and to obey the moral I OUT I'd- 
 
232 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 low-men demand it of those who qualify for a certain 
 
 stratum of social life. ,-, 7 7 . m ^ 7 
 
 — Franklin T. Baker, 
 
 Teachers College, Columbia University. 
 
 (3) Sometimes the high-school course works as 
 a sort of vaccination to prevent their ever taking 
 literature seriously. Indeed, many of our graduates 
 emerge triumphantly diploma-ed, with their old un- 
 trammeled originality in spelling and sentence struc- 
 ture, but with a new relief in their hearts that they 
 have lived through "litercher" and may hereafter 
 read what they please. And the public, which de- 
 votes about 99 per cent of its influence to bringing 
 about this very result, does occasionally use the 
 remaining 1 per cent in sternly demanding to know 
 why English teachers don't teach English and de- 
 velop a taste for real " liter achoor." (It will be 
 noticed that the amount of emphasis on the final 
 syllable is an index to the speaker's seriousness.) 
 
 The truth is that literature teachers are devoted 
 champions of a lost cause. To change the figure, 
 they are swimmers battling against an ever- 
 strengthening current of seething modernity. To- 
 day it is harder than it was even ten years ago to 
 arouse any sympathetic interest in Milton, for in- 
 stance. Some of the dead authors appear to be so 
 irrevocably dead that no amount of artificial respi- 
 ration can put any breath of life into their works, 
 so far as the ordinary high-school student is con- 
 cerned. 
 
 # # # # 
 
 From my previous experience with separate 
 classics I had discovered that many students feel 
 vaguely that these old books are forced upon them 
 
READING 233 
 
 by an educational conspiracy. They do not beli< 
 
 a moment that any normal person would 1'reely 
 choose Shakespeare's plays and the Spectator essays 
 when reading for his own enjoyment. They do not 
 formula tt* their suspicions, but they might put them 
 tli us: "In the undated past a group of old fogies 
 ]>ut their noddies together and agreed that certain 
 musty, fusty volumes should be called classics, and 
 that every unfortunate youngster should finish his 
 quota of this moldy diet before being allowed any 
 
 I literary food or candy. Since then, whenever 
 a board engages a teacher, it makes her solemnly 
 
 ear to pretend that she and everybody else prefer 
 the classics to all modern literature. And so the 
 teachers don't dare to admit their liking for living 
 authors, but have to earn their salaries by going into 
 datives over Shakespeare and Addison and the 
 other dead ones. The more a teacher praises a 
 thing, the less good it is, just to read; she has to 
 l»raise it to keep her job and prove what a great 
 
 olar she is. The thing for a student to do is to 
 keep his mouth shut about not liking a classic, and 
 just learn what the teacher wants him to say; for 
 she would fail him if she knew what he really 
 thought" 
 
 There is also a prejudice against the biography 
 of authors as being a useless and inexpressibly tire- 
 some hodge-podge of names and dates. A student's 
 impression of a composite author's biography would 
 
 d something like this: "So-and-so was born in 
 an unpronounc inspellable place that nobody 
 
 ever heard of ; his parents, though poor and appar- 
 ently insignificant, were people of great interest tn 
 lit. r.itmv. He was not on good terms with his 
 
234 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 teachers because he preferred his own choice of 
 studies and occupations to theirs ; and his fame later 
 on showed how much better he knew what he needed 
 than they did. By-and-by he married a woman who 
 either made him superlatively happy and successful, 
 or else broke his heart and crippled his genius. His 
 early writings were attacked by school teachers and 
 other moss-backed critics, but he won fame by touch- 
 ing the great heart of the common people ; or else his 
 work was very popular in his own day, but nobody 
 can see anything in it now. All his life was spent in 
 places hard to remember, doing things with dates 
 nailed to them; and he finally died and was buried 
 in another place that the teacher makes everybody 
 learn. Whgtofitt" 
 
 TS" T5» "VP TP 
 
 In addition to these prejudices against old books, 
 against biography, history, and the essay, there is 
 also a well-marked distrust of poetry, especially on 
 the part of boys. The number of high-school stu- 
 dents who voluntarily read anything more than hu- 
 morous or topical verse is small indeed. Many boys 
 have an ingrained dislike of poetry, because some 
 teacher has overdone allegories, or figures of speech, 
 or " speaking pieces," to use the old term. Besides, 
 many boys at the adolescent age manifest a fierce 
 shyness, an utter revolt against the expression of 
 emotions. Some poetry strips the soul stark-naked 
 by its intensity of feeling. Imagine the difficulties of 
 teaching it to self-conscious boys and girls. The 
 high-school student is just at the age of most pain- 
 ful sensitiveness: it is astonishing to learn what 
 trifles cause real suffering. Even skilful and kindly 
 teachers frequently jab bare nerve ends without the 
 
READING 235 
 
 1. 1 in test idea that they are doing so. Bold and self- 
 assured as some of the lads look, they secretly writhe 
 under many forms of embarrassment. The study 
 of literature, and, most of all, the study of poetry, is 
 the very thing they need to free and broaden their 
 sense of personality, to develop and guide their emo- 
 tions. But unless they can be made to feel at home 
 in what they read, it is worse than useless to them. 
 
 Another very common difficulty is the fact that 
 many children early form the dreadful habit of read- 
 ing without visualizing. Their imaginations are 
 atrophied, so far as the power of reincarnating a 
 printed page is concerned. Some actually have 
 almost no power to get the thought of a poem, a bit 
 of description, or even a drama, until it is read aloud 
 and discussed in class. To translate words into 
 I ures, statues, perfumes, music, or human reality 
 of any kind is almost beyond their power. The 
 teacher has to give them constant training to develop 
 
 their imagination. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Pondering over these prejudices and limitations 
 of the average high-school student, I decided that 
 absolute sincerity and cooperation should be the two 
 guiding principles of my work with my literature 
 classes. My first step was to take my students into 
 my confidence, get acquainted with them, and make 
 them realize that I was deeply interested in their 
 real opinions and would never penalize them for tell- 
 ing the truth. Knowing that students love to experi 
 ment, and to do things in a grown-up way, I told 
 them how the course in English literature was usu- 
 
236 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 ally taught, and how we were trying to improve the 
 method. I made it clear that my purpose was to 
 teach them how to know literature, how to read and 
 judge it; and that their likes and dislikes were en- 
 tirely their own affair. From the beginning to the 
 end I tried to make them feel that everybody's busi- 
 ness was to help everybody else without interfering 
 with his personal rights, and that I would hold sa- 
 credly confidential anything that they told me upon 
 that agreement, or anything which they asked me 
 not to share with the class. 
 
 Day by day in informal conversations, I gradually 
 led them to tell me what they thought a course in 
 English literature ought to be, what kinds of train- 
 ing they needed most, what are the big problems in 
 studying literature. If I had expounded these ideas 
 to them, they would have rejected them as part of 
 the traditional stuff that teachers are paid to cram 
 down the student's throat. But when they discov- 
 ered problems for themselves, their whole attitude 
 toward literature began to change. For instance, 
 they began with a vague idea that the materials for 
 such a course should all be chosen upon the basis of 
 j enjoyment. But when they had heard the various 
 I contradictory opinions in a single class about a bit 
 of literature, they saw at once that no choice could 
 be made that would please everybody; and they lost 
 confidence also in the old idea that only teachers like 
 certain things. Then they decided that it would be 
 wisest to study all the " great' ' things. 
 
 It took me about two weeks to make my students 
 feel that it was safe to tell me what they really 
 thought, and that I was not trying to make every- 
 body agree with me. No matter how rash and preju- 
 
READING 237 
 
 diced an opinion was, I received it seriously, pointed 
 out and had the class point out the grain of truth in 
 it, and then l»y questioning the student and others 
 tried to make them carry the idea farther. As soon 
 as I felt sure that they trusted my sincerity and 
 would express themselves freely to me, I had them 
 write answers to a questionnaire. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 The students were so interested in the idea of help- 
 ing me fit the course to their needs that they wrote 
 from two to six pages of definite information on 
 these questions. This set of pages was the most 
 interesting set I ever read because of their frank 
 revelation of the minds of the writers. They formed 
 a very valuable index to the hundred and forty new 
 personalities in my charge. I tabulated on cards the 
 gist of each answer, and for some time continued 
 to add discoveries, and to consult these personality 
 cards whenever I wanted to wake up a lagging stu- 
 dent or assign an appropriate piece of individual 
 research work. The teaching of literature is funda- 
 mentally a matter of interpreting different minds to 
 each other ; the teacher has to know intimately both 
 the book and the student before she can bring them 
 together successfully. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Since I laid no emphasis upon their liking the 
 famous pieces of literature, but instead demanded 
 thai they know a great deal about it and have full 
 reasons for their opinions, it was no longer a point 
 of honor with the students to dislike classics. Some 
 of them discovered that they eoold lean nearly as 
 much and do nearly as good thinking about a tiling 
 
238 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 they disliked as about a thing they liked. A good 
 many of them learned to look within for the causes 
 of certain opinions, frankly criticized their own lack 
 of mental energy, imagination, observation, vocabu- 
 lary, and the like, and set about improving them- 
 selves. They gradually learned to regard anybody's 
 opinion about any piece of literature as a mere per- 
 sonal symptom, and often a temporary symptom at 
 that, and they gained interest in looking for the 
 cause of the opinion. And all the time the range of 
 their enjoyment broadened. 
 
 — Elizabeth Hodgson, 
 
 High School, Wichita, Kansas. 
 
 In all our thoughts about literature it is well to 
 bear in mind that one of the shrewdest of English 
 critics wrote an essay entitled ' ' Is It Possible to Tell 
 a Good Book from a Bad One ? ' ' His conclusion was 
 that it is not possible. But it is always easy to tell 
 a good reader from a bad one. The bad one cannot 
 visualize; the good one sees gorgeous tragedy go 
 sweeping by. 
 
 Have no thought about inspiration. Prepaxe_y_pur- 
 Vself by reading the assigned book over and over 
 again. It is astonishing how the closest familiarity 
 that you can get by yourself is inadequate for the 
 searching demands sometimes made by inquisitive 
 youth. You will find the average pupil strangely 
 ignorant of those essentials that impress you at a 
 first cursory reading ; while, on the other hand, some 
 small non-essential, that you quite failed to notice, 
 stands out in his mind like a pinnacle. Your objec- 
 tive is a clear understanding of the essentials, as: 
 Where are we? Who is acting? What did he do? 
 
READING 239 
 
 Why did he do it? What kind of person was he! 
 What did character number two think about number 
 three! Have no fear of the most simple and obvious 
 questions. Indeed you had best at first fear any 
 other kind. You never know when you are going to 
 uncover the most remarkable ignorance. If a pupil 
 misconceives, don't set him right. Let another pupil 
 dn it. Perhaps the first one has an unexpected de- 
 fense for a curious notion. You never can tell. Get 
 then to debating. Admit no evidence of the "I 
 think" kind; always exact the reference to what the 
 author says. A recitation that continues for ten 
 minutes as prosy as a bird-cage may unexpectedly 
 open into fresh air. 
 
 For secondary classes I am B devotee of the writ- 
 ten test at the beginning of the recitation. In my 
 first year's work I got into a hopeless bog with a vol- 
 ume of poems. The class seemed to know less every 
 recitation. The simplest outstanding facts escaped 
 them. One day I announced that the next lesson 
 would be a very short review; that there would be a 
 five minute test in which they must show definite 
 knowledge, expressed without the wriggling and 
 looking for help that made oral recitation so value- 
 less; and that I should then devote the rest of the 
 hour to reading aloud, line by line, with comments 
 and questions. I was not thinking of the test, but of 
 the chance to force some comprehension into their 
 brains. And lo! a miracle. They studied differently. 
 ichow that thought that they were to be left alone 
 in a silent t«st period, forced to show that they knew 
 • tiling or nothing — that made a difference. What 
 they had floundered in they soon learned to make a 
 path through. The written test is a great help 
 
240 WHAT IS ENGLISH ? 
 
 for composition ; it leaves the teacher more time for 
 reading aloud; it relieves him of the distraction of 
 keeping a record of oral recitation. But more than 
 all these combined is the training it gives in reading 
 attentively. The same principle may be applied if 
 a class finds any text hard to understand. Allow 
 five minutes or so for a careful reading of a page in 
 class, announcing that at the end of the time you will 
 assign a topic for a test. When attention is thus 
 concentrated, pupils overcome hard passages with 
 an ease that is very enlightening. Explain the prin- 
 ciple : That kind of concentration on each page, as if 
 for a test, does twice as much in half the time. 
 
 Beware of that pedagogic weakness, talking too 
 much. What we say, like what the rhetoric text says, 
 amounts to much less than we suppose. Our brain- 
 capillaries distend, and in the heat we may speak 
 well and impressively; the pupils' brains are inert. 
 It is often impossible to avoid taking the floor our- 
 selves, but in discussing a literature lesson it is well 
 to be a mere moderator as far as one can without bad 
 waste of time. Beading aloud is apt to seem waste 
 of precious minutes — often is ; but what is heard is 
 remembered better than what is read. So long as 
 attention is alert and so long as you feel real pur- 
 pose, time thus spent is valuable. 
 / It is with diffidence that I suggest that anything 
 like a critical attack of literature is a mistake in 
 secondary classes. You are steeped in it. For some 
 years you have hardly thought of a play but as an 
 object of critical appreciation. Many texts are 
 edited in an atmosphere that reeks with the fumes of 
 estimate and analysis; edited with the fear of not 
 showing enough scholarly acumen. Even such rea- 
 
READING 241 
 
 sonable queries as "By what means does Goldsmith 
 heighten the effect of the discovery that the house 
 
 burning f M are on the wrong track. Steer thus: 
 "Ho* ,ii,i the Vic.u feel as he got near home?" 
 'I 'his is not the difference between tweedledum and 
 t\\< It is the two sides of the footlights. 
 
 The class belongs in the audience. A normal reader 
 never bothers the stage door. He always " likes that 
 l"or wonders why Soandso didn 't tell. We have 
 no hu>in» nm to call a pupil's attention to a paste- 
 board rock or to an elocutionary trick that puts a 
 lump in our throat. We have no right to suggest 
 that Goldsmith threw down his pen at this point and 
 beat his head and paced the floor before he got the 
 right device. Goldsmith doesn't belong on the stage; 
 the Vicar is doing very well alone. At least reserve 
 the author for his call when the play is over. 
 
 Annotations are sometimes a rock of offense and 
 sometimes give grateful shade in a weary land. It 
 is better to use them too little than too much. Every 
 note is good that keeps a pupil from misconceiving 
 an author's general purpose in a passage; every one 
 is bad that distracts from that purpose or that su- 
 peradds information. If you are studying Macbeth 
 fully, it may be barely worth while to explain 
 that the "dollars" were not paid in American hills; 
 t<» explain the etymology of the word is one of the 
 most freakish crimes of pedantry. A comparison of 
 an old Rolfe or Deighton edition with the recent 
 work of Neilson or Schelling will be illuminating. 
 Unless you are doing this sort of close study notes 
 should not be kept in the foreground Have little to 
 do with verbal difficulties. The criterion that nearly 
 always appli.- is: "Will this make the picture m 
 
242 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 clear?" Hence sketch-maps are often most useful. 
 Not that it matters whether a certain stag escaped 
 in Fife or the Hebrides, but that Scott had a map 
 in his mind, and we follow his story with more inter- 
 est if we have some idea of its locus. Anything that 
 supplies a substratum of conceptions (like "What 
 was a cross-bow ? " " The Holy Grail ?" " The French 
 Bevolution?") is a necessity. Anything else is likely 
 to be a hindrance. The Essay on Johnson requires 
 few 'notes. The Farewell Address will not show its 
 hidden fires (it really is fiery) until a reader can 
 think of many conditions in our early history. 
 ~ More valuable than class work will be any reading 
 you can require or encourage as supplementary, not 
 to be recited on, perhaps not even to be tested. One 
 way is to assign a novel, giving a brief test on a hun- 
 dred pages or more each week. In seven minutes 
 you can find out whether a pupil has read attentively 
 an assignment of two hundred pages, if you require 
 answers with one or two details to the simplest, most 
 matter-of-fact questions. Avoid the type of question 
 that admits a hazy, bluffing answer; give no credit 
 for a reply that might have been guessed at by one 
 who had merely heard a friend J s outline of the story. 
 Another plan is to require reports on books selected 
 by the pupil (his choice to be first approved by the 
 teacher). Get pupils to sample books for you, and 
 so build up a list of good ones that are generally 
 liked. It is hard to judge by your own taste. I 
 should have guessed that sixteen-year-old boys would 
 like Kim and would find Lorna Doone too sentimen- 
 tal, but the opposite is usually the case. There can 
 be a system of extra credit for books read volun- 
 tarily. One teacher in a private school tells me that he 
 
READING 243 
 
 now gets several times as much reading done by this 
 "supplementary" plan as he did two years ago in 
 Ufl "dark ages." This kind is the real kind. Dis- 
 section in class is less thought of than formerly — a 
 statement sufficiently meaty for the end of a chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ODDS AND ENDS 
 EHETOBIC 
 
 Some textbook in Rhetoric is prescribed for you. 
 Regard it as the foundation of all your work. Though 
 you disapprove some parts, dislike some peculiari- 
 
 ^ ties, it must be the basis of all you can accomplish. 
 It marks out where you are to build and indicates 
 the kind of structure you are to raise. Follow the 
 specifications until experience shows you where to 
 vary the prescribed plan. The text presents a diver- 
 sified lot of things as of about the same importance ; 
 your task is to discover which topics are minor and 
 which are major. And remember that the text alone, 
 be it mastered never so thoroughly by the class, ac- 
 complishes almost nothing. The principal error that 
 we all make, and can never entirely get over, is reli- 
 
 - ance on the efficacy of the text. Teachers are all 
 keyed up to rhetorical distinctions, so that when they 
 are struck by anything the least novel they perceive 
 it with excited attention. Again, a lucid presenta- 
 tion of familiar notions seems to them convincing; 
 what it stows in their minds is lively and operative. 
 Youth is not so affected. After ten — yes, after 
 twenty — years a teacher still suffers the same dis- 
 
 . mayed amazement at finding that what was under- 
 stood clearly and recited upon accurately is not 
 doing any work. The matter of shall and will fur- 
 nishes an illustration. A boy who apprehends 
 
 244 
 
ODDS AND BNDG MB 
 
 clearly, as a theory, when to Nty •• 1 >hall" and when 
 uy ••! will" may the Q«xl week wear a question- 
 ing frown over the X through his "will" in a ftome 
 > the same old, Qnendiiig difficulty. It is a truth 
 1 1 eqaentry harped upon in these pages. It is a lesson 
 for you. Constant repetition should teach you. It 
 will do nothing of the sort. You will never know it 
 till you have been through the exercises. A pupil 
 will never know about shall until by repeated and 
 repeated and repeated exercises his own work has 
 made it a part of himself. A boy from an excep- 
 tionally refined home, whose own speech was refined, 
 once recited passably on this mystery of shall and 
 will. On the exercise in the text (filling in blanks) 
 i^ot zero. The class returned to the exercise, and 
 he got zero. A week later he got 30% on that iden- 
 1 exercise. 
 
 Nay more. The teacher had omitted all entan- 
 glements of "the form you expect in the answer," 
 and all the rest of it. He was trying for nothing 
 more ambitious than to cultivate the habit of "I 
 -hall" and "we shall" when no assurance is im- 
 plied. (Schools cannot establish a complicated 
 of idioms, and ought not to try.) This simplest of 
 simple changes in a fixed verbal habit is the moving 
 of a mountain. To get the merest temporary result b, 
 as a mere drill, is an achievement. 
 
 The text is a necessary foundation; it is not a 
 -tincture of knowledge, however lively and sympa- 
 thetic. And any part that is not sympathetic is not 
 n a foundation. What is conceived in the spirit 
 of critical abstraction makes no impression on a 
 pupil's mind. Even the most lively and per 
 chapter of text can do no more than open the way to 
 
246 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 improvement of style. All advance upon that way 
 is a matter of practice ; no real progress can be made 
 except by the use of exercises. Real development 
 and lasting improvement are secured only by exer- 
 cises. In proportion as you gain experience you will 
 hunger for exercises, will. regard text as a mere index 
 to the real work, will rely for permanent results on 
 the actual handling of a great deal of illustrative 
 N material. The rhetoric that seems to me the most 
 effective one on the market (Herric ^and Damo n) 
 succeeds largely because of copious exercises based 
 on entertaining selections. 
 
 Every year I try harder to find out when we take 
 up a rhetoric topic how far back the ignorance 
 reaches. One example will serve for all. "Figures 
 of speech' ' are promptly attacked on the basis of 
 "Is it good or bad! " For several years I was con- 
 founded by the excessive stupidity displayed. Bright 
 boys were declaring that it was "bad" to compare 
 martyrs to watering pots, and failing to object to 
 "The cold hand of Death stalked into our midst.' ' 
 I had to grant a certain good taste to their verdicts : 
 separated from context the good metaphor may be 
 ridiculous, while the bad one may have a suggestion 
 of tragic dignity. What was wrong? Why must I 
 always be overruling sensible boys' feelings? Be- 
 cause they did not know the simple, fundamental 
 truth that a figure is a comparison of something with 
 something, that genius can contrive a fairly fitting 
 comparison of anything in the universe with any- 
 thing else in the universe, but only a rare genius 
 under exceptional circumstances is allowed to com- 
 pare that anything with two anythings at the same 
 time. I have never been able to persuade them about 
 
ODDS AM) BNDS 247 
 
 the watt ring pots; the best 1 oan <lo is to compron. 
 on: "What is oompared t<> whatf Is it compared 
 
 wo whats at the same timet " 
 You are marveling at my slowness of apprehen 
 i, at my lack of sympathy. Then you get the 
 at — that utter failure to detect underlying igno- 
 rance. I can hardly believe it of myself as I spr« 
 it on the record. May it save you from any similar 
 i a dure to get way down to the bottom of the trouble. 
 A wh.de class is never stupid; once in a while a 
 ier may be. 
 The dean of college theme-writing in America says 
 that he always had trouble to distinguish between 
 metonymy, synecdoche, etc. One day it was reveal e< 1 
 to him that there was no need of knowing. Similar 
 revelations have cleared several big obstacles from 
 my own path. But the need of knowing the central 
 fact about figures of speech — "what is compared to 
 what?" — is vital for apprehending a lively style or 
 livening one's own composition. The longer we 
 h, the more we see the value of extending this 
 form of exercise. All bungling and mixing of figures 
 is primarily a failure to know "what is compared to 
 what." 
 I am very skeptical about the wisdom of "eulti- 
 ing a vocabulary/ ' because it may result in such 
 testimony as this, written by an <'i<rhth-,<>frader: 
 "This year we have not done much writing as we 
 
 have 1 n very busy on other subjects. . . . We also 
 
 had some large words to digest among them, "Cam- 
 pan, tlogy", "Peripatel Much can be said on 
 both sides; all depends on the practical sense of the 
 teacher. I will content myself with one observation: 
 Searching for an idea is always a useful occupation, 
 
248 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 even if the hunt is vain ; but a meal of big words may 
 not digest. 
 
 I am very skeptical about the wisdom of finding 
 | errors in selections from Thackeray, Kipling, Scott, 
 I et al. In the first place, they are probably so unim- 
 portant that you have no time for them. Secondly, 
 there is always the peril that the author may have 
 known what he was about. 
 
 We are all too likely to forget that the models 
 introduced (selections from authors) are parts. The 
 opening of a book, the description of a room, the 
 paragraph that summarizes, the page of dialogue — 
 all are fragments of a large whole. They are models 
 only in certain aspects. The motifs behind them and 
 the architecture to which they conform may be an- 
 tipodal to any sincere effort that a child should make. 
 A volume of short examples of skilful writing has 
 recently appeared — an excellent and much needed 
 device. But they are much too long and they are 
 still too obviously fragments. Try to find a few 
 short models to put before the class, samples of 
 something like their kind of subject matter. How 
 about the real thing — the best compositions written 
 by members of the class? How about the school 
 theme as a somewhat unreal product, which may in 
 time be regarded as we now regard "samplers"? 
 How about an effort to make themes a bit more real 
 by assigning topics that might be the burden of 
 actual letters or a living desire to persuade someone 
 to do what you want ? 
 
 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 
 
 It is often argued that a history of literature 
 should not be attempted in schools, because we have 
 
ODDS AND ENDS 249 
 
 • al with such tabloids of development, such mor- 
 sels of criticism, such a pile of opinion that cannot 
 be based on reading. The effect of unentertaining 
 biography has been humorously described on page 
 
 m. 1 other objections, unquestionably valid, could 
 be adduced. But, after all, these objections apply 
 equally to an outline of American history, and the 
 schools know that that study is one of the most val- 
 uable subjects in the curriculum. So experience 
 shows that the right history of literature, if rightly 
 
 lied, is a valuable, an almost indispensable, part 
 of a school course in English. 
 
 Most texts are vitiated by critical phraseology and 
 the unsympathetic use of abstract terms. If you are 
 allowed to choose, decide against a book which says 
 tliat the Saxons " worshiped gods who were the per- 
 sonification of the forces of nature* ' and choose the 
 one which says that they made the Christian mission- 
 68 preach on a little island in the open air be- 
 Be "they had no idea of hearing strange teachings 
 under a roof where mairie might easily overpower 
 them." The difference between those two presenta- 
 tions is the difference between sleep and waking. 
 Discard the book that refers abstractly to Gold- 
 smith's eccentricities and adopt the one that names 
 the scarlet breeches. Try to gathe r anecdotes and 
 striking facts ahout author.-; aim at some picture of 
 them as pei ndeavor to convey a definite im- 
 
 oul the one mjaai striking feature 
 author's work, rather io m and e s tim ate 
 
 and of names. It is much better to omit 
 
 half the writers and concentrate on the big names 
 than to secure an indiscriminate blend of many au- 
 
 s. A chart will do more in a minute to rescue 
 
? 
 
 250 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Marlowe from the twelfth century than half an hour 
 of rehearsing dates. 
 
 MEMOEIZING 
 
 All my life I have regretted that in my youth I 
 did very little memorizing. Men without any pride 
 in literary attainments have been glad of little poems 
 or passages that became theirs in school. Tell your 
 classes such testimony. The why of it is harder to 
 present. When time can be spared, assign a memory 
 lesson. 
 
 TESTS 
 
 It is better to have short and easy lessons, strictly 
 graded, than longer assignments that are loosely 
 accounted for. The same principle holds for exami- 
 nations. Fairly simple and direct questions, graded 
 more strictly, are better evidence of a pupil 's knowl- 
 edge and better training for him. He is spurred up 
 by finding he did not know the easy topic ; disgruntled 
 and self-excusing if he thinks he failed because of 
 catch-questions. Every English examination (unless 
 it is mere grammar) must be understood to be a test 
 in writing. Perfect knowledge and careless writing 
 may be worth anywhere from 60 to 0, according to 
 circumstances. It ought to be 0. 
 
 Al ways pla n tests and examinations with a view 
 to easy grading — i.e., ho w much each part is goin g 
 to count, and how definite are the units that you have 
 a right to require. 
 
 Don 't make an invalid of yourself by correcting 
 papers. The more you can handle, the better. But 
 make a time limit of reasonable hours and refuse to 
 be killed. Study ways of speeding up the correcting. 
 Some sets of class tests can be graded in very short 
 
ODDS AND i: 251 
 
 order, and with justice to .ill. Sou may pause to see 
 If Susie has a sentence-error, but Algernon's paper 
 shows at a glance that it is worth 100. Don 't let the 
 conscience destroy the nerves. Set an arbitrary 
 standard (a good brain >lmul<l have known enough, 
 e.g., to put in reasonable order four points out of a 
 possible six) and grade mechanically, always reserv- 
 ing the right, if it doesn't take extra time, to add a 
 little credit for an original handling. If you have 
 required a long exercise to be written out, don't try 
 to n>a<l the entire paper. Grade on the basis of a 
 selected fourth or fifth of the work. Find the quick 
 way. The excessive amount of time and nerve-force 
 u- -(I by some teachers in marking papers is suicidal. 
 Work easily. Keep the mill running. Never stop to 
 debate the "mightn't I be unjust?" Always study 
 for serenity and celerity. 
 
 8TEMMING THE TIDE 
 
 Have nothing to do with the crusaders who fight 
 for logical purity or academic nicety or lexicographi- 
 cal sovereignty. You have too much else to attend 
 to. You will need to slaughter "I seen" and "they 
 done," but you can refuse to notice those subtleties 
 <»t long u's and broad a's and "guess," and <»t dic- 
 tion generally. In no department are most of us so 
 a i ong-headed as in pronunciation. To try to drill n 
 class in "rule" and "laugh," where those sounds 
 art* not native, is to destroy the respect of pupils for 
 your judgment in other matters. Yon may have to 
 insist on "picturesque" in three syllables, because 
 no educated human being pronounces it in four ; but 
 v on are not to inculcate "octopus" just because that 
 is the only pronunciation given by the Century. 
 
252 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Don't even waste energy on stemming the tide of "it 
 is me." Never use the logic of these tide-stemmers 
 as a weapon. The fact that is never takes an object 
 is no guarantee that "it's me" is wrong. "Seen" 
 is not vulgar because of any grammatical ratiocina- 
 tion ; it happens that careful people do not use it as 
 a preterit; just as it merely happens that present- 
 day collars are not ruffs. 
 
 CHAEITY 
 
 Remember that The Spectator was in its day the 
 new and non-classical thing, the ephemeral frippery 
 of its age. It is safe now to put Tom Sawyer on our 
 reading lists; imagine the hardihood of doing it 
 twenty-five years ago. The taste of the average 
 reader may not be so much in need of directing as we 
 think. 
 
 Be patient with what appears so stupid. The next 
 time you are tempted to complain of the dullness of 
 pupils sit down for an hour with something you know 
 nothing about — say electrical potential, or our fed- 
 eral judiciary, or ' ' selling short, ' ' or what * i rhythm ' ' 
 means as applied to French verse. By the time you 
 have attained a crystal-clear conception you will feel 
 charitable toward the mental failure of a child who 
 has not grasped a new idea. 
 
 KEEPING INFOEMED 
 
 Resolve at the outset, and renew the resolution 
 frequently, not to be a victim of pedagogic sclerosis. 
 In no subject is it so easy to harden into wrong con- 
 victions. What begins as a mere choice or impulse 
 may in time grow to seem a momentous principle. 
 \ SubscTiheJAJli&JZnglish- Journal, a monthly pub- 
 
ODDS and BNDfi 
 
 Ii-hed at the Univ of Chicago Press, at $2.50 
 
 per year. English is at present a welter of opinions. 
 Changes are upon us and more are coming. You 
 will be more sure of yourself if you follow develop- 
 ments. This book gives frequent evidence of how 
 useful the Journal has been to the author. 
 
 The Bulletin of the Illinois Association, a leaflet 
 published eight times a year, contains many articles 
 of a practical and directly useful nature. Teachers 
 of English may be placed on the free mailing-list by 
 sending their names to Professor H. G. Paul, Urbana, 
 Illinois 
 
 A similar bulletin, the Leaflet of the New England 
 Association of Teachers of English, is published 
 monthly during the school year. The subscription 
 is a dollar a year. Address The Editor, Newton, 
 Mass. 
 
 DISCIPLINE 
 
 Perhaps you are thinking: "Yes, yes, but what 
 about the actual details of the first five minutes and 
 the tii >t week!" Unless you are -unusually fortunate 
 you will be dealing more with discipline than with 
 the beauties of Evangeline. Petty disorders or con- 
 certed botherations will distract you. Advice about 
 handling these would be as futile as directions to 
 parents about punishing children. But handle them. 
 Remember that the individuals before you in the 
 classroom arc normally decent human beings, as in- 
 dividuals. As a body they may be demons. Be pre- 
 pared for this. An even temper (or a savage one), 
 hitting the other fellow first (or turning your un- 
 smittcn cheek) — whatever your method is, go out for 
 good order. Din icties until the ground is 
 
 ready for the seed. 
 
 s* 
 
254 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 * Discipline is the exercise of personality; hence no 
 person can advise another about it or analyze his 
 own methods or follow his own analysis. The only 
 hint I ever got that helped ranch was this: "Yon 
 are not contending against a crowd, but against in- 
 dividuals. Only as you get acquainted with individ- 
 uals, make individuals respond, can you handle the 
 crowd. ' ' All good discipline comes from the display 
 of strength, which may be manifested by a quiet 
 serenity or by a cruel sarcasm or by humorous inti- 
 . macy — or in a dozen other ways. Whatever the ex- 
 J pression, strength is the fact. A teacher who scolds 
 is weak; one who argues is weak; it is weakness to 
 threaten what you will do "if "; it is always a weak- 
 ness to lose self-control, or to talk angrily; it is ut- 
 terly weak to plead for good order. 
 
 Beware of being led into talking. Pupils love 
 nothing better than to raise questions for the sake 
 of killing time and amusing themselves. In no way 
 is a teacher so easily fooled as by that hope that he 
 is charming a class* with a dissertation. Ten to one 
 he is duped by some clever boy who doesn't know 
 the lesson. 
 
 A WORD ABOUT DISCOURAGEMENT 
 
 In Milton's outline of school studies he proposes 
 that Italian should be mastered in those odd mo- 
 ments not otherwise provided for. If one who has 
 himself done a little teaching can be guilty of such 
 sublime nonsense, what may you not expect to have 
 urged upon you who teach "only English"? 
 
 I have heard a man describe how he taught his 
 wife and daughter to swim before they went into 
 the water. I am not joking; neither was he. If such 
 
ODDS AND KXDS 255 
 
 a prodigy of tuition is reported, how ready will the 
 world be to declare that you are an inefficient teacher 
 of "justEnglisi 
 
 The country is full of the records of wonderful 
 results in mother-tongue instruction. Shall we w.i 
 in despair — you and I, the mediocre ones? Not until 
 pedagogy is so developed that Italian is taught inci- 
 dentally and swimming is learned by sprawling half 
 an hour in the sand. 
 
 The world loves to wave before us these Miltonic 
 danlemento, to shame us with tales of English Edens 
 newly made over there at the end of the rainbow by 
 some god-like teacher. But if discouragement comes 
 from hearing of lofty deeds of education, think of 
 King Arthur. When the light and lazy Gawaine 
 proposed the quest of the Holy Grail, it was the king 
 who inveighed against the splendid undertaking. On 
 what ground? He granted the holiness of the proj- 
 ect, but protested that it would ruin Camelot and 
 restore paganism. His prophecy was fulfilled. It 
 applies in fulness of wisdom to us knights of the 
 Table Round of English. Our vows should not bind 
 us to "follow wandering fires," but by plain tasks 
 of knighthood to preserve Camelot. 
 
IXDKX 
 
 Accuracy 
 
 of French boy*, 12, 13 
 difficulty of securing, 17, 19 
 
 with .harm, 19 
 demanded in American Univer- 
 .17. 21,22, 1M 
 tnded by business men, 26 
 demanded at Harvard, 115 
 in themes, 192 
 essential, 255 
 
 », 89, 107 
 rbs, 82, 90, 92, 101 
 Aldus, 
 
 Alright, 45, 46, 69 
 Annotation*. 24] 
 
 elation, 20, 23 
 
 low's Manual. 1l'l\ 178 
 Brown, \i. W.. 12 
 
 .lizing, "0. 117 
 Classics, see Reading 
 
 importance of, 80, 86,91 
 teaching of, 91 
 noun, lit, 114, II!' 
 
 fives) 
 
 letta oi i »M72 
 
 College entrance requiremc; 
 
 175. 187 
 ma 
 nature of. 12H 1 V2 
 def- 
 
 with parentheses, 178 
 
 with dashes, 180 
 
 and see Sentence-error 
 Comma blunder, see Sentence- 
 error 
 Composition 
 
 the objective in France, 14 
 
 defined, 20 
 
 subject of this book, 26 
 
 separate college requirement, 27 
 Compound words, 70 
 Conjugations, 108 
 Conjunctions, 82, 91, 92, 101, 111, 
 
 111, 159, 174 
 Connectives, 82, and see Conjunc- 
 tions, Adverbs 
 Cook and O 'Shea, 37 
 
 Dash, 179-183, 188 
 "Demons" of spelling. W, 49 
 Dictation of spelling. 71 
 Diction, 33,96, 216, M4, HI 
 Diagraming. 112-114 
 
 Discouragement, 254 
 Diacrih, . 87, |] 
 
 •J 17 
 
 Kllipses, 84, 87 
 
 Knglish 
 variety of subjects, 11, 24 
 proportion of novice teachers. 
 
 11 
 compared with mathemat: 
 
 187 
 
258 
 
 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 English 
 
 facts of practice, 16 
 
 changing conception of, 17, 20 
 
 teacher in different relation to 
 
 pupils, 31, 98 
 compared with arts, 203 
 
 English Journal, 18, 49, 121, 252 
 
 Essentials, see Accuracy 
 
 Exercises 
 
 important in grammar, 93, 99 
 important in rhetoric, 246 
 not altogether on topic, 93 
 
 Experience, this book based on, 12 
 
 France, method with mother- 
 tongue, 12-14 
 
 Gender, 86 
 Gerund, 92 
 Grammar 
 
 function, Chap. IV 
 
 teaching, Chap. V 
 
 in France, 13 
 
 for college entrance, 27, 74 
 
 compared with arts, 74 
 
 Newman 's estimate, 76 
 
 as basis for other languages, 76 
 
 nomenclature, 76 
 
 for composition, 77, 79, 81, 83, 
 84, 87, 113 
 
 horrors of, 77 
 
 false emphasis, 77, 78, 85, 113 
 
 clauses, see Clauses 
 
 relatives, see Eelatives 
 
 dread of, 82, 84 
 
 classification by function, 85, 
 100 
 
 Latin models, 85 
 
 classification of forms, 86 
 
 parts of speech, 87-92, 98-111 
 
 nouns, 88, 102-104, 112 
 
 pronouns, 88, 99, 104 
 adjectives, 89, 107 
 adverbs, 90, 101 
 verbs, 90, 108, 109 
 prepositions, 90, 101, 107, 111 
 conjunctions, see Conjunctions 
 adverbs not conjunctions, 92 
 verbals, 92, 98, 99, 103, 109, 
 
 110, 111 
 exercises, 93, 99 
 not literary selections, 93 
 1 ' small ' ' value, 94 
 compared with algebra, 95 
 futility of arguing about, 96 
 manuals for, 97 
 schematizing, 98, 99 
 order of topics, 98, 102 
 transitive and intransitive, see 
 
 Transitive 
 subject of verb, 103 
 subject of infinitive, 110 
 conjugations, 108 
 mood, 90, 108 
 phrases, 111 
 diagraming, 112-114 
 
 Habits, power of bad, 32 
 
 Hall, J. L., 34 
 
 Harvard, 20, 21, 116 
 
 Hillegas scale, 190 
 
 History of literature, 233, 248 
 
 How the French Boy Learns to 
 
 Write, 12 
 Hyphens, 68, 70 
 
 ie, 47 
 
 Ignorance of teachers, 97, 252 
 Illinois Association Bulletin, 253 
 Illinois University, 17 (3), 73, 
 
 191 
 Infinitives, 92, 110, 111 
 
INDKX 
 
 Inspiring pupils, 76, 218, 2l 
 Intransitive, tee Transit i\.- 
 Introducing words, 176, 181 
 It, 104, 111 
 
 Jones, W. F., 38 
 
 Latin models for English gram- 
 mar, 85 
 Leonard, 8. A., 198 
 Literary atmosphere of textbooks* 
 
 16 
 Literary models for themes, 28, 
 
 196, 248 
 Literary motive in France, 13 
 Literary selections for grammar, 
 
 93 
 Literature 
 
 relative importance, 25, 27 
 history of, 248 
 see Reading 
 Lounsbury, T. R., 33 
 
 MacauUiy misspelled, 49, 63 
 
 Manutius, 133 
 
 Maps. MA 
 
 Mechanics, 10, 21, 30, 76, 77, and 
 see Accuracy 
 
 Memorizing, 250 
 
 Meredith, 19 
 
 Misspellings 
 
 lists of common, 38-40, 43, 49-61 
 different degrees of, 63, 200 
 on themes. 
 
 Mood, 90, 108 
 
 Near-by, 217 
 
 New England Association Leaf- 
 let, 253 
 Newman, 76 
 Notes, 241 
 Nouns, 88, 102104, 112 
 
 Novice, teacher, 10, 11, 31 
 
 Oral Composition, 26 
 Outlines in themes, 195, £08 
 
 Paragraphing, 210 
 
 Parentheses, 177 
 
 Participles, 92, 98, 111, 165 
 
 Parts of speech 
 classified, 85, 86 
 defined, 87 
 order of attack, 99 
 
 Pedagogy, experts in, 10 
 
 Periodicals for teachers, 252, 253 
 
 Phrases, 87, 111, 164 
 
 Poe, 199 
 
 Possessives, 61 
 
 Prepositions, 90, 101, 107, 111 
 
 Princeton, 18 
 
 Printing, early, 134 
 
 Pronouns, 88, 89, 99, 104, and see 
 Relatives 
 
 Pronunciation, 251 
 
 Punctuation 
 in France, 13 
 importance of, Chnp. VI 
 nature of, Chap. VII 
 code of, Chap. V 1 1 1 
 conspectus of rules, 185188 
 recent emphasis in textbooks, 
 
 117 
 causes good sentences, 116, 117, 
 
 127 
 ignorance of, in textbooks, 117- 
 
 Itl 
 sources of rules 
 concreteness in teaching, 126 
 "intrinsic" character of, 130 
 antiquity of, 133135 
 "pause" theory, 135-137 
 function of comma, 137139 
 nature of rules, 139, 150, 156 
 
260 
 
 WHAT IS ENGLISH? 
 
 Punctuation 
 
 by individual taste, 140, 142 
 a social custom, 142-144 
 basis of usage, 144-150 
 determined by publishers, 146 
 code in periodicals, 148 
 horrors of, 151 
 brings freedom, 152 
 authorities, 136, 154 
 manuals, 155 
 
 possibility of complete code, 156 
 exclamation mark, 157 
 comma, 158-172, 185-187 
 semicolon, 157, 159, 172, 180, 
 181, 187, and see Sentence- 
 error 
 colon, 175, 187 
 quotation marks, 176 
 parentheses, 177, 183, 188 
 dashes, 179, 183, 188 
 at beginning of a line, 184 
 puzzles, 184 
 
 ' ' open ' ' and ( ' close, ' ' 184 
 the few important matters, 184, 
 215 
 
 Reading 
 
 nature of, 219 s 
 
 classics, 221, 229-238, 252 
 
 inspiring a love of, 221, 238 
 
 what pupils enjoy, 226 
 
 love of by teachers, 228 
 
 importance, 229 
 
 as education, 230, 235, 237 
 
 history of literature, 233, 248 
 
 lack of power to read, 235, 238, 
 
 240 
 social approval, 235 
 facts of lesson, 238 
 tests, 239 
 not critical attack, 240 
 
 annotations, 241 
 supplementary, 242 
 choosing books, 242 
 Reading aloud, 240 
 Relatives, 80, 89, 105, 106, 107, 
 
 169 
 Restrictive and non-restrictive, 
 
 166-172 
 Rhetoric, 244 
 
 need of exercises, 245 
 figures of speech, 246 
 vocabulary, 247 
 errors in literature, 248 
 models, 248 
 Rudiments, see Accuracy 
 
 Semicolon, 157, 159, 172, 180, 181, 
 
 187, and see Sentence-error 
 Self-expression, 20 
 Sentence 
 
 in French teaching, 13 
 importance, 28, 30 
 improved by punctuation, 116- 
 118 
 Sentence-error, 79, 81, 83, 87, 92, 
 121, 151, 159, 173-175, 213, 
 216 
 Sentence-sense, see Sentence-error 
 Seperate, 37, 41 
 Shall and will, 17, 77, 78, 216, 
 
 244, 245 
 Shepherd, 43 
 Simplified spelling, 70 
 1 * Since ' ' story, 72 
 Social approval, 197, 218, 235 
 Spacing words, 217 
 Spelling 
 
 nature of difficulty, 36 
 visual, 36 
 
 number of words to be studied, 
 37-41 
 
INDEX 
 
 2*1 
 
 Bpeffiaf 
 
 mov," 39 
 second-grade words in Ugfc 
 
 acho< 
 in the grades, 38-40 
 overcoming wrong habits, 40, 
 . 43 
 fusion, 43, 68 
 intensive. 44, 63, 64 
 similar forms together, 45,46,61 
 proper names, 49 
 emphasis in proportion to com- 
 monness, 49, 62 
 list of words most commonly 
 misspelled in high school, 49- 
 61 
 poasesaives, 61 
 
 three kinds of misspellings, 63 
 dignity of, 64 
 principles, 64 
 rule*, 65-70 
 by sound, 65, 69 
 not showing wrong forms, 70 
 compounds, 70 
 rules lacking, 70 
 simplified, 70 
 grading of tests, 71 
 
 ition, 71 
 correcting by pupil, 72 
 difficulty of teaching, 72 
 importance of at Illinois and 
 Yak, 
 Stoddard, 199 
 
 >d, 41, 64, 65 
 Style in themes, 23 
 Subjects of verbs, 103 
 
 Subjects of infinitives, 110 
 
 Subjunctive, 108 
 
 * 
 
 Talking too much, 240, 254 
 Tests, written, 189, B50 
 Textbooks, ignorant •> in, 35, 96, 
 117, 1__ 
 
 Th.'tnes 
 
 drafta, 16, 35, 209, 218 
 
 lack of uniformity in grading, 
 189 
 
 literary criterion, 190, 192, 196 
 
 accuracy criterion, 192 
 
 mechanical grading, 193, 198, 
 199-204, US, 81 I 
 
 outlines, 195, 208 
 
 orderly thinking, 194, 201, 204 
 
 interesting, 197, 198, 204 
 
 social approval, 197 
 
 topics, 204, 208 
 
 concreteness in <lire<-tions for 
 205, 309, 1 1 1 
 
 kinds of, 206 
 
 introduction and conclusion, 
 208 
 There and their, 42 
 To for too, 42, 200 
 Transitive, 85, 88, 90, 102, 107 
 
 Verbs, 90, 108, 109 
 Vocabulary 
 
 Whittier, 219 
 Wilson, -John. HI ISO 
 Wisconsin, 17 (4), 191 
 
 Yale, 73 
 
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