Persuasive expression important in politics and business. The third question that the amateur expresser should ask himself, namely, Will the presentation be impressive? is especially important in connection with certain practical activities, such as politics, salesmanship, and advertising. In such cases it is necessary not only to be clear and interesting, but also to be persuasive. The material must be arranged so as to be impressive and to inspire belief. Many students with practical or commercial tendencies would quickly appreciate this point and become interested in developing skill in persuasive writing or speaking on practical topics.

Expressions should not distract attention by peculiar form. - A fourth and final point to be considered by the student in getting the point of view of his audience is to adapt his vocabulary to theirs in such a way as to avoid distracting attention from the thought; that is, the language used should not be such as to attract undue attention in itself. Obviously, the language to be used would vary enormously with the character of the audience. If the student is writing for the general reader, he should be careful to use only forms of expression that are in good general use, and he should avoid highly specialized technical expressions and slang. On the other hand, if he is writing an account of the operation of a turbine engine, with a class of prospective engineers as an audience, his language might be quite technical; if he is writing an account of a baseball game for a class of high-school boys, it might contain a great deal of the current slang of the game.

The standard proposed in the preceding paragraph, namely, avoiding language which will distract the attention of the audience from the thought, will help in securing a rational basis for the correction of linguistic errors and will assist in the avoidance of pedantry in such correction. Obviously misspellings and the use of "I seen" and even colloquialisms like "he won't" are undesirable, because so many general readers would have their attention distracted from the thought

by such expressions. On the other hand, the use of "I will" and "we will" to express simple future tense is probably justified, since only academic linguistic purists would notice the form used; the ordinary reading public would simply get the thought of future action. Similarly in regard to slang; for example, such an expression as "make good" is so generally current that the ordinary reader gets its meaning easily without any interruption of the thought and without having his attention distracted by the form of expression used.

Teachers' corrections should stress content as well as form. If the student can be trained to keep in mind the necessity of getting the point of view of his audience, many of the formal points of rhetoric will thus be provided for. The four aspects mentioned in the preceding paragraphs are among the most important, namely, to consider whether the presentation will be clear, interesting, and impressive to the particular listeners or readers for whom it is intended, and whether the vocabulary and forms of expression used are so chosen as not to impede the thought or distract attention by their peculiarity. As far as the relation between the larger aspects of expression and its more detailed formal aspects concern the teacher, the following advice by Professor Baker is worth considering.

Shall [the teacher] correct themes? Surely. But he must know how. He must not be fussy nor pitch his standard too high. He must not forget that it is the ideas rather than the form that are the main thing. He must not forget to put the responsibility for the form on the pupils as fast as possible, and to make them proofread their own themes. He must himself be highly enough trained not only to catch, at a rapid glance, the errors and infelicities of expression, that are, however important, still only matters of detail; he must be highly enough trained also to make, in rapid reading, valid judgments of the general qualities of thought in a pupil's work to gauge it for soundness, clearness, proportion, interest. He must see it, indeed, as a critic sees a manuscript submitted for publication. (3: 343)

How to avoid snap courses in oral expression. Training in oral expression in English classes offers certain special difficulties which are worth considering. It is not uncommon to find prescribed courses in public speaking introduced into schools by administrators or faculties who recognize the large social value in such training, but to find them abolished after a few years as required courses, owing to the unsatisfactory way in which they are administered. The chief objection is that they become "snaps" and are characterized by lack of serious preparation by the students outside of class and by waste of time listening to speakers while in class. In contrast with this condition, classes in written composition usually have the reputation of being "hard" or "heavy," and students on debating teams do very intense studying in preparation for their debates. In view of these facts, the following methods of securing more efficient training in oral expression in English classes have been suggested.

I. Give the work more definite and specific intellectual content by requiring students to investigate topics and write briefs in the same way as is done by debating teams.

2. Associate the training in oral expression with the work in written composition.

3. Require students to study and discuss important speeches, legal arguments, "selling talks," etc. from the standpoint of content, organization, and form of expression.

4. Provide some type of laboratory or class organization so that each student speaks only to a small committee or group, including the teacher, thus enabling other members of the class to be using their time in studying.

Experiments suggest superiority of combined training in oral and written composition. The social importance of training in oral expression, and the desirability of ascertaining what results are secured when oral and written composition are combined in various ways, have led progressive teachers of English to undertake experiments to determine the most

effective methods of administering the combination. One of the most significant of these experiments is the work carried on by some twenty-five high-school teachers in Illinois under the direction of a committee of which Professor J. M. Clapp was chairman. Each teacher conducted two parallel first-year classes in composition, one class taking the ordinary course in written composition and the other a course in which two thirds of the themes were oral and one third were written. The experiment was continued for a semester and produced results which were definitely in favor of the combined course in oral and written composition. The precise details of the experiment are too long to permit us to reproduce them here, but every English teacher should read the full account referred to in the bibliography at the end of this chapter. (7 148-163)

A suggestive plan for organizing "Oral Composition as a Basis for Written" is described as being in use in a high school in St. Louis. (5: 354-361.) In the first year three periods are devoted to oral composition and one to written; in the second year, three to oral and two to written; in the third and fourth years, two to oral and two to written. The author emphasizes especially the superiority of practice under immediate supervision, which is secured in the oral method, as contrasted with the long-delayed criticism of the results of unsupervised practice, which prevails in the ordinary method of teaching written composition.

Principles of practice to be applied.—Training in expression offers opportunities for applying the general principles of practice which were discussed above in Chapter VIII (see p. 142). The application was made there to acquiring motor skill, as in tossing balls or learning to use a typewriter, and to memorizing. I know of no experimental investigations of the application of these principles to training in composition, but it would be possible to carry out the same type of investigation in this field. It would be complicated, however,

owing to the difficulty of securing, for the quantitative measurement of progress, objective units corresponding to the number of letters written in typewriting or to the time consumed in memorizing. With the present condition of our knowledge we can simply conjecture or draw inferences concerning the application of the general principles of practice to training in composition. In order to do this the student should review pages 142-146 and consider to what extent the principles discussed there apply here.

The principle of assuring a correct start would need careful interpretation. Often, as applied to composition, it has been interpreted to mean absolutely correct linguistic form. Insistence upon this has killed spontaneity and overshadowed the desired initial emphasis upon real, vital content and clearly organized ideas.

The importance of the proper emotional tone, including feelings of success and satisfaction, is as great in training in expression as in any other kind of practice. Zeal and concentration of attention are also essential.

The best length of the unit to be used for theme assignments should be determined. If the principles summarized on pages 161-164 apply here, short daily periods of writing or speaking should prove to be quite helpful.

Training in expression best secured in content subjects. In the first part of this chapter it was stated that in order to provide successful training in expression, the principles of such training should be applied by all teachers in all subjects. in which students are expressing themselves. As indicated throughout this chapter, these principles concern primarily clear thinking about a body of information which the student possesses and which he is interested in discussing, and careful effort to get the point of view of his audience in order to make the presentation clear, interesting, and impressive. These principles should be applied in recitations in all subjects. If this is done and students are given opportunities to