Writing and Speaking

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 10, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 44.

“Writing and Speaking.”

By Charles Sears Baldwin. Price $1.20. Longmans, Green & Company, 91, 93 5th Ave., New York.

There are unnumbered books on English, and especially on English composition; but there is always room for something a little better yet, and thus we would denominate this new book on “Writing and Speaking” English. The author of this review thinks so well of it that he is using it as a text-book in giving special instruction in English to a private pupil.

Having been closely identified with school work, and knowing practically everything there is on the market, we consider this one of the best books, if not the best book, published for those who wish a text-book on practical rhetoric. The purpose of the author is well expressed in the following statement which we take from its Introduction:

“What all writers know makes the laws of writing. These are not like the laws of the state, but like the laws of sailing. In bringing a boat to the wharf the law is to come up on the lee side. You may learn that law in either of two ways: you may try the windward side instead, smash the bowsprit, and perhaps fall overboard; or you may accept the teaching of an old sailor. When you have learned the laws of sailing you are not less free to go where you wish; you are more free. In fact, you are hardly free at all until you have mastered the laws practically. So it is in writing. The whole object of a text-book of composition is to help you gain your end; the whole object of learning these laws is to apply them practically to your own purposes.”

The author states that the great objects of composition are two, clearness and interest; and around these two great objects he builds his book, and toward these objects he leads his pupils.

The book covers work in Sentences, in Punctuation and Capitals, in Letter Forms, in Revision, Conversation, Principles of Clearness, Principles of Interest, Planning, Revising, Bringing Books to Bear, Presentation in Argument and Exposition, Structure of Narrative, Story Telling, Style, and The Forms of Composition in Literature.

The book is a valuable one for use with students who have well mastered grammar. As the author says, the object of this book is “not only to make better writers, nor to make writers at all in the professional sense, but through writing and speaking to make better thinkers, men and women more sympathetically responsive to their actual world and better able to answer its calls.”