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PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

Nowadays there is something important called “updating.” It was need­ful in other days, too—when Jubal struck the chorded shell, for in­stance, and when Noah built the Ark. For college textbooks, as for other useful modem objects, it is extremely important. But how does one go about updating a composition and rhetoric textbook every five or six years?

It is being done. It must be done. And among the exempla it can be done without great hazard and hand-wringing. There are always illus­trative models that, though perhaps imperceptibly ancient in method, are totally new as to subject. New and fresh, we like to say. In the first edition of this textbook, under the head of “Mechanisms,” an article entitled “Automobiles That Fly” seemed new and fresh. The automobiles did not fly, after all; the selection was soon stale. And so, from the first edition on, we have run through a series of new models until in this Fifth Edition we enter the space age with Mr. G. Edward Pendray’s “Rocket Power” to illustrate “Mechanisms.”

How much further should we take this updating? No very assured answer comes from the numerous studies that have recently appeared in periodicals and books and that have been anthologized by Professors Gary Tate and Edward P. J. Corbett in their valuable Teaching Fresh­man Composition. Advocates of the “new” or “functional” grammar; of linguistics; of rhetoric; of the literary approach—all these have had much to say. There is also a strong cross-current of “stylistics”—an old idea expressed by a word so new that I find it in only one of the four “college” dictionaries on my desk.

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

CHAPTER

I. THE STUDY OF COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC

II. THE COMPOSITION

III. EXPOSITORY WRITING
IV. THE PARAGRAPH

V. THE SENTENCE

VI. WORDS

VII. DESCRIPTIVE AND NARRATIVE WRITING

VIII. DEFINITION AND ANALYSIS IN EXPOSITORY WRITING

IX. THE RESEARCH PAPER

X. THE CRITICAL ESSAY

XI. THE INFORMAL ESSAY

XII. ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

A CONCISE HANDBOOK OF GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, MECHANICS, AND SPELLING

THE NATURE OF GRAMMAR : A FOREWORD

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