This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ... ON READING ALOUD Question. What is required in reading aloud well? Answer. First, the ability to give thoughts to your listeners. Q. For what do readers usually strive? A. For mechanical perfection in speaking words and in giving attractive action, however irrelevant it may be. Q. What is the second requirement for good reading? A. That your eye be educated to glance ahead and quickly comprehend what is coming, that you may look at your audience, thereby emphasizing the main thought. A very good way to gain facility along this line is to place your book or manuscript on a table and walk by it and around it, glancing at it for promptings as seldom as possible. Q. Give another requirement for good reading. A. A pleasing voice with theoretical and practical knowledge of its use. Q. What is the vital requirement for good reading? A. The possession of that intangible, elusive something, termed "individuality," which defies definition but which instantly communicates itself to the listener. Q. What is the difference between individuality and personality? A. Individuality is the broader, bigger, more comprehensive term. It is the ego, the real man shining through his personality, which in a sense is external. Q. What should be both a duty and a pleasure when you first come in touch with a new book or poem? A. A consideration of the author. Who is he? Is he living? What has he written? How does the book or selection you have in hand rank among his writings? Is this his major performance? For instance: "The Star Spangled Banner," by Francis Scott Key; "Home, Sweet Home," by John Howard Payne; "America," by Samuel F. Smith; "Pilgrim's Progress," by John Bunyan; "The Arabian Nights," translated from the Arabic. In considering the greater...

Much of the scholarly exchange regarding the history of women in rhetoric has emphasized women’s rhetorical practices. In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres—humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women’s preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks. She examines the relationship between communication and gender and between theory and pedagogy and argues that women constructed a theory of rhetoric based on conversation, not public speaking, as a model for all discourse. Donawerth traces the development of women’s rhetorical theory through the voices of English and American women (and one much-translated French woman) over three centuries. She demonstrates how they cultivated theories of rhetoric centered on conversation that faded once women began writing composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth century. She recovers and elucidates the importance of the theories in dialogues and defenses of women’s education by Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Madeleine de Scudéry; in conduct books by Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and Eliza Farrar; in defenses of women’s preaching by Ellen Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Catherine Booth, and Frances Willard; and in elocution handbooks by Anna Morgan, Hallie Quinn Brown, Genevieve Stebbins, and Emily Bishop. In each genre, Donawerth explores facets of women’s rhetorical theory, such as the recognition of the gendered nature of communication in conduct books, the incorporation of the language of women’s rights in the defenses of women’s preaching, and the adaptation of sentimental culture to the cultivation of women’s bodies as tools of communication in elocution books. Rather than a linear history, Conversational Rhetoric follows the starts, stops, and starting over in women’s rhetorical theory. It covers a broad range of women’s rhetorical theory in the Anglo-American world and places them in their social, rhetorical, and gendered historical contexts. This study adds women’s rhetorical theory to the rhetorical tradition, advances our understanding of women’s theories and their use of rhetoric, and offers a paradigm for analyzing the differences between men’s and women’s rhetoric from 1600 to 1900.

Examining language debates and literary texts from Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken and from Washington Irving to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book demonstrates how gender arose in passionate discussions about language to address concerns about national identity and national citizenship elicited by 19th-century sociopolitical transformations. Together with popular commentary about language in Congressional records, periodicals, grammar books, etiquette manuals, and educational materials, literary products tell stories about how gendered discussions of language worked to deflect nationally divisive debates over Indian Removal and slavery, to stabilize mid-19th-century sociopolitical mobility, to illuminate the logic of Jim Crow, and to temper the rise of "New Women" and "New Immigrants" at the end and turn of the 19th century. Strand enhances our understandings of how ideologies of language, gender, and nation have been interarticulated in American history and culture and how American literature has been entwined in their construction, reflection, and dissemination.