This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1920. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... The college student no longer has patience to tread the paths his fathers trod. He is in quest of the royal road. He wants to speak and write with dash and brilliancy on a vocabulary of a few hundred words. Yet it is reading that gives a man his vocabulary and reflection that teaches him how to use it. Without reading and reflection no one ever learned to write with virility, and in all human probability no one ever will. Thought is the only road to effective self-expression; there are no short cuts known to man. 11 there was any way of giving a boy a good education without a lot of drudgery, both for himself and for his teacher, the world would have' found it out long ago. -- Editorial in the Boston Herald. PREFACE: TO TEACHERS 1 Writing Theough Reading is a small book of methods and exercises in different kinds of rewriting or retelling another person's thought. I have compiled it in order to provide an inexpensive manual of carefully selected passages suitable for "first practice," trusting that teachers, having once tried the plan, and having trained their students to use it, will continue in it, assigning specimens of their own selection. The convictions that led to the preparation of the book are as follows: -- 1. That not more than one third -- at most, one half -- of a student's writing should be original. 2. That the rest of his practice should present to him definite, even intensive, problems in expression, in which his incentive is emulation, and his product is of such a sort that not only his teacher, but he himself, can form some fair estimate of his success. S. That such definite problems are supplied by the various forms of reproduction, the advantages which these offer being: -- A. To the student: -- (a) That he ...