INTRODUCTION.

1. PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

The great object to be accomplished in reading, as a rhetorical exercise,
is to convey to the hearer, fully and clearly, the ideas and feelings of
the writer.

In order to do this, it is necessary that a selection should be carefully
studied by the pupil before he attempts to read it. In accordance with
this view, a preliminary rule of importance is the following:

RULE 1.--Before attempting to read a lesson, the learner should make
himself fully acquainted with the subject as treated of in that lesson,
and endeavor to make the thought and feeling and sentiments of the writer
his own.

REMARK.--When he has thus identified himself with the author, he has the
substance of all rules in his own mind. It is by going to nature that we
find rules. The child or the savage orator never mistakes in inflection or
emphasis or modulation. The best speakers and readers are those who follow
the impulse of nature, or most closely imitate it as observed in others.

II. ARTICULATION.

Articulation is the utterance of the elementary sounds of a language, and
of their combinations.

An Elementary Sound is a simple, distinct sound made by the organs of
speech.