A Text-Book on Rhetoric, Supplementing the Development of the Science with Exhaustive Practice in Composition

A text-book on rhetoric – is a work written by Brainerd Kellogg, who was a Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Middlebury College in Vermont, United States and later a Professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He published a number of influential education books and this book is one of them. This rhetoric textbook is divided into three sections - Inventions, Quality of Style, and Production. Much attention is paid to Invention, the discovery of thought, the most important element of any kind of discourse. Thirty lessons are devoted to "Invention", more than a third of the total. Although, strictly speaking, rhetoric cannot, nothing can teach the student to think, he can be involved in such a relationship with his subject that he will think a lot in it, draw a lot from it, and he can be forced to put it in the brightest place in his oral and written works. Explaining, in this way, what thinking is, what a thought is and what a sentence is as an embodiment of thought and a tool for its expression, the author leads the student to the construction of sentences of all conceivable types, from the simplest to the most complex ones - transformed by replacement, reduction and expansion - through the synthesis of sentences in their various forms into paragraphs, as well as through the analysis of subjects and the preparation of a framework for the search for thought for his topics. In the section "Qualities of Style", looking at more than 100 pages, the student gets acquainted with the six main, cardinal of them - insight, imagery, energy, wit, pathos and elegance, - studies in detail what he should do to provide them and placed in front of him pages of rare excerpts from English writers for a critical study of style. In the "Production" section, the entire discourse is divided into oral and written, and written in prose and poetry. They are subdivided, and the details and functions of the main divisions and their divisions are explained. Particular attention is paid to those works that are required from the student - conversation, debate, speeches and letters. The rhythm and meter of poetry are brought to his understanding, and passages are given for the critical study of poetry.