OF ENGLISH COMPOSITION THROUGH ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS A TEXT-BOOK FOR THE SENIOR CLASSES OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS BY P. GOYEN INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1894 All rights reserved 897 6724 pri Educ. Library PREFACE As a means of teaching composition and the principles that govern sentence structure, analysis of sentences has completely broken down and become, outside the teaching profession, entirely discredited. Pupils parse and parse, analyse and analyse, for years of their school life, and in the end are ignorant of what constitutes a good sentence and wholly without ability to write one. The cause of this unsatisfactory result is not, I think, difficult to dis cover. The parsing of single words, however well done, can be made to bear only on the syntax of single words—quite a trifle in sentence structure. Analysis, however, includes single words, phrases, and clauses-the whole mechanism. of the sentence however complex, and, of course, ought to bear on the syntax of the whole mechanism; but unfortunately it has been made by the books to concern itself only with breaking down and classifying. Its sole aim has been to dismember the sentence and to place the disjecta membra under their appropriate headings. This is all very well from the point of view that decomposition and classification are the sole end of grammar; but ought they to be so regarded? Is not synthesis as important as analysis? Is it not necessary that the young student should be trained not only to decompose and classify, but also to compose, that is, to arrange words, phrases, and clauses in their most effective setting? Analysis is purely destructive; it destroys beauty of thought and beauty of 717 |