Excerpt from Macmillan's Course of French Composition: First Course Parallel French-English Extracts and Parallel English-French Syntax

To link the pupil's first attempts at Composition with the Course of his Readings, to make Composition go hand in hand with Translation, and alongside with, instead of after, the systematic study of Syntax - such are, briefly told, the characteristic features of this Manual. An attempt has been made to steer a safe middle course between two extremes of method: on the one hand, the rash and reckless course of rushing the tyro into the thick of the fray with no further equipment than some sort of formal word-drill by way of tools, and an unmanageable dictionary, full of snares and pitfalls, for the supply of his materials, - a course, it need hardly be said, foredoomed to certain failure and bitter disappointment, on the other hand, the safer, but withal painfully slow, process of reserving practice in Composition for that advanced stage when the whole Code of Syntactical Rules will, as is fondly hoped, have been fully mastered, - a process fraught with the serious risk of relegating the writing of connected passages to the Greek Kalends: the translating of endless detached sentences, eminently useful though it be, having crowded out the very end it was intended to subserve, and the perplexed pupil having, all the while, never been able to see the forest for the trees.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.