New Composition and Rhetoric for Schools

"New Composition And Rhetoric For Schools" by Robert Herrick and Lindsay Todd Damon is a comprehensive early-20th-century writing manual guiding students in clear, effective prose through mastery of sentence, paragraph, and whole-text structure. The work fuses theoretical guidance with abundant literary examples and practice exercises, organized around four core principles: unity, coherence, proportion, and emphasis. It treats the sentence as a vehicle for variety and control, urging the arranger to mix long and short, simple and complex constructions, and to use pronouns, connectives, inversion, repetition, and echo-words to illuminate relationships. It discusses periodic versus loose sentences and emphasizes placing key elements at sentence beginnings or ends to strengthen emphasis, while offering exercises that identify faults in parallelism and misuse of connectives. The paragraph chapter concentrates on unity (every sentence serving a single main idea), coherence (clear connections between sentences), and proportion (space allotted to ideas). The whole-composition chapter treats the piece as a single unit built from unity, coherence, proportion, and emphasis, and stresses careful planning through outlines, with effective openings and conclusions. Part IV and later sections on description, narration, exposition, and argumentation provide techniques, examples, and exercises for practice. The book repeatedly links revision, planning, and systematic practice to strong writing in high school classrooms.