How to Speak and Write Correctly: Joseph Devlin's Classic Text

The classic text on how to speak and write English 'correctly.' *** "In the preparation of this little work the writer has kept one end in view, viz.: To make it serviceable for those for whom it is intended, that is, for those who have neither the time nor the opportunity, the learning nor the inclination, to peruse elaborate and abstruse treatises on Rhetoric, Grammar, and Composition. To them such works are as gold enclosed in chests of steel and locked beyond power of opening. This book has no pretension about it whatever, -it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary rules and exceptions. It is merely an effort to help ordinary, everyday people to express themselves in ordinary, everyday language, in a proper manner."

Joseph Devlin, also known as Joe Devlin, (13 February 1871 – 18 January 1934) was an Irish journalist and influential nationalist politician. He was a member of parliament (MP) for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and later a Nationalist Party MP in the Parliament of Northern Ireland.

Born at 10 Hamill Street, in the Lower Falls area of Belfast, he was the fifth child of Charles Devlin (d. 1906) who ran a hackney cab, and his wife Eliza King (d. 1902) who sold groceries from their home. Until he was twelve he attended the nearby St. Mary's Christian Brothers School in Divis Street, where he was educated in a more Irish nationalist and Catholic view of Irish history and culture than offered in the state system.

During the 1890s he was active as an organiser in the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation in eastern Ulster. When William O'Brien founded the United Irish League (UIL) in County Mayo in 1898, Devlin founded the UIL section in Belfast which became his political machine in Ulster. He was elected unopposed as Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) Member of Parliament for Kilkenny North in the February 1902 by-election.His first political assignment came that year when the Party sent him to Irish Americas on the first of several successful fund-raising missions.

He became a distinguished parliamentarian and had reached the top by the skillful use of two remarkable talents, his persuasive and very powerful oratory, and secondly, that he was a great organization man, not merely as General Secretary of the United Irish League, but because he also dominated the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He was the only member of the younger generation to belong to the innermost circle of the IPP leadership and was widely seen as eventual heir-apparent.