Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III STUDIES IN CONNECTIVES Grammar teaches us that coordinate conjunctions connect words, phrases, and clauses of equal rank; in reading, we find that the connected words, phrases, and clauses are of equal thought value. Conjunctions are " signboards," and each has a message of its own. For instance : And connects words, phrases, and clauses of equal thought value, and therefore tells us that the part to follow is equally important with the part that has gone before. (See illustration No. 1.) Or connects parts of equal thought value, but we may know that between them there is always a choice. (See No. 15.) But bespeaks the presence of a second part; and it tells us that the second will be opposed, in some way, to the first. (No. 23.) For signals that it is followed by an explanation or reason for what precedes, or if the form is inverted, for what follows; and so on through the list of well- known words, whose meanings the Dictionary will unfold. A preposition is a connective having an object that it connects with some other part of the sentence. Pedagogical Introduction Faulty reading of words, phrases, and clauses connected by and is one of the most common errors in school reading. What teacher has not wrestled with the tendency of pupils to place undue emphasis on connectives, particularly coordinate conjunctions and prepositions that express naturally inferred relationships ? It is one of the most noticeable errors in the reading of poetry, and invariably present in " singsong." Undue emphasis, however, is not the real fault; it is only the outward manifestation of careless and incorrect thinking. In the sentence, " The United States has a large home and foreign trade in wheat," pupils will read, home-and-foreign, as though the two words ...