Written and Spoken English

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 II MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS AND TALKS 1. THE SUMMARY Studying Intelligently. An educator has said, in a Chinese way of expressing thought, that a high school education should teach a student how to discover what he should not learn. Many educators have emphasized this same thought, that a high school...
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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 II MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS AND TALKS 1. THE SUMMARY Studying Intelligently. An educator has said, in a Chinese way of expressing thought, that a high school education should teach a student how to discover what he should not learn. Many educators have emphasized this same thought, that a high school education should give a student the ability to study intelligently, ? the ability to distinguish between the essential and the unessential parts of what is read. Very many students are attempting to get an education without knowing how to study intelligently. They do not realize that only certain parts of an assigned lesson are of primary importance and that many parts are of such minor importance that they may be passed hurriedly. If the students of a class are asked to study a magazine article, some will select at random certain thoughts that attract their attention, and will get only a distorted notion of the author's thought. Others will attempt to learn all that the article contains, without distinguishing between important and unimportant thoughts, and they will get only a distorted notion of what the author really said. Those who study intelligently, however, will read the article to get its general message, and then they will select the few principal thoughts that the article presents andwill learn these thoroughly. These are the only students in the class who will be able to give a clear statement of the thought in the article. These are the only ones who have studied intelligently. A Mental Summary. A person who has learned to study intelligently forms the habit of making a mental summary of the thought in each oral or written discussion that impresses him as being of worth. He asks himself, What is the message ? What is the substance of this discussion ? ...