Word: shorthand
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...teaching of reading be improved? In essence, Author Flesch urges a return to the old phonetic method still used in Europe. Reading should be taught like shorthand, i.e., by writing and reading at the same time with "pure, unadulterated, old-fashioned drill" in the ABCs and the sounds they make. When the child can write each letter and knows its sound, he should go on to letter combinations. Moreover, the five-year-old can start right in on nursery tales and fables, e.g., Henny Penny and The House That Jack Built. With this "phonics" method, says Flesch, educators and parents...
...later regretted his brashness, and still later, U.S. readers did adopt Walt Whitman as a national poet, but the clash between the two men dramatized the perennially split personality of American writing. Critic Philip Rahv has aptly defined it as a clash between "paleface and redskin." This is critical shorthand for the interrelated battles of highbrow v. lowbrow, refined sensibility v. raw energy, the tradition-directed writer v. the self-made writer. The palefaces, e.g., Hawthorne, Melville, James, ruled the 19th century; the redskins, e.g., Dreiser, Anderson, Wolfe, Hemingway, Faulkner, rule the 20th. As the first great chief...
...started life in Utah, where his father managed a copper mine before it was sold and he decided to move to California and go into chicken ranching. The elder Rowe soon found this too hazardous a business, so he invented a speedwriting system called Rowe Vowel Shorthand and opened a business school in Michigan. When this venture also failed, the family moved to San Francisco and Guy got a job peddling newspapers. After the 1906 earthquake, the Rowes headed for Detroit, where Guy went to work in the railroad station smashing baggage at $2 a week...
...with such intimate intensity as to give the illusion that the recipients of the letters were entering the room one by one, hearing the Emperor's orders with their own ears, and then passing from the scene like ghosts. The toiling secretary, scribbling like mad in a desperate shorthand, never dared to interrupt the one-man show, which ended only when the Emperor abruptly shot from the room, took an hour's nap. and ultimately returned with "an overfilled goose-quill" to inscribe a blotty "N" at the base of each transcribed letter...
Cora Louise Sutherland had always been a thin, wiry type, but in 1951 she developed a hacking cough and lost weight steadily. Each day she taught shorthand to three classes totaling more than 70 pupils at Los Angeles' Van Nuys High School. Students and fellow teachers whispered, but nobody knew what ailed her. For Cora Sutherland was a Christian Scientist. Instead of submitting a chest X ray every three years (as do all but about 100 of LosAngeles' 13,000 teachers), she turned in an affidavit declaring herself free of communicable disease...