Do You Make These Mistakes in English?

EDWIN L. BATTISTELLA

Do You Make
These Mistakes
in English?
z The Story of Sherwin Cody’s
Famous Language School

1
2009
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Battistella, Edwin L.
Do you make these mistakes in English? : the story of Sherwin Cody’s
famous language school / Edwin L. Battistella.
p. cm.
ISBN ----
. Cody, Sherwin, 1868–1959. . English teachers—United States—Biography.
. Entrepreneurs—United States—Biography. . Language and culture—United
States—History—th century. . Correspondence schools and courses—History—
th century. . English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. I. Title.
PE.CB 
.'—dc 

        
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 Contents

Introduction vii
Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 An Advertisement That Never Changed 3

Chapter 2 From Literature to Business 12
Chapter 3 Good Money in Good English 23
Chapter 4 What You Want and Where to Get It 36
Chapter 5 The 100% Self-correcting Course in
English Language 45
Chapter 6 Grammar and Vocabulary 61
Chapter 7 The Finishing Touches 73
Chapter 8 Every Day People Judge You 79
Chapter 9 Just 15 Minutes a Day 86
vi S contents
Chapter 10 A Better Self: Manners, Music, and Muscles 94
Chapter 11 Smile 105
Chapter 12 Language, Culture, and Anxiety 117
Chapter 13 Linguistics and the New Rhetoric 126
Chapter 14 Study at Home 139
Chapter 15 School’s Out 145
Chapter 16 The Sherwin Cody Legacy 160

Notes 165
Answers to Exercises 190
Sherwin Cody Timeline 197
Works by Sherwin Cody 200
Index 207
 Introduction

z I first became aware of Sherwin Cody many years

ago from an advertisement in a comic book. The small ad was on
the same page as the ones for X-ray specs, sea monkeys, joy buzz-
ers, and ventriloquism pamphlets. The exact wording escapes me,
but it promised mastery of the English language for just a cou-
ple of dollars. In the post-Sputnik meritocracy of the 1960s, that
seemed like a good deal, and I ordered the set of pocket books
through the mail. I even read them a bit at a time over a summer,
along with more comic books.
Much later, and after much more schooling, I came across
Sherwin Cody again. I was researching attitudes about grammar
for a book called Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others?
I showed my wife a vintage ad I had found for the Cody books,
titled “Good English and Good Fortune Go Hand in Hand.” We
began to wonder whether anyone had done work on Cody’s
course or life. I found other ads, bought a set of the correspon-
dence course booklets, and began to track down some of Cody’s
hundred-plus publications and information about his many
business ventures. Soon I was hooked.
viii S introduction
Cody’s trail was to be found in paper ephemera. At the center
was his signature ad which reminded readers about their mistakes
in English. Cody’s ad offered success-oriented readers a scientifi-
cally tested method to improve their English in just a few minutes
a day, and the success of the ads made Cody an often-cited figure
in the history of advertising. But he was largely unmentioned
elsewhere—in linguistics, English studies, rhetoric, or the history
of the book. Cody was not a member of the American literary
elite and he was not a professional linguist. He was an entrepre-
neur—a businessman and business teacher whose success was in
mass-marketing good English and in building a correspondence
school that helped over 150,000 men and women improve their
speech and writing. Cody saw himself as an independent scholar
and applied scientist as well, and his goal was to blend the prac-
tical and the intellectual, a goal we sometimes seem to give up
on today. Cody addressed many concerns in his writings, and his
work as a whole should be considered part of American success
and self-help rhetoric. And the central practical issue that Cody
grappled with was one that has always been at the heart of lan-
guage study: how we are judged by our speech and writing.
 Acknowledgments

z This research benefited from the generous help of

many institutions and individuals. The National Endowment for
the Humanities provided a valuable summer research stipend (FT-
5327405), which was followed by a sabbatical leave from Southern
Oregon University during which the manuscript was completed.
I received research help from many people, near and far.
Members of the Cody family were generous with their time
and recollections: Peter Malcolm Cody of Maryland, Professor
Gabrielle Hamilton Cody of New York, and Aldus M. Cody of
Florida. Rutgers University business professor Carter A. Daniel
shared recollections of his interviews with Morrill Cody and pro-
vided valuable advice and comments along the way.
History researcher Ben Truwe of Medford, Oregon, Sara
Rogers of the Dobbs Ferry Public Library, Robert Scheffel of
the local history division of the Central Library of Rochester and
Monroe County, Molly O’Hagen Hardy of the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, Barbara Simmons of the Amherst
College Library, Georgette Hedberg of the Dobbs Ferry Historical
Society, Cynthia Soroka of Charles Atlas Ltd., and Paul Collins
x S acknowledgments
of Gracion Software also provided helpful information along the
way, and librarian Jim Rible assisted in the preparation of some of
the images reproduced here. Anna Beauchamp, interlibrary loan
librarian at the Lenn and Dixie Hannon Library, went above and
beyond the call of duty helping me to track down old, odd, and
unusual references and Cody’s publications and advertisements.
The images from Cody’s ads, prospectus, and course are repro-
duced with the permission of Peter M. Cody and Gabrielle
Hamilton Cody. The “Creative Man’s Corner” in Chapter 15 is
reproduced with the permission of Crain Communications, Inc.
I am also indebted to the fine referees for Oxford University
Press for their comments and to Maureen Flanagan for her reality
check on the final version and for her help in pixel editing. Special
thanks to Executive Editor Peter Ohlin of Oxford University Press
for his work in bringing this project to fruition.
A note on the citations to The 100% Self-correcting Course in
English Language: the booklets are unpaginated and contain both
regular two-sided pages and tri-fold pages with two regular sides
and material repeated for a second trial of a lesson. I have adopted
the convention of citing pages without counting the extra folds.
So a citation of Lesson 1, 3 refers to the first booklet and the third
regular page.
Do You Make These Mistakes in English?
This page intentionally left blank
 one

An Advertisement That
Never Changed

zI n the early 1900s the average life expectancy

in the United States was under 50 years. Catastrophic
fires and mine explosions were common, and there were still
outbreaks of typhoid and the bubonic plague. Few Americans
graduated from high school, two out of every ten adults couldn’t
read or write, and unskilled workers made between $200 and $400
a year. The Ford Motor Company and the World Series were just
getting started. Andrew Carnegie, the Bill Gates of his day, was
building the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and funding about
2,000 Carnegie libraries across the nation. And a balding, middle-
aged writer named Sherwin Cody was marketing a home-study
course on The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language.
Cody would eventually develop a correspondence version of
his course that would last for over 40 years. Together with the
Harvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book-of-the-Month
Club, and other mail-order products, Sherwin Cody’s 100% Self-
correcting Course in English Language introduced working-class and
middle-class consumers to the skills, manners, and mental habits
of the successful. Cody’s course had a signature advertisement that
4 S do you make these mistakes in english?
was just as durable, and even gained cult status over the years—he
asked “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”1
The headline offered free information about English, promising
to reveal mistakes that you may be making and appealing to readers’
insecurities about language. The typical ad copy led off with sev-
eral examples of mistakes in English. Some were simple spelling and
grammatical errors (calander, you was) while others were less obvious,
such as Cody’s preference for Have you heard from him today? over Did
you hear from him today? 2 The ads offered a patented self-correcting
device to provide improvement in just 15 minutes a day and prom-
ised more astonishing facts about English in a free prospectus.
Longer ads also explained why so many people were deficient
in English, citing the “crying disgrace” of the nation’s schools, and
detailed Cody’s credentials. They explained that the scientifically
tested device to correct one’s bad habits was “Mr. Cody’s voice
behind you, ready to speak out whenever you commit an error”
and assured the reader that Cody would be a patient “everlasting
mentor beside you, a mentor who would not laugh at you, but
who would, on the contrary, support and help you.”3 The ads also
explained how the system was efficient. Cody’s system identi-
fied personal mistakes and concentrated on those so “You do not
need to study anything you already know.” Ads also emphasized
Cody’s research in simplifying grammar to essentials, letting read-
ers know that “statistics show that a list of sixty words . . . make
up more than half our speech and letter writing” and that only
25 errors in grammar make up 90 percent of mistakes. This was
not the old grammar of obscure rules and technical terms. It was
a modern, personalized, scientific system. The longer ads were
also direct about the social and financial value of good English.
Cody’s students would gain “a facility in speech that marks them
as educated people in whatever society they find themselves.” And
there was the offer of a free lesson. Readers could clip a coupon
to receive a free book telling “one of the most interesting stories
about English that ever has been written.”
figure 1.1. An advertisement that never changed.
6 S do you make these mistakes in english?
The Cody ad ran widely, appearing in magazines like The
American Magazine, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The World’s Work,
in pulps like Amazing Stories and Black Mask, in annuals like The
World Almanac and Book of Facts, in comic books, and in the Sunday
newspaper book reviews and magazine supplements. Cody’s ads
began appearing in The New York Times in 1919 and ran two or
three times a year until 1959, usually as a full page on the back
of the book review or magazine. Over the years, however, Cody
and the copywriters working on his account experimented with
a number of headlines, including some that invited the reader
to construct a narrative from a drawing or photo. For example,
in “He thinks he is speaking correct English!” the drawing of
the women looking at the speaker tells everything we need to
know—that despite the suit and hat, the man on the telephone
lacks refinement. Other headlines were accusatory imperatives
to “Stop Making Mistakes in Speaking and Writing!” and “Stop
Abusing the English Language!”
Cody and adman Victor Schwab experimented with variations
on the “mistakes” theme, and they kept track of the return rate
of various ads and placements as they adjusted their marketing
buys. The “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” version of
the ad was the most often used and the most successful. Over the
years, the number of students served was updated, going from
“thousands” in the mid-1920s to 150,000 in the 1950s. Pictures,
drawings, sidebar, and new testimonials were inserted on occa-
sion, but most often the ad had a single image of Cody, bearded
and balding, looking from the middle of the page toward its left
column of text.
As we shall see, there was more to the course than the brief
pitch provided in the advertisements, and more to Sherwin Cody
as well. This book aims to place Cody’s work—his advertising
campaign, his course, his “scientific” approach, and his philosophy
of life—in the cultural context of the first half of the twentieth
century.Why is this important? Or to frame the question as Cody
figure 1.2. A Cody ad from the 1930s.
8 S do you make these mistakes in english?
might have: Why should you be interested in the Sherwin Cody
School of English?
If you have studied marketing, Cody’s name may be familiar
to you as an advertising pioneer and a client-collaborator of the
legendary admen Maxwell Sackheim and Victor Schwab. And if
you have studied professional writing, Cody may be a footnote
figure in discussions of the cardinal C’s of business communi-
cation (correctness, clarity, conciseness, courtesy, coherence, and
character). We look at these roles of Cody’s and also at the adver-
tising of correctness in English. Sherwin Cody’s course provides a
long-running case study of the way in which the early twentieth-
century mass media and advertising marketed self-improvement
and sold correct behavior, and we will place Cody’s course within
the larger genre that included the Harvard Classics and the Book-
of-the-Month Club, Dale Carnegie’s advice on winning friends
and influencing people, and even the body-building prescriptions
of Charles Atlas.Taken together, this self-improvement advertising
reflects techniques, narratives, and themes—anxiety about social
judgment and desire for success—that were successful during a
much earlier information and media revolution. By understand-
ing Sherwin Cody’s marketing of English in the context of the
marketing of self-improvement, we gain perspective not just on
the history of marketing but on some of the advertising that we
encounter today.
Cody’s story is also one for grammarians, linguists, and English
educators. Language scholars may have a passing recognition of
Sherwin Cody from his ads. But if you judge Cody merely by
his ads, you are likely to dismiss him as scoldingly traditional, or
worse. A fuller look at his work reveals that Cody was a modern
grammarian who generally advocated colloquial over bookish
usage. He was also a practical grammarian who aimed at simpli-
fying grammar instruction so it could be taught efficiently and
in relation to individual weaknesses. For linguists and English
teachers, Cody’s story reveals to us the ways that modern ideas
 an advertisement that never changed S 9
about grammar and teaching emerge in unexpected places and
the way that traditional grammar evolved to practical rules for
correcting the most common errors.
Cody’s course and his ad campaign also speak to language
scholars in another way. They highlight grammar as a symbol of
the social dynamics of correctness. We are anxious to appear edu-
cated, but also anxious not to be so educated as to be pedantic or
stuffy. Cody claimed this colloquial middle ground for language,
literature, and culture, and his orientation fit new working-class
and middle-class attitudes. The classic liberal arts education that
Cody himself had received was being challenged by newer forms
of study, and Cody himself had mixed feelings about the value of
that education. He saw the literary style in speech as outmoded
and crafted a practical twentieth-century message. Good speak-
ing, good writing, and good reading were a passport to success
and fulfillment, but grammar rules and reading lists needed to be
modern and pruned of deadwood.
Today’s educators will also find Cody’s role as an educational
critic of interest. As Cody built a business career as a teacher and
textbook publisher, he became an advocate of educational testing,
founding a national organization of schools of business and pro-
posing an efficient employment registry. He was part of an ideal-
istic group of civic leaders and school efficiency consultants who
sought to make schools more businesslike and accountable and
who saw a new partnership between schools and employers based
on the science of testing. Cody’s work thus provides historical
context for those of us who grapple with present-day assessment
and standards models.
Cody’s story is also about the education of workers and place-
bound students. If we think of the early twentieth-century postal
service as the internet of its day, Cody’s course involved distance
education for nontraditional students. As an educational critic and
entrepreneur, Cody was naturally drawn to the emerging busi-
ness model of correspondence education, which was becoming
10 S do you make these mistakes in english?
popular in universities and as private business. His experiences
in this new field tell us something about the potential for online
education today, which faces similar challenges and reactions.
Sherwin Cody’s interests were broader than just one field. Like
many successful entrepreneurs, he worked across boundaries, car-
rying ideas from one area to another. We often hear today that
the average person changes careers several times and that those
entering college will end up in types of work that don’t yet quite
exist. Cody’s story illustrates someone making such transitions a
century ago. His entrepreneurship was set in the context of the
social, cultural, and economic forces of his time, but many of these
forces remain today—advertising, mass culture, self-improvement,
educational efficiency—and so Sherwin Cody’s experience has
relevance in our twenty-first-century world. Because he lived
nearly a century, Cody’s story is also part of America’s story. He
was born at the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment and the
impeachment of Andrew Johnson and he lived until the state-
hood of Alaska and Hawaii and the beginnings of the U.S. space
program. In looking closely at a life spanning such great changes
in American society, business, and culture, we can learn more than
the fine points of speaking and writing the English language.
This book is organized into 16 chapters. Chapters Two and
Three recount Cody’s early years, his attempt at a literary career,
his entry into the publishing business, and his emergence as a
critic of traditional education. Here we see the trajectory that
led him to work in testing and eventually to the creation of his
correspondence course. Chapter Four describes the emergence
of the modern advertising industry and Cody’s connection with
Sackheim and Schwab as he developed a commercially viable
correspondence course, an advertising campaign, and a market-
ing strategy for the 100% Self-correcting Course in English Language.
Chapters Five through Seven look at the course itself and its
major themes—practical speaking, spelling and pronunciation,
punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, and reading—and in Chapters
 an advertisement that never changed S 11
Five and Six you have an opportunity to test your knowledge of
the English language with some of Cody’s lessons. In Chapter
Seven, Cody’s advice on literature is discussed as an example of
the role of book culture in self-improvement ideology.
Chapters Eight through Eleven look at some other, related
self-improvement products popular in the first half of the twen-
tieth century. Beginning with the narrative themes of print
advertising, these chapters introduce the ad campaigns for the
International Correspondence Schools, the Harvard Classics, the
Book-of-the Month Club, The Book of Etiquette, the U.S. School
of Music, the body-building course of Charles Atlas, and the self-
confidence course of Dale Carnegie. Understanding these helps
us to situate Cody’s correspondence course in the rhetoric of
conduct, success, and self-improvement and helps us to situate
grammar as well.
Chapters Twelve through Fourteen analyze the market condi-
tions that enabled Cody’s course to grow and thrive. Here we take
up American attitudes toward language and culture and look at
the ways in which linguistic and rhetorical thought were evolving
during Cody’s time. We also look at the emergence of correspon-
dence education as a means of serving workers, rural dwellers, and
others to whom traditional university education was unavailable.
Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen describe the last years of the 100%
Self-correcting Course in the 1950s and the combination of factors—
personal, cultural, business, and demographic—that brought about
its decline.
While the Sherwin Cody School of English has come and
gone, its history is a window on language and culture. In this book
we dust off that window.
 two

From Literature
to Business

zT o understand how Sherwin Cody came to

develop his “remarkable new invention,” we need
to begin with a different question: who was Sherwin Cody?
Alpheus Sherwin Cody was born in 1868, just a dozen miles from
Grand Rapids, Michigan, where his parents, Aldus and Eliza, had
moved from Ohio. Aldus Cody owned a sawmill and gristmill, and
the family lived in a two-room, bark-covered cabin. There were
a post office and grocery store nearby, and the area was known
for a time as Cody’s Mills. Sherwin Cody reports being born on
a snowy Thanksgiving, November 30, and says he was glad he was
“born like a real American pioneer.”1 According to Cody, both
of his parents’ families had New England roots, and his father
left Oberlin College to join the Ohio volunteers fighting against
slavery in the Civil War. Aldus had contracted tuberculosis while
fighting in the war, and he and Eliza both found the Michigan
winters hard. Soon after Sherwin was born, the family moved to
Lincoln, Nebraska, where Aldus ran a hardware store and later
bought a 40-acre fruit farm. He died when Sherwin was about
ten, apparently from the recurring tuberculosis.
 from literature to business S 13
Eliza Cody was also educated, having studied first at Oberlin
and during the Civil War at the Painesville Seminary. Though she
never completed her studies, Cody described her as being strong
in mathematics and as having an interest in languages. Sherwin
was the oldest of four sons, and with four boys to educate, Eliza
home-schooled at first. She also had plans for young Sherwin,
intending for him to go two years to Oberlin and then to “some
Eastern college [because] she wanted me to be better educated
than my parents.”2 But Eliza too had been prone to illness, and
she died about a year and a half after her husband, leaving Sherwin
Cody and his younger brothers orphaned. Cody’s maternal grand-
mother had lived with them and managed the household until the
family could move to New Hampshire to be near other relatives.
The death of his parents, and especially of his mother, deeply
affected Cody, so much so that in his running autobiography, he
referred to her as his “guardian angel” and emphasized his promise
to get a good education. Cody drove himself toward this goal of
building a better life than his parents had. In New Hampshire, he
attended the Canterbury district school and studied Latin privately
with a Dartmouth-educated farmer. But Cody also needed to con-
tribute to the household and could find little work in Canterbury.
He located a boarding house in Waltham, Massachusetts, and with
his grandmother’s blessing moved there to finish high school. At
Waltham High School, Cody distinguished himself in mathemat-
ics, founded a debate society, and was finally able to study Greek
in his junior year. His next stop would be Amherst College.

WORKING HIS WAY THROUGH COLLEGE

Founded in 1821 by a committee that included lexicographer
Noah Webster, Amherst College had a special mission to educate
indigent young men, and 17-year-old Sherwin Cody certainly
qualified when he arrived there in 1885. Cody chose Amherst
“because of all the colleges in the country I decided I was likely
14 S do you make these mistakes in english?
to get the best education there.”3 Money was a constant worry,
and Cody devoted two chapters of his autobiography to his col-
lege finances. He had received a small pension from the death of
his father and some back pension money as well, and he managed
to save about $115. But after paying his first year’s tuition of $50
and renting a room for $10 for the year, Cody had little left to
live on. He described how close he came to starvation in his first
term in college, living on “potatoes and corn mush” with “a pint
of milk a day, some bread, and an occasional egg.”4 His first year’s
expenses (including tuition) were $319, and he earned the differ-
ence by a variety of jobs.
Cody also received help from Julius Hawley Seelye, Amherst’s
president. Seelye was an Amherst graduate himself, who had
worked as a missionary and as the pastor of the First Dutch
Reformed Church in Schenectady, New York. In 1858 he returned
to his alma mater as Professor of Philosophy, served as a member
of Congress from 1875 to 1877, and assumed the presidency of
Amherst in 1877. With Seelye’s intervention, Cody received some
financial support from an aunt who sent him ten dollars a month.
Seelye also eventually hired Cody as his personal secretary, a job
that helped Cody begin his career as an entrepreneur. The type-
writer was just coming into mass production while Cody was
in college, and he persuaded an uncle to advance him money to
buy one for his job. Cody ended up acquiring a new Remington,
which he also put to use in a class he was taking with rhetoric
professor John Franklin Genung. Genung was lecturing from the
notes to his soon-to-be-famous rhetoric text, and Cody offered
to type and reproduce Genung’s notes in advance for the class. To
do this, Cody constructed a hectograph, an early form of dupli-
cating machine that used a glycerin-coated plate of gelatin to
make copies. He collected 75 cents each from a hundred students
and reproduced Genung’s notes as four-page leaflets. He reported
that he “cleared twenty-five dollars on this first publishing opera-
tion,” and he went on to make another eleven dollars copying a
 from literature to business S 15
play for a nearby girls’ school. By his sophomore year, Cody had
received a scholarship, and he and another student even borrowed
money to buy a boarding house. Becoming a property owner
and landlord in his sophomore year provided sufficient financial
security that Cody was able to devote his junior and senior years
mostly to study.
His financial circumstances taught Cody entrepreneurship, but
he was learning other things at Amherst as well. Cody’s education
was grounded in the traditional liberal arts and classics. He took
a total of eleven courses in Latin and Greek, reading Catullus in
Latin and Aeschylus, Euripides, and the New Testament in Greek.
In philosophy, Cody read Huxley,Tyndall, Spencer, Berkeley, Kant,
Conte, Hegel, and Swedenborg. He studied mathematics, phi-
losophy, chemistry, and history, which included art history and
which got him interested in “the great artists of the Renascence.”5
Reflecting on his education, however, Cody was ambivalent. In
an essay called “What is the Value of a College Course?” he wrote
that the classical aspects of college were valuable in acquaint-
ing students with the “great minds of all time” and helping to
develop “some underlying principles that afterward [are] eternal.”
At the same time, Cody felt that college was oriented too much
toward the past. “A college man,” he wrote, “needs to take at once
a course of applied science and philosophy and literature in the
actual work of today. It is a pity he is not better prepared to do
this, but stumbles on it blindly, in pained distress. Perhaps they do
it better now than in my day.”6
Cody was graduated from Amherst in 1889, at the age of 21.
He had begun college seeing himself as an engineer but, in his first
year, found himself increasingly drawn to literature. At Amherst he
kept journals, begun partly in an attempt to learn to write with his
left hand after he was confined to his room with an infection in his
right hand. Journaling became a habit, and Cody wrote “confes-
sions, philosophic discussions, love stories, prose poems, anything
and everything.” He reported writing for two to four hours a day
16 S do you make these mistakes in english?
and producing a total of about 2,400 pages during his college
years—a dozen 200-page volumes stapled with loose-leaf covers.
(Today he would doubtless be a blogger.) In his journals, Cody
often imitated writers like De Quincey, Thackeray, Macaulay, and
Shelley and even published student essays on Macaulay and De
Quincey. But while he appreciated literary history, he later came
to see the literary style as an impediment, claiming that the formal
style “killed the sale of my writing for many years, till I wished
I had never heard of college.”7

LITERARY VAGABOND
On graduation from college, Cody worked as a teacher for a short
while in Kingsport, Rhode Island, to pay off some college debts,
but his real passion was to write. After his teaching stint, he found
work as a reporter at the Boston Herald from 1889 to 1890, during
which he interviewed Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. For a short
time Cody was the private secretary to John Bigelow, one of the
founders of the New York Public Library. From 1890 to 1892, he
worked as a proofreader in a publishing house owned by William
Eaton Chandler, who was a senator from New Hampshire, and
in 1892 Cody also worked as Chandler’s private secretary.8 By
1893, when he was 25, Cody was in New York, conducting what
he calls a literary apprenticeship. He wrote that “All this time
I was carrying on my ‘education in the world,’ almost ready to
forget I was ever a college man, and at the same time writing and
rewriting a dozen volumes. . . . ”9 Cody described himself at this
time as a “hack writer,” and in one version of his Story Writing
and Journalism volume, he recounted how he supported himself
by preparing a history of the Chinese Empire in the wake of
the Boxer Rebellion and by writing advertising booklets such as
“How to Build a Cheap House.”10 Cody also wrote book reviews,
earning money by reselling review copies to used bookstores, and
he remarked that most books could be reviewed after reading just
 from literature to business S 17
ten pages, and some after reading just ten lines or glancing at the
contents page.11
In 1893 Cody privately published a series of love poems called
Life’s Philosophy, and in 1894 he published some lessons he had
been using to teach story writing as a five-dollar book called How
to Write Fiction, Especially the Art of Short Story Writing. It included
discussion of different kinds of stories; methods for writing; advice
on setting, character, theme, dialogue, plot, and style; and even
suggestions on how to observe people.While the book was largely
ignored, the Chicago Dial gave it such a laudatory review that
Cody thought his reputation was made.12
From 1894 to 1896, Cody lived in London, where he sought
to establish a literary career. He became a member of the New
Vagabonds Club, and he republished How to Write Fiction. Cody
also realized his ambition to publish a novel when J. M. Dent
accepted In the Heart of the Hills. The novel tells the story of
Alec Howe, the son of a prosperous New York merchant. After
a dispute with his father and stepmother, Alec sets off to find
his fortune in rural New Hampshire. He is befriended by a
shopkeeper and his family, and Alec eventually comes to man-
age the store after the shopkeeper dies. Through hard work and
business acumen, Alec becomes successful and marries. The
novel ends, Horatio Alger–like, with financial success and local
philanthropy:
Alexander Howe is now the rich man of the town in Ashton.
He made a considerable fortune in his business, and owns a large
farm, which he intends turning into a private park,—private, but
open to all his town’s people.13

In the Heart of the Hills was a failure, however, and Cody’s lit-
erary career stalled, causing him to reflect that “As an optimistic
American I couldn’t write for the old world British.”14 Cody did
succeed in another way, however, marrying an English woman
named Marian Teresa Hurley. Together they moved in 1896 to
18 S do you make these mistakes in english?
Chicago, a city that Cody described as the frontier of literary civi-
lization and that he perhaps saw as more promising for his future
than New York or London. Chicago was where he would remain
for the next 20 years as he completed his transition from literature
to business.

HOW TO WRITE LETTERS THAT PULL

In Chicago, Cody returned to the newspaper business, work-
ing first at the Chicago Record and then at the Chicago Tribune.
Correspondence education was coming into vogue at the
recently founded University of Chicago, and the Tribune was
offering home-study courses as well. Cody was put to work on
the Tribune’s course on the English language. Of about a hun-
dred courses offered, only two had any success, Cody’s course
on English and another course on bookkeeping. While at the
Tribune, Cody also continued his literary work, publishing a book
on Story Composition in 1897 and developing a relationship with
the Werner School Book Company. In 1899 Cody produced
biographical booklets on William Cullen Bryant, Washington
Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Greenleaf Whittier, as well
as school books on Four American Poets (Bryant, Longfellow,
Whittier, and Holmes) and Four Famous American Writers (Irving,
Poe, James Russell Lowell, and Bayard Taylor).
As he became more involved in publishing, Cody had the idea
of reissuing his Tribune home-study course in pocket-sized book
form, and he solicited some advance orders from Sears, Roebuck
and Company and from a Chicago correspondence school. By
May of 1903, Cody had enough credit established to publish
the books, and he set about marketing them in a Chicago-based
business magazine called The System (which would much later
become Business Week). Edward Thurnau, the advertising man-
ager, offered Cody full-page ads on a profit-sharing basis, and in
the period from 1903 to 1906 Cody sold about 25,000 sets of
 from literature to business S 19
The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language this way.15 By
1903, when Cody was 35, he had made the shift from literature
to business.
Marketing his own books taught Cody about advertising.
Early ads showed the books with their mundane individual titles:
Word Study, Grammar, Composition, Constructive Rhetoric. Later ads
depicted the books with descriptive titles like Can you Spell?
Grammar Simplified, Knack of Using Words, and Letter Writing/Story
Writing. Cody realized a good profit on The Art of Writing and
Speaking the English Language, but more important was the knowl-
edge he was gaining about business and marketing. He was also
networking with businessmen and thinking ahead to new oppor-
tunities. The Art of Writing and Speaking had contained a chapter
on writing a business letter, and Cody came to realize that
the business men who bought my books on word study, grammar,
and composition really wanted or needed to know the psychol-
ogy of human appeal rather than the technicality of language.
There was obviously a chance to sell these interested customers a
correspondence course. I had been studying the common man as
a reader of novels, and I found he was exactly the same person as
the reader of business letters. I was therefore able to transfer my
hard-earned knowledge of the psychology of literary appeal to
business appeal, simply by a little practical adaptation.16

What he came up with was something called the Cody System.

This was a set of 50 instruction cards for business writing, each
mailed out weekly and sold as a course for $10. For a dollar
down, a businessman could get the first several lessons and then
decide whether to continue to pay for more lessons. Cody used
an approach that would come to be known as “the negative
option,” telling readers that if the first lessons were not returned
to Cody within a week, the course would be cancelled. (The
negative option would later be adapted and made famous by the
Book-of-the-Month Club.) Cody reported making about
20 S do you make these mistakes in english?

figure 2.1. An ad for the Cody letter-writing system.

$25,000 in the next three years, which he described as “the first

easy money I ever made.”17
Cody was also learning about correspondence education. He had
begun to give personalized correspondence courses for $90, but he
soon found that the work involved in individual instruction by mail
far outweighed the pay. Nevertheless, the experience of working
with 60 or so different businesses allowed him to test ideas in actual
sales letters for businesses. He was able to find out which approaches
sold and which didn’t, noting that “Sales letters gave me an opportu-
nity to measure results which few literary writers ever have.”18
Business leaders were also becoming increasingly interested in
school reform, and some of Cody’s business clients suggested that
he teach his system in the schools. Sensing a new opportunity and
recognizing that magazine advertising to businessmen would be
a finite market, Cody turned again to schoolbook publishing. He
had established his own publishing imprint called The Old Greek
Press in 1903, and he used it to publish a series of practical business
guides. His textbook Good English Form Book in Business Letter
Writing came out in 1904 and sold about 10,000 copies. A revision,
tested in a YMCA adult-education class for secretaries, sold about
25,000 copies through the System magazine and another 125,000
to schools by mail order. In 1905 he published Exercises in Word-
Study, and in 1906 he produced Success in Letter Writing. In 1908,
he followed these with How to Do Business by Letter.
Cody did not give up the literary life entirely. In 1903 he
published a short essay on Poe in the Dial, and he continued to
 from literature to business S 21
publish literary anthologies such as A Selection from the Best English
Essays and The Best Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (both in 1903). He
followed these with two more anthologies in 1904 (A Selection
from the World’s Great Orations and A Selection from the Great English
Poets) and a reading guide titled How to Read and What to Read.
In 1907, Cody came out with a book series called the Nutshell
Library, which was made up of separate volumes of excerpts
from Longfellow, Poe, Dickens, and others, together with some
biographical material. The books were marketed as an evening’s
reading; they would become an important auxiliary to his later
correspondence course. As a publisher, Cody was learning about
the schoolbook market, and he found that rural schools were a
good market for his books, since urban areas tended to have more
booksellers competing for orders. He was also learning his limita-
tions. In 1906 he launched a humor magazine called The Touchstone.
According to the announcement in The New York Times, The
Touchstone described itself as “a human, sensible, amusing, critical
review of the great world of women, literature, and the arts.”19 It
lasted just five issues.
In the early 1900s, Sherwin Cody was finding his way in the
world. He was blending his classical education with growing
experience in the world of business—as a private secretary and a
writer, as an advertiser and publisher, and as an entrepreneur. And
he was applying the habits developed on his roundabout journey
from Nebraska to Chicago—industriousness, resilience, drive, an
eye for innovation, and an understanding of the business world.
Despite his failure as a novelist, his self-image was strong, and he
saw himself as ready to build a bridge between the literary world
and the commercial world.
22 S do you make these mistakes in english?

Cody on Business Letter Writing

What should a business letter do? Here is some advice from

Cody’s 1903 Constructive Rhetoric (pages 13–15 and 29–32):

• A business letter should be strictly grammatical

• The character of the person to whom the letter is to be sent
wholly determines the form of the letter and even what is to
be said
• Never write a longer letter than will be read
• The most important principle of composition for letter
writers to master is condensation
• [Omit] all details that the recipient of the letter may
reasonably be supposed to know already
• [Suggest and imply] in the choice of words and forms of
sentences as much as possible
• [State] important matters so forcibly that the reader will be
forced (or rather induced) to think out the unspoken details
for himself
• [Letters] should not be flippant or frivolous,. . . but they may
and should be good-humored, kindly, courteous
• Sincerity, honesty, is the chief source of success
• An advertisement or advertising booklets should be valuable
and useful to the reader
 three

Good Money in
Good English

zS herwin Cody’s move from literature to

business ended up being financially profitable. It
also created a legacy for him as one of the founders of mod-
ern business communication.Today, most colleges and universities
teach communication courses as part of their business curricu-
lum, and courses stress attention to customers’ interests and needs.
One hundred years ago, however, practical business education
was just getting organized. The first university business school in
the United States had begun at the University of Pennsylvania
in 1881 (its Wharton School), and the earliest university courses
in business communication were offered in the early 1900s—at
the University of Illinois in 1902 and at New York University
in 1906.1 But relatively few people attended universities. Instead,
aspiring office workers in the late 1800s typically learned about
business writing from etiquette manuals, and later from books
specifically designed to instruct people in letter writing.2
Cody’s 1903 volume on Rhetoric, part of The Art of Writing and
Speaking the English Language, was one of the first to stress business
writing as the basis of education in rhetoric. Cody opened the
book with that topic because he considered it to be of most interest
24 S do you make these mistakes in english?
to the average reader. He led with correctness, reminding readers
that “First of all, a business letter should be strictly grammatical.”3
Cody suggested that a business writer should write clearly, should
avoid commercial jargon, and should know the interests of the cor-
respondent. He advocated brevity and a conversational approach
rather than the style of literary English. These tenets—clarity, cor-
rectness, conciseness, and colloquial style—are still taught today,
and they form the basis for such works as Joseph Epstein’s Style and
William Zinsser’s On Writing, among many others.4
Cody’s earliest advice on business writing was part of his larger
course on English, but he quickly saw a new market. His Success in
Letter Writing and How to Do Business by Letter ( published in 1906
and 1908) were among the earliest stand-alone books aimed at effec-
tive business correspondence, and they developed the conversational
approach more fully. Cody organized his letter-writing advice around
the form of letters (salutations, closing, punctuation) and around
themes such as “applying for a position,” “how money is collected,”
and “letters to ladies.” He also provided exercises, sample letters,
and grammar summaries. Cody also saw letter writing as a founda-
tion of language study and of public speaking. Written and spoken
language skills were different but interconnected, Cody thought, and
letter writing was not just a business skill but a model of the short
essay. A good business letter was also an imaginary conversation with
a reader. In How to Do Business by Letter, Cody wrote:
There is a close connection between good letter writing and skill
in conversation. The difference lies in the fact that the good letter
writer takes part in a condensed, imaginary conversation, while
the real conversationalist must usually have the stimulus of the
occasion and interesting people. But the way to become a good
letter writer is to practice imaginary conversation.5

The centrality of letter writing—not just to business but also to

literacy, good English, and persuasive ability—was a recurring
theme for Cody. He felt that there was no better way to practice
 good money in good english S 25
the skills needed to hold an audience’s interest. At the same time,
Cody saw business writing as connected to literary studies, argu-
ing that short story analysis and creative writing gave an adver-
tising writer or journalist the “power of moving human nature
by words.”6 Cody stuck with this theme in later works, writ-
ing in 1908 that “business letter writing is not a study of forms
and usages. It is rather a study of human nature and ‘how to use
words so as to make people do things.’ ”7 Throughout his life,
Cody would return again and again to letter writing as founda-
tional, and one of his last books, Letters: Writing to Get People to Do
Things, began by suggesting that cheap postage had opened the
entire country to business and social opportunities by mail.
Historians of business communication credit Cody and a hand-
ful of others with establishing modern business communication
and popularizing the notions of clarity, correctness, courtesy, and
conversational style. Cody was not the first to propose these ideas
to an American business audience. That distinction probably goes
to J. Willis Westlake, a professor of English at the State Normal
School in Millersville, Pennsylvania, who published How to Write
Letters in 1876.8 Westlake emphasized that most writing was in the
form of letters, and he suggested that students would be better off
writing letters than literary themes. He recommended adapting
one’s style to the mood of the reader, and he also included special
directions for typing, since that was a new technology at the time.
By the early 1900s, ideas like Westlake’s were clearly in the air,
and various writers were assembling the components of practical
rhetoric into books on business communication.
One of the others thinking about business writing in the early
1900s was George Burton Hotchkiss, a professor at the New York
University School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. Around
1909, Hotchkiss developed a 12-book series for correspondence
education called Business English and, like Cody, he included
the ideas of clarity, correctness, conciseness, and courtesy in his
course.9 Other correspondence handbooks and training courses
26 S do you make these mistakes in english?
on business letter writing were appearing as well, including one
for the newly established LaSalle Extension University. LaSalle’s
1911 series on Business English was developed by Edwin H. Lewis,
a professor at the University of Chicago, who had been one of
the readers of Cody’s The Art of Writing and Speaking the English
Language and who had earlier written an English textbook that
included a chapter on letter writing.10
Cody was not writing in an era in which writers credited their
influences extensively, and he was just one among many advocat-
ing a practical, colloquial model for business writing. As business
historian Carter Daniel has emphasized, however, Cody was an
especially influential voice in promoting the conversational tone
in business communication and in the application of practical psy-
chology to business writing.11 His long career, high profile, broad
connections, and voluminous publications gave him a preeminent
voice as a business communication expert for many years. One of
the ways in which Cody gained prominence was his role in edu-
cation reform, and that is where we turn next.

figure 3.1. The headline of an early ad for Cody’s books.

 good money in good english S 27
SCHOOL AS BUSINESS
The first quarter of the twentieth century was a difficult one for
American schools. The growth of industrialization and com-
merce gave business a new influence over schools, whose mis-
sion was increasingly seen as training workers. At the same time,
progressive reform and muckraking journalism targeted edu-
cation along with the meat-packing industry, patent medicine
scams, and insurance and stock manipulation. In 1903 The Atlantic
Monthly featured an influential article that called for schools to
be run like businesses, and the language of business management
soon found its way into National Education Association rhetoric
and into such textbooks as William Bagley’s influential Classroom
Management.12 Local school boards would soon begin to be domi-
nated by business leaders.
The school reform of the early twentieth century had its roots
in the efficiency movement known as Taylorism, whose intellec-
tual leader was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a Philadelphia Quaker
born in 1865. Working as an engineer in the 1880s and 1890s,
Taylor studied such topics as metal cutting, the design of shovels,
and the handling of pig iron, and he went on to examine work
flow, time use, and incentive systems. In 1909 his influential writ-
ings were published as Principles of Scientific Management, and Taylor
outlined five key managerial principles: science rather than intu-
ition, harmony rather than competition, cooperation rather than
individualism, maximum output, and the development of worker
productivity. Taylor was something of a utopian, seeing scientific
management as applying to all problems and to workers and man-
agers alike. But while his ideas were popular with many reformers,
they also came to be associated with unscrupulous cost-cutting.
After Taylor’s death in 1915, the idealistic side of Taylorism was
often ignored, and some efficiency advocates promoted scientific
management and industrial engineering as a system in which
workers were easily interchangeable and replaceable.
28 S do you make these mistakes in english?
Cody mentioned Taylor’s work approvingly in his 1913 book
Business Practice Up to Date, and Taylorism was a natural fit for
Cody’s image of himself as an engineer and applied scientist. He
saw himself as creating similar efficiencies for business education
and English teaching.13 His criticism of schools was partly moti-
vated by his dissatisfaction with his own education, which he saw
as intellectually challenging but impractical, but Cody also had a
business reason for getting involved in school reform. He had been
frustrated in trying to sell schoolbooks to urban schools because
of competition from larger publishers, so he may have seen a good
market opportunity for textbooks and tests in a reformed, stan-
dardized school curriculum.
Cody quickly established himself as a reformer promoting
ways to teach English more efficiently. Listing his affiliation as
“School of English, Chicago, Ill.,” he contributed an article to the
first volume of the English Journal published by the newly estab-
lished National Council of Teachers of English. Cody’s “Scientific
Principles in the Teaching of Composition” alluded to Taylorism
and criticized traditional methods of teaching writing as overly
concerned with literary models as opposed to business corre-
spondence and advertising writing. He also criticized (without
naming names) traditional textbooks as too comprehensive and
unwieldy. The result was “a mental indigestion that has dissi-
pated the intuitive mental powers of the student to an alarming
degree.”14 Instead, Cody suggested a modern scientific method.
He recognized that science had long been distrusted by language
teachers, but thought that if teachers of composition had adopted
scientific principles earlier, they would “not be spending an infi-
nite amount of energy teaching a subject without getting proper
results.”15 Cody’s article also discussed the difficulty of grading
compositions in crowded schools with large class sizes. He advo-
cated correcting papers orally in class and having students write
corrections as the teacher dictated them. Written criticism was
better in principle, he noted, but only if students paid attention to
 good money in good english S 29
the comments, which was “very doubtful.” Since many students
tended to make the same errors, it was “foolishly unscientific” not
to have the whole class listen to the comments, and he outlined
a system of student self-editing and peer editing.16 Cody would
be a critic of the education system throughout his career. While
lauding the efforts of teachers, he was harsh about the efficiency
of institutional education, and in his 1944 Coaching Children in
English, one of his last publications, he referred to the schools as
“a great social grinding machine” which only graduates half of
those enrolled.17

THE GARY PLAN

Cody was also involved in the most famous test of the efficiency
movement in American schools, the reorganization of the Gary,
Indiana, school system. Located on Lake Michigan not far from
Chicago, Gary was the headquarters of U.S. Steel, and the steel
industry was deeply influenced by Taylor’s ideas. In 1907, the
Gary school system hired William Wirt as superintendent to
reform its schools. Wirt was a proponent of teaching such practi-
cal and vocational skills as woodworking and pattern making,
and he also saw the value in physical and social development
along with the traditional three R’s and academic subjects. Wirt
had developed what he called the “work-study-play” model
at another school in Indiana, and he introduced it in the Gary
school system in 1908. The “work-study-play” model broke up
the school day into discrete activities involving vocational train-
ing, academics, and recreation. It also organized school logistics
around movement between homerooms and specialized rooms
for music, art, geography, chemistry, and other subjects.18 The
system allowed the incorporation of new vocational activities that
had previously been impossible, and it promised to make better
use of school facilities. Wirt published a short explanation of the
system in the American School Board Journal in 1911, and others
30 S do you make these mistakes in english?
began to promote the Gary system as an example of scientific
management and of the elimination of waste.19 Soon the plan was
receiving public support from a number of education leaders and
was even praised by John and Evelyn Dewey in their book Schools
of Tomorrow.20 By 1930 the system was used in over 1,000 schools,
mostly in urban areas where population growth had placed new
demands on school capacity. The Gary plan was not without
controversy, however. When Wirt was hired as a consultant in
1915 to introduce “work-study-play” into the New York City
schools, parents expressed concerns about the vocational aspects
of the new method and about the effect of cost-cutting. Funding
of schools and education became an issue in the 1917 New York
mayoral campaign, and eventually the plans for Wirt to reorga-
nize the New York school system fell through.21
As Wirt was developing his system, Cody was also studying
school efficiency in Chicago. He had become interested in school
and employee testing in 1912 when, as a member of the Chicago
City Club’s committee on education, he was asked to convene a
group to study the relationship between schools and business. His
committee reported a gulf of perceptions between business lead-
ers and teachers. Cody found that business leaders believed teach-
ers were responsible for “fundamentally bad” teaching in English
and arithmetic. Teachers, in turn, saw businessmen as “vague and
superficial” in their ideas about education.22 However, Cody was
certain that teachers would be willing to base their curricula on
business standards if standards were less vague, and he proposed
that employers themselves commit to testing the students coming
out of the public schools. Such tests would represent scientifi-
cally devised standards of employment that businesses could use
to determine a starting salary. Cody felt that reliable tests would
be useful in hiring beginning office workers for the right job
and would save millions of dollars in turnover costs. In 1915 he
took the next step of founding an organization of businessmen
and educators to pursue this idea. The New York Times described
 good money in good english S 31
his National Associated Schools of Scientific Business as an effort
to put “commercial education on a more practical and scientific
basis through the adoption of definite standards.” Cody was the
managing director, and the committee included, among others,
the then Governor of Michigan, Woodbridge N. Ferris, who had
established the Ferris Industrial School in 1894.23 The National
Associated Schools of Scientific Business received some finan-
cial support from the U.S. Bureau of Education, and it worked
with a variety of schools and businesses such as the National
Cloak and Suit Company, the National Cash Register Company,
the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, the Commonwealth
Edison Company, Swift and Company, and Marshall Fields.
The business standards developed by Cody’s group covered
the ability to copy an address correctly and legibly, to do busi-
ness arithmetic quickly and accurately (including fractions), and
to correctly spell a few hundred commonly used business words.
The standards also included the ability to recognize and punc-
tuate a sentence and the ability to recognize and correct cer-
tain errors in grammar, word usage, and pronunciation. Cody
next developed a series of National Ability Tests to go along
with the standards. He promoted these as measuring the abil-
ity “to perform common operations in the business office” and
as benchmarking “the fundamental education which all office
employment presupposes.”24 Beginning in 1915, after consulta-
tion with various companies, Cody released about 20 tests based
on results from 500 young office boys and girls, general clerks,
stenographers, secretaries and bookkeeping clerks, and voca-
tional students. As he developed tests and issued grading keys,
Cody explored physical formats for scoring exams that would
be most efficient and useful to employers. As a result, his tests
and grading keys were formatted so that individual scores could
be compared with the averages for various classes of employ-
ees. Cody’s work also prompted him to think about grading
and standards, and he distinguished between the passing standard
32 S do you make these mistakes in english?
required in subjects like Latin and Greek (60%–70%) and what
was needed for business credibility (100% accuracy). Cody pro-
moted his tests as encouraging students to work toward a 100%
standard in subjects like spelling, and 100% was an ongoing
catchphrase in his books and courses.25
Interest in validating his tests and his ideas about teaching
grammar led Cody to an eventual collaboration with Wirt. In
the spring of 1917, Cody piloted a grammar curriculum for
about 1,000 students in both Gary and Racine, Indiana, mea-
suring students’ improvement in spelling, grammar, and punc-
tuation. After five weeks of drill with his system, Cody found a
40%–50% reduction in the number of students’ errors.26 Under
Wirt’s auspices, Cody later offered the tests in New York schools
as well, and by 1920 he was developing a YMCA curriculum
for the teaching of Standard Test English, linked to the National
Ability Tests.27 Cody’s experiences with Wirt and the Gary
schools would be a running theme in his later correspondence
course advertisements, many of which contained the subheading
What Cody Did at Gary.
The work with the National Associated Schools of Scientific
Business and in the schools had acquainted Cody with research
being done on commercial and employment testing by such people
as Edward L. Thorndike, Walter Dill Scott, and Frank Thompson.
Cody also familiarized himself with the tests developed in 1905
by French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, which
evolved into the Stanford-Binet tests in 1916. He researched the
Point Scale of Intelligence that Robert Yerkes developed in 1915 for
the U.S. Army to use in classifying soldiers for various duties. And
he studied the standardized educational tests, such as the Courtis
Tests in Arithmetic, being used by schools and by some employ-
ers. Cody summarized the results of these studies, his work with
the National Associated Schools, and his collaboration with Wirt
in a book called Commercial Tests and How to Use Them. The book
outlined Cody’s vision of the National Ability Tests as a means to
 good money in good english S 33
raise the standards of schools “by measurement and competition
and above all by the use of a single national standard.”28
This vision was utopian. Cody saw school standards and
employment tests as tools that would create a national test-based
meritocracy rewarding achievement and proficiency. By provid-
ing a basis for distinctions in hiring, ability tests would end the
practice of level pay for new employees and would encourage
students to be more diligent. Cody predicted that “As soon as
employers begin to complete for the best talents, they will pay
more for the good help, and less for the poor; and where pupils are
now satisfied with mere 60 or 70 per cent passing marks, they will
then try to make the highest possible grades, since their ratings
will make a difference in the pay at which they will be able to start
to work.”29 He noted that businesses would also benefit by being
better able to distinguish between those worth six, eight, or even
ten dollars a week and by reducing the turnover costs that come
with poor hiring. He even envisioned an Efficient Employment
Register of workers that “would make it possible to control and
use the available [labor] supply so as to save a waste in distribution
from present haphazard methods.”30 For Cody, business education
and testing were part of a broad progressive reform of the schools,
which had for too long focused on a “narrow, specialized profi-
ciency” in limited traditional subjects. “The broad power to think
in a clear, businesslike way,” he wrote, “is far more important and
is more difficult to develop.”31

THE MAN WHO SIMPLIFIED ENGLISH

If students were going to be tested for grammar and business
ability, they would need study materials, and that was where
Cody’s earlier work on speaking and writing the English lan-
guage came in. The Art of Writing and Speaking the English
Language had established Cody as a practical teacher rather than
a theorist. From his books on letter writing and business usage,
34 S do you make these mistakes in english?
Cody had some experience in simplifying grammar and spell-
ing to minimal essential points and the most common misspell-
ings. From his private correspondence teaching and work in
the schools, Cody was aware of the problems of correcting and
grading student work. He was beginning to position himself
as an applied scientist with a businesslike approach to subject
matter and benchmarking. The natural next step for him was a
correspondence course adapting the methods of testing to self-
instruction. The course he envisioned would have short and
simple explanations of grammatical points, supplemented with
self-corrected quizzes to help students focus on individual errors.
It would be an innovative use of self-instruction, aimed at pro-
viding students with passable speaking and writing skills and at
preparing them for the National Ability Tests that would certify
their merit. For Cody, the course was part of his utopian vision
of meritocracy. It was part of his entrepreneurial vision as well,
since it would position him as a provider of both the English
curriculum and the English tests. In fact, the grammar, punctua-
tion, and spelling items of the Ability Tests were often reused
in the 100% Self-correcting Course in English Language, though
Cody does not make a point of this in his course. It is, however,
evident from material presented in Standard Test English and the
100% Self-correcting Course.
Entering middle age, Sherwin Cody was an independent
scholar and a critic of schools. He had a home in the Chicago
suburb of Lake Bluff, where his and Marian’s circle of acquain-
tances included Vachel Lindsey, Edgar Lee Masters, and Margaret
Anderson, all part of a summer colony of writers in the town.
Marian Cody was able to travel to England periodically, and
the whole family even took a year’s vacation in Europe in 1911.
Cody was doing well as an advertising consultant, publisher,
writer, teacher, and test-maker. His School of English was located
in the Chicago Opera House, and he was a member of the
Chicago City Club, with connections to Midwestern politicians,
 good money in good english S 35
educators, and business leaders. The National Business Ability
Tests were showing some promise, and he had a fresh idea for a
self-correcting correspondence course. Cody realized, however,
that there was only so much he could do on his own, and he was
ready for assistance from the emerging advertising profession in
New York.
 four

What You Want and

Where to Get It

zI n the final 30 years of the nineteenth century,

the national wealth of the United States quadrupled.
Then it doubled again by 1914.1 Business was the new American
philosophy, and advertising copywriters were its philosophers.
During the 1880s and 1890s, advertising had been associated
with the multimillion-dollar business in blood bitters, snake oils,
catarrh pills, kidney and liver treatments, rheumatism cures, and
expectorants, many of which were simply bottled liquor. Patent
medicine had a straightforward advertising formula: identify a
malady—real or imagined—and then sell a cure. Patent medi-
cine manufacturers understood that they were treading on shaky
ground with their products, and their great fear was state regula-
tion. Some even included clauses in their advertising contracts
voiding them if state regulatory laws came into effect, thereby
applying economic pressure to the print media. Nevertheless,
health-conscious magazines and muckraking journalists slowly
eroded the influence of the patent medicine industry. In 1892 The
Ladies’ Home Journal stopped taking patent medicine advertising,
and in 1904 it published chemical analyses of some medicines. In
 what you want and where to get it S 37
October of 1905, another muckraking magazine, Collier’s Weekly,
began series of exposes of “The Great American Fraud” written
by Samuel Hopkins Adams. The newly formed American Medical
Association joined the attack, and in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug
Act required ingredients to be identified. The end was nearing
for patent medicine advertising, but not for many of the tech-
niques that had been developed.
In the twentieth century, the advertising business was beginning
to see its role as creating demand for manufactured products and
consumer goods like automobiles, refrigerators, and radios as well
as for food and grooming products like Wheatena, Crisco, Cutex
nail polish, and Listerine. A prospectus for McClure’s Magazine in
1904 explained this straightforwardly. It showed a young boy read-
ing a magazine, presumably McClure’s, and saying to his mother
“Mamma, you know magazines are very useful. They tell you
what you want, and where to get it.”2 The advertising business
even played a role in World War I by aiding in war recruiting. As
the progressive reform movement waned, skepticism about busi-
ness was replaced by confidence in a continually improving stan-
dard of living. In fact, by 1925 advertising was so much a part of
American life that advertising executive Bruce Barton, the son
of a Congregationalist minister, would write an account of Jesus
Christ’s life portraying him as an entrepreneur.3 Barton’s thesis
was that Christ had the qualities of a successful business leader
and salesman: personal magnetism, an understanding of people,
organizational ability, and sincerity. Christ himself did not endorse
the ad business, but President Calvin Coolidge did, lauding it in
a speech to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in
1926. Coolidge stressed that advertising had an important educa-
tional role because “It informs its readers of the existence of com-
modities by explaining the advantage to be derived from their use
and creates for them a wider demand.”4
Within the advertising business itself, there were different
perspectives on the copywriter’s role. Some agreed with Coolidge
38 S do you make these mistakes in english?
and saw themselves as professionals whose job it was to educate
the public and advance society. To them, advertising was a pro-
fession just as medicine, law, and teaching were, and they were
writers in a particularly challenging literary form. This profes-
sionalization even led to galleries of advertising art, prizes such as
the Harvard Advertising Award, and agencies boasting of college
graduates and even PhD’s working for them. Other copywrit-
ers, however, saw advertising in terms of sales rather than literary
merit. This group saw its role as getting results, and advertising
historian Roland Marchand refers to such bottom-line copywrit-
ers as the “real pros” rather than professionals.5
Sherwin Cody took his idea for a correspondence course to
an advertising agency made up of some of these result-oriented
“real pros.” The Ruthrauff & Ryan Advertising Agency special-
ized in mail-order sales, and Maxwell Sackheim was one of their
young copywriters. In his autobiography, Sackheim wrote of
meeting Cody in 1915, commenting that “Cody was difficult to
listen to” because of his idiosyncratic speech. Other copywriters
at Ruthrauff and Ryan were impatient with him, but Sackheim
encouraged Cody to complete the correspondence course he had
in mind and to patent its self-correction method.With Sackheim’s
help, Cody franchised his course to two Rochester, New York,
businessmen, Walter R. Paterson and Charles S. Lennon, who
were involved in running other correspondence schools for civil
service testing. Sackheim’s autobiography quotes from a letter
Cody wrote to him in 1920: “I came to New York with a vague
idea of an English course, and you helped me to shape it up into
commercial form.”6
Sackheim helped Cody shape the course and strategy, but
his greatest contribution was in writing the first advertisement
using the headline “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”
Sackheim had learned about the advertising business from Wilbur
Ruthrauff, who had begun his career as a patent medicine
copywriter, and Sackheim used the patent medicine formula of
 what you want and where to get it S 39
identifying a malady and offering a cure.7 The malady in this case
was bad English, and the cure was Cody’s patented self-correction
method. Sackheim’s copy fit with the theme of Cody’s earlier ads
for his book series (such as “Good Money in Good English”),
emphasizing how the product—a course in correct English—
would lead to career opportunity and social advancement.
The ad led with class-conscious examples of mistakes in English
and concluded its leading paragraph by noting that “Every time
they talk or write” many people “show themselves lacking in the
essential points of English.” The implication was that if someone
lacked English skills, a job that required talking, writing, and man-
aging was harder to achieve, and if someone was known for faux
pas, he or she would find it difficult to fit in to a better, more
refined social group. The message targeted those who were ambi-
tious yet uncertain.
The “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” advertisement
reflected Cody’s views on salesmanship as well, which were out-
lined in his 1915 How to Deal with Human Nature in Business.There
Cody wrote that “The first step in creating desire is to put your-
self in the other man’s shoes. Look at life from his point of view.
Begin by saying ‘you’ not ‘I.’”8 Cody and Sackheim had the same
basic approach in mind, and the “you-viewpoint” was reflected in
most (but not all) of Cody’s ads.
Sackheim and his friend Harry Scherman soon formed their
own ad agency, and Cody’s account went with them. When
Sackheim and Scherman later sold their agency to Victor Schwab
and Robert Beatty, Cody remained with the new Schwab &
Beatty Agency, where his account was managed by Sackheim’s
protégé Victor Schwab. Schwab became a pioneer in direct-
mail research, and he took particular pride in the Cody ad as an
example of the scientific approach to advertising.9 In an article
for the industry journal Printers’ Ink Monthly, Schwab referred to
it as “An Advertisement That Is Never Changed,” and he gave a
ten-year comparison of responses to two different headlines, “Do
40 S do you make these mistakes in english?
You Make These Mistakes in English?” and “How to Speak and
Write Masterly English.” Schwab found that the cost per inquiry
and the response rate were vastly better for the ad asking speak-
ers about their mistakes (374 ads brought 224,025 inquiries and
10,962 orders with a total value of $328,860, versus the “How
to” version, for which 251 ads brought only 52,304 inquiries and
3,861 orders with a total value of $115,830).
Schwab also offered an analysis of the success of the advertise-
ment, commenting on each of eighteen parts and seven headings
or subheadings. His commentary was not particularly sophisticated,
but it reveals some of the thinking that went into the copy. Schwab
wrote that the ad promised “worthwhile information,” it looked
“painless to read,” and it did not “look too much like an adver-
tisement.” Interrogatives like why and what in subheadings kept
the reader interested, and the ad contained several points of proof
about Cody’s accomplishments. It also had some emotional appeal
in its indignation about schools and traditional English instruction,
and it provided a layer of academic credibility by referring to the
Sherwin Cody School. The ad copy used the recurring theme of
simplicity, and it opened and closed by appealing to the reader’s
interest in success. Finally, Schwab added that the photo of Cody
had “impressive attention value” and served as a trademark of sorts,
since Cody’s image was by then well known and showed him to be
“quite obviously an educator; dignified, impressive.”10
Schwab especially emphasized the word selection of the head-
line, which contained both an appeal to the reader’s insecurity and
a promise to explain mistakes in English. The word you focused
on the reader rather than the product. The modifier these implied
specifics that would help readers to decide whether they need the
product, and Schwab suggested that without these the headline
“Do you make mistakes in English?” would imply criticism of
the reader. Even the choice of the word English, as opposed to
alternatives like grammar, writing, or speaking, was designed so that
readers could connect the headline with their own weaknesses.
 what you want and where to get it S 41
In its text, the typical Cody ad led off with examples of errors
in English and asked why so many people are “deficient in the use
of English.” Subheads guided the reader along, moving from why
people make mistakes to Cody’s credentials, the method, results,
and finally to action. The ad explained that Sherwin Cody dis-
covered why people make mistakes by “scientific tests, which he
gave thousands of times,” and it assigned institutional blame to the
schools. Shifting to the positive, the ad promised a course based
in practice rather than rules, recounted Cody’s successes in Gary
to establish his credentials, and again invoked the exclusivity of a
patented 100% self-correcting device.
The scientifically tested device that corrects one’s bad habits
was “Mr. Cody’s voice behind you, ready to speak out whenever
you commit an error,” and the ad copy told the reader that Cody
would be a patient “everlasting mentor beside you, a mentor who
would not laugh at you, but who would, on the contrary, sup-
port and help you.” Since Cody’s patented, scientific system found
your mistakes, you needed to do less work.You could make prog-
ress in just 15 minutes a day by concentrating on your weaknesses
only. Finally, readers were reminded of the value of what they
would gain: “a trade-mark of breeding that can not be erased.”
The implication was that language, more than anything else, is
used to assess one’s potential. By eliminating the errors associated
with vulgarity and ignorance, a man or woman could pass as one
bred to elegant speech.
Cody’s ad appeared widely, in slicks, pulps, comics, and papers.
It was a fixture of the New York Times Book Review, running over
a hundred times. The peak years of Times advertising for Cody
were the 1920s and 1930s, with nine ad placements in 1930
alone. By the 1940s, Cody ads were being run just three times
a year, and in the 1950s just twice a year, typically in August
and December as school terms were beginning. Over the years,
the copywriters associated with his account experimented with
a number of headlines with the hope of identifying the ones
figure 4.1. Do you make these mistakes in English?

42
 what you want and where to get it S 43
that generated the most replies. John Caples reported on a test
run in which the reader-centered “Do You Make These Mistakes
in English?” was tested against the same ad with a manufacturer-
centered headline: “The Man Who Simplified English.” The
reader-centered headline yielded twice the results of the manu-
facturer-centered one.11 Sackheim and Schwab tried other head-
lines and approaches as well. Sackheim used small ads in 1919 and
1920 to focus on the product with headlines like “15 Minutes a
Day Gives You a Wonderful Command of Language,” “A New
Invention that Finds and Corrects Your Mistakes in English,” and
“Astonishing Facts about Your English.” Schwab experimented
with variations on the “Mistakes” theme, portraying speak-
ers embarrassed in various social settings. “Do You Make These
Mistakes in English?” was the gold standard, however, and Schwab
often cited it in other articles he wrote on the science of copy-
writing. Schwab and Beatty gained both prestige and revenue
from their management of the Cody campaign and even featured
their work for Cody in an ad for their agency in 1956. Showing
two Cody ads and reporting on split-run testing, they concluded
that “Copy-testing of this kind can take much of the guesswork
out of advertising,” adding that “the actual response of consum-
ers decides conclusively which is the better ad.”12 Cody would
certainly have agreed.
 Headlines over the Years

A New Invention that Finds and Corrects Your Mistakes in

English
Stop Making Mistakes in Speaking and Writing!
Astonishing Facts about your English
Stop Abusing the English Language
His New Invention Finds and Corrects Your Mistakes in English
His simple invention has shown thousands how to break bad
habits in English
New Way to Find and Correct Your Mistakes in English
Mistakes in Writing and Speaking Made Every Day
Your English is your trade-mark—it tells just what you are
Ten Mistakes in English—How Many Will You Make?
If only people knew how they are hurt by their unconscious
mistakes in English!
His simple invention has shown thousands how to stop
making embarrassing mistakes
How to Discover Your Mistakes in English in One Evening
Are YOU ever overheard making mistakes like these?
What are YOUR Mistakes in English?
Stop Groping For Words!
Sherwin Cody’s New Method Has Improved the English of
41,000 People
How to Avoid Embarrassing MISTAKES In ENGLISH
Does Your English Help You or Hurt You?
He thinks he is speaking Correct English! Can you find his FIVE
mistakes?
Which of These Mistakes in English Do You Make?
How You Can Master GOOD ENGLISH—in 15 minutes a day
 five

The 100% Self-correcting

Course in English
Language

zI f you clipped Cody’s coupon from Black Mask,

Physical Culture, The Ladies’ Home Journal, or the
Chicago Tribune and requested the free book on English, you
received something called How You Can Master Good English—
in 15 Minutes a Day. This advertising booklet expanded on the
themes of Do You Make These Mistakes in English? Cody began
with economics, citing a Carnegie Institute of Technology
report that business success is due to the ability to influence
others, and he asked “Do you want to get a raise—secure a
new position—get ahead faster? . . . Good speech will help you
avoid making a bad impression. It will provide a means of call-
ing attention to your abilities, which may now lie dormant
because your speech has not conveyed your potential to your
employers.”1
Cody’s target audience was both the workplace and the
social world. He asked how “a carpenter, a machinist, a factory
worker” can use good English to advance, but he also gave
46 S do you make these mistakes in english?
the example of a newly rich woman at the New York opera,
whose “murderous English” revealed her lack of education.2
The anecdote cited her use of ain’t and statements such as
“Between you and I, I don’t think much of them Eyetalians,”
as leading to social stigma. Cody linked slang, cursing, poor
pronunciation, and bad grammar with a lack of breeding, and
he invoked human nature to explain what happens if you don’t
try to improve your English. “How,” he asked, “can anyone be
other than critical of a person who does not seek to improve
himself ? . . . You cannot help it, no matter how fond you may
be of him.”3
Cody provided some brief success anecdotes—a stenographer
who became the private secretary to a corporation president by
improving her English and a factory supervisor who advanced
to a level requiring better language skills. He described a woman
seeking to join a club who misused words like ubiquitous and who
pronounced often with a t, and he contrasted her with another
woman whose home study of English led her to be mistaken for a
Vassar, Smith, or Wellesley graduate even though she “never went
further than one year in high school.”4 Graphics reinforced his
points with images of a successful stenographer, a group of well-
dressed women around a tea-service, workers reading on break, a
man in a suit making a forceful point, and smiling men lined up
at a cashier’s window.5
Cody explained that the level of the course was for just about
anyone. It covered “the fundamentals of the English language,
English composition, and English literature from the very begin-
ning (seventh grade of the public school, where formal study
of grammar is first taken up) to entrance to Harvard, Yale or
Princeton.”6 And he returned to the opening theme of economic
value by comparing the cost of a college education (which he gave
as $600) with the cost of the Cody course, which was on average
$30. Cody ended with the question “What can you gain from this
 the 100% self-correcting course in english language S 47
small investment?”7 The Cody course was for those who wanted
to invest in themselves.
If the 32-page prospectus won you over and you enrolled, the
full course—The Sherwin Cody 100% Self-correcting Course in English
Language—arrived in 25 weekly booklets. The booklets in turn
were divided into five sections, one for each day of the workweek,
and each day focused on something different. Expression was
on Mondays, spelling on Tuesdays, punctuation on Wednesdays,
grammar on Thursdays, and conversation and reading on Fridays.
The daily lessons were tied to other reference books published
by Cody: Success in Letter Writing was a reference for lessons in
expression, The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language and
his Brief Fundamentals provided background on punctuation and
grammar, and the Nutshell Library supplemented conversation
and reading.
The basic plan of the course was for students to focus on
individual weaknesses. This entailed an assessment compo-
nent—a self-test—and so lessons 1 and 25 included timed tests
of what students knew before beginning the course and what
they knew at the end. A form letter from 1924 explained the
rationale:

Who ever heard of beginning a course of study with an exami-

nation instead of a lot of rules and definitions? The reason is
this: Your object is to correct your unconscious bad habits of
spelling, punctuation and grammar. But what bad habits have
you? You don’t know. Every one else has taught English by the
analytic-reasoning method, but Mr. Cody first makes you con-
scious of what mistakes you unconsciously make. . . . Mr. Cody
does not want you to waste time on that which you are uncon-
sciously doing right, nor does he want you to take a chance—he
wants you to know what your weak points are and concentrate
exclusively on them.8
48 S do you make these mistakes in english?
This method was a natural outgrowth of business testing and
the philosophy of advertising. A good English course, like a good
advertisement or business letter, should serve the needs of the
customer. The best way to do this, in Cody’s view, was by individ-
ual instruction, and the most efficient form of individual instruc-
tion was guided self-assessment and self-correction. Cody also
understood the importance of providing students with a rationale
for what they were learning. His course attempted this by select-
ing issues of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and word usage
that were most commonly troublesome, and Cody emphasized
how his system avoided the old models of comprehensive memo-
rization of grammatical rules. And of course he linked commu-
nication to practical life goals such as sales, advertising, and letter
writing.
The main vehicle for Cody’s views on writing and speech
were the Monday lessons on expression. These took up the first
two pages of each weekly booklet, and typically consisted of
an essay on some topic about writing or speaking (essentially
a one-page letter to the reader) followed by a page of Cody’s
running autobiography. The Monday lessons gave advice on
style, clarity, brevity, emphasis, imagery, and emotional appeal,
and Cody included essays on conversation, news writing, story
writing, and copywriting as well. The lessons also touched on
broader topics of practical communication, such as the impor-
tance of good manners, humor, empathy, and audience, and they
even described how to overcome self-consciousness. The auto-
biographical essays allowed Cody to both infuse the course with
some of his personality and provided a way to introduce his
ideas about education and culture. Cody explained that educa-
tion should be practical and functional, but also intellectually
fulfilling, and the final two biographical entries stressed Cody’s
dream of “a new literary art” that would bridge the cultural
divide between “intellectual esthetes” and “ordinary humanity.”9
We shall return to this dream in more detail in Chapter Seven.
 the 100% self-correcting course in english language S 49

Monday Is for Telling Your Life Story

Most of the Monday lessons on Expression in the 100% Self-

correcting Course are a running account of Cody’s life up to his
fiftieth year.While the autobiography was tangential to the course,
Cody explained it in term of helping readers to write their own
life stories. The chapter titles below give a roadmap to Cody’s
philosophy and image of himself.

1. “Telling one’s own Life Story” (Lesson 2)

2. “My Earliest Recollections—the Storms and Fires in
Nebraska” (Lesson 3)
3. “My Father and I” (Lesson 4)
4. “The Early Education of a Country Boy” (Lesson 5)
5. “My Mother Becomes my Guardian Angel” (Lesson 6)
6. “I set out at Eleven to Earn my Living and get an
Education” (Lesson 7)
7. “A Year Among the Beautiful Hills of New Hampshire”
(Lesson 8)
8. “A Schoolboy’s Triumph” (Lesson 9)
9. “Financial Problems of Working one’s Way Through School”
(Lesson 11)
10. “Starvation to Affluence in College” (Lesson 12)
11. “How I Learned to Write” (Lesson 13)
12. “What is the Value of a College Course?” (Lesson 14)
13. “The Enchanting World of Art” (Lesson 15)
14. “The Heaven and Hell of Love” (Lesson 16)
15. “Leading the Life of a Writer” (Lesson 17)
16. “Transition from Literature to Business” (Lesson 19)
17. “Psychology of Literature and Business Writing the Same”
(Lesson 20)
18. “Advertising and Education at Bottom the Same” (Lesson 21)
(continued)
50 S do you make these mistakes in english?

19. “Learning the Italian Language” (Lesson 22)

20. “Principles of Psychology” (Lesson 23)
21. “A Dream of a New Literary Art” (Lesson 24)

There were no autobiography entries in Lessons 1, 10, 18, or 25.

SPEAKING AND SPELLING

The practical lessons relied on various techniques—fill in the
blank, choice among two forms, and even actual composition.
The constant was Cody’s avoidance of theory, definitions, and
lists of rules to memorize. The Tuesday lessons began with the
difference between vowels and consonants and an explanation of
the syllable. Cody’s definitions are understandable but not lin-
guistically sophisticated: vowels are “the real sound letters” and
consonants are sounds “which merely modify the vowels.” The
syllable, in turn, is “one vowel sound with consonants that can be
pronounced with it.”10 Years earlier, in the Word Study volume
of The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language, Cody gave
somewhat fuller definitions. Vowels were described as “full and
open tones from the vocal cords made with the mouth open, and
capable of being prolonged indefinitely,” and consonants were
described as “modifications of these open sounds, which are pro-
nounced with or without the help of the voice, and incapable of
being prolonged.”11 Later, in The New Art of Writing and Speaking
the English Language, Cody added that “The very simple, even
primitive, phonetic system” he gave was intended for “the prac-
tical purpose of an easy introduction to reading pronunciations
from the Webster diacritical marks.”12
In the 100% Self-correcting Course, Cody discussed vowel length
and diphthongs (oi and ow) and provided exercises identifying
long and short vowels. He commented on variation in vowel
 the 100% self-correcting course in english language S 51
sounds, such as the varieties of a (an “Italian” ah as in father and a
broad aw as in all ) and the weakening of vowels before r. At times
Cody’s discussion was hampered by his imperfect understanding
of phonetic terminology. For example, he used the labels “hard”
and “soft” to refer to two unrelated distinctions—the different
pronunciations of th and the different pronunciations of c and g.
In the first case, “hard” and “soft” th refer to the phonetic distinc-
tion between voiced and voiceless (as in bathe versus bath). In the
second, hard and soft refer to the fricative s versus the stop k and
to the affricate j versus the stop g.
Cody’s penchant for simplification was also evident in the
pronunciation and spelling rules he gave. He identified just two
pronunciation principles as worth everyone’s attention. The first
was that vowels are naturally short, unless made long. Lengthening
occurs by adding “silent e after the single following consonant”
(for example, sit versus site), by placing an “accent on the naked
vowel,” or because vowels “were long in the original word from
which a given word is derived.”13 His second principle was that
the pronunciation of c or g is soft before e and i, and hard else-
where (which encapsulates the contrast between the first letters
of city and gem as opposed to cape and game).14 In lesson 5, Cody
added two spelling rules built on these principles. The first was
that “Silent e is dropped when a syllable beginning with a vowel is
added, unless required to keep c or g soft.” Thus knowledge + able is
spelled knowledgeable rather than knowledgable. The second rule was
for doubling consonants in words such as barred, fretting, preferred,
occurrence, and beginning:

In words of one syllable, and words of more than one syllable

accented on the last syllable, ending in a single consonant pre-
ceded by a single vowel, the final consonant is doubled when a
suffix beginning with a vowel is added; but if the accent changes
to another syllable after the suffix is added, the consonant is not
doubled.15
52 S do you make these mistakes in english?
According to this, fretting and barred have doubled consonants
because they are derived from monosyllabic fret and bar. Prefer,
occur, and begin will show doubling in prefErred, occUrrence, and
begInning because the stress is on the second syllable. And when
stress shifts, as in the case of prEference, doubling does not occur.
Aside from pronunciation and spelling rules, the recurring fea-
ture of the Tuesday lessons was practice in spelling. Cody’s method
was to give sentences with select words in a phonetic spelling
and have students write the standard spelling in a blank next to
the prompt.16 The transcription was not without its curiosities:
Masachusetz was transcribed with a final z rather than s and the
examples abreviate and akomodate included a final e letter which of
course is silent.

Some of Cody’s Spelling Exercises

Do not abreviate your words. —————

I can akomodate you with a loan. —————
He made aknolejment of the receipt. —————
It pays to advertı-z. —————

At the end of the first spelling test, Cody gave benchmarks: the
average grammar school graduate missed nine items out of twenty-
five and the average high school graduate missed six. Experienced
stenographers missed only four and the best spellers just one.
Spelling lessons tended to focus on irregular words, which
Cody adapted from an earlier study of 542 troublesome spelling
words identified by the statistician Leonard P. Ayres. Cody also
emphasized that his system of learning spelling from transcription
was for adults rather than children, remarking that “While young
children should never look at phonetic or wrong spelling, this will
 the 100% self-correcting course in english language S 53
not harm adults if the correct form is always near at hand.” He did
not discuss word formation (what linguists call morphology) in
either the Self-correcting Course or in Word Study, though he noted
in the latter book that the study of prefixes helps spelling, and he
gave a list of words organized by suffixes (including able, ible, ent,
ence, ant, ance, cous, ious, cious, ize, and ise).

Can You Spell These?

The words below are from Cody’s spelling exercises (without the
sentence context). How many can you get? (Answers on page
54.)

curn’t stashunery didunt

mis’lān’us duznt mish’uneries
en’velop ārōplānz envel’op
katar’ for’ud champān’
chōfer’ pēcūlyer chŏkolat
pincherz kōkane’ spagět’i
spĭinaj awxĭl’yery complumentery
osilātz mēzlz běnufish’ery
negroz preseed bookā

Difficult pronunciations were also a theme of the Tuesday les-

sons because they could so easily mark someone as provincial or
unsophisticated. Cody gave the pronunciation of a number of
foreign words and names such as attaché, ballet, beau monde, blasé,
Boulanger, bourgeois, canaille, chic, cognac, and coup d’état. Cody also
treated English names and words that might be mispronounced
because of their spelling, noting, for example, that Concord should
be pronounced cong kerd, not con-cŏrd and that blackguard is blag gard
not black-guard. He warned against pronouncing devil and evil with
54 S do you make these mistakes in english?
the last syllable as ill, against pronouncing iron as ī’ron and England
as eng-land (preferring ing gland ). He indicated a length distinction
between there and their, as thar and thār, and between shone and
shown, as shon and shōn.17 Cody also included some comments
on the general character of American speech as well, suggesting
a tendency for Americans “to pronounce all their syllables with
great exactness.” He cautioned therefore that “The largest num-
ber of mispronunciations comes from trying to enunciate obscure
vowels accurately, as or at the end of honor, favor, error, where prop-
erly the sound is simply that of er.”18 He stressed as well the need
for people to deal with personal idiosyncrasies, and he identified
his own: hor’izon rather than ho rī’ zon, cŭl’ in ary rather than cū’ lin
ary, and flas cid rather than flac(k) cid.19

Answers to Can You Spell These?

current, stationery, didn’t, miscellaneous, doesn’t, missionaries, envelope,

aeroplane, envelop, catarrh, forehead, champagne, chauffeur, peculiar, choco-
late, pincers, cocaine, spaghetti, spinach, auxiliary, complimentary, oscillate,
measles, beneficiary, Negroes, precede, bouquet

Some pronunciations and spellings have changed since Cody’s time.

Cody’s discussion of pronunciation showed that he understood

it as both relative and informed by local standards.When authorities
disagree, Cody wrote, students should “follow the prevailing fashion”
of their region “if that fashion is recognized either as first or second
choice.”20 For Cody, pronunciation did not need to be uniform and
was best when it was colloquial: a speaker should avoid uneducated
pronunciations but should also “not make himself conspicuous by
adopting a pronunciation that those he associates with will consider
pedantic.”21 He cautioned, for example, that the pronunciation of
 the 100% self-correcting course in english language S 55
ask, command, last, and similar words with ah was an affectation.
Implied in Cody’s advice is the understanding that speakers ought
to meet the expectations of their audience, along with an under-
standing of the public as neither unrefined nor over-refined.

WEDNESDAY: PUNCTUATION
Wednesdays dealt with punctuation: capitals, apostrophes, colons,
semicolons, and even parentheses and dashes—which Cody cau-
tioned against overusing.22 The apostrophe was treated, with Cody
preferring James’s and Dickens’s over James’ and Dickens’ because
“these names are singular.”23 Hyphenation of compound words
was covered as well, and Cody noted that compounds evolve
from being two words to being hyphenated, and finally to being
one word. Among other spellings, he recommended anybody, any
one, ball-bearing, bedroom, by-product, engine-room, facsimile, foolscap,
gas stove, good-bye, vice president, under-estimate, over-confident, pin-
money, pocket-knife, school teacher, schoolgirl, and stock-market.24
The main focus in punctuation, however, was on the comma,
which was “nine-tenths of punctuation.”25 He gave comma rules
for compound sentences, for subordinate clauses, for modifiers, for
serial words and phrases, and for dates, addresses, and quotes, along
with several exercises in which commercial contexts were used,
such as formatting a purchase order or punctuating a business
letter. Cody’s punctuation exercises did require some knowledge
of grammatical terminology on the reader’s part. One explana-
tion, for example, gave the rule of thumb that “When subordi-
nate clauses are so essential to the meaning that leaving them out
would spoil the sense, they should never be set off by commas.”26
To make sense of the rule, readers must already understand the
idea of a subordinate clause, figure it out from the examples given,
or refer to Cody’s supplementary materials.
Often, Cody organized the exercises to give practice in
identifying the basic categories of grammar necessary to apply
56 S do you make these mistakes in english?

Subordinate Clauses

Cody’s exercise asked readers to “Decide which clauses in the fol-

lowing are to be set off by commas and which not, inserting also
periods and capital letters.” Readers were also instructed to mark
simple subjects, predicates, subordinate conjunctions, and relative
pronouns. How well can you do on this paragraph?

Yesterday we went for a picnic to the woods which we

visited last summer even before the sun was up Harold and
Ellen were out of bed and getting dressed as I had packed
our lunch basket the night before we had only to dress and
get our breakfast I told mother that I would not let the boys
go in swimming and Ellen promised to see that the girls did
not take off their shoes mother was afraid that snakes might
bite their feet

Answers on page 190

punctuation rules. Some comma exercises, for example, asked

readers to circle or underline simple subjects and predicates, con-
junctions, and prepositional phrases. As much as possible, how-
ever, Cody avoided terminology in the 100% Self-correcting Course.
When discussing restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, for exam-
ple, Cody avoided those terms, noting only that “The comma has
the effect of shading the meaning. You will see, therefore, that so
far as absolute correctness is concerned it may be just as exact to
put in a comma or to leave it out. The real difference is that you
get more intelligent meaning out of words in one case than in the
other.”27 Cody’s example was this:
Postal cards, which are furnished by the government, cost one
cent each or two cents for a double or reply card. Post cards,
which are privately printed, must bear the word “Post Card” on
the address side and come within a specified size.
 the 100% self-correcting course in english language S 57
The commas were needed, he explained, because postal cards and
post cards are different things and “the relative clauses follow-
ing them merely explain the differences which already exist in
the words.” Cody succeeded in identifying the use of the comma
without actually explaining it, and his method was often inductive
in this way—teaching punctuation by examples rather than rules.
The avoidance of grammatical terminology reflected more
than Cody’s commitment to simplification. Cody thought that
punctuation was more often a matter of experience with language
than something reducible to rule. In The New Art of Writing and
Speaking the English Language, he made this explicit by distinguish-
ing between punctuation rules—matters of correctness—and
principles of composition, such as “The comma is used to throw
emphasis on what follows” or “The comma is used to suggest a
contrast or change of structure.”28 Cody advised students to drill
just a few rules. Instead, he thought, they should develop “instinct
and observation for the refinement and exceptions” by reading
and writing.29
In some of the supplementary material Cody offered additional
interesting perspectives on publication. In Brief Fundamentals, for
example, he described the semicolon as “a superior comma” and
he distinguished among commas, dashes, and parentheses for
“words thrown into a sentence for additional explanation.” The
various marks are used when the connection of the words to the
main material was close (commas), less close (dashes), and slight
(parentheses). And Cody discussed the use of quotation marks,
including the quotes around slang terms, which he explained as
attempts to communicate that “I have heard these words used, but
I do not venture to take any responsibility for them myself.”30
Cody’s advertisement and prospectus and the Monday, Tuesday,
and Wednesday lessons illuminate several key ideas of his approach
to speaking, writing, and communication: simplification, self-
checking, the social role of grammar, and the relativity of correct-
ness. Cody believed that the subject matter of correct speaking
figure 5.1. The patented self-correcting course.

58
figure 5.2. Grammar Self-Test from Lesson One (answers on page 191).

59
60 S do you make these mistakes in english?
and writing could be scientifically simplified, so that progress
could be made in just a few minutes a day, and he believed that
individual errors could be identified and eliminated by motivated
self-testing, using his patented worksheets. Cody also maintained
that correctness was a social passport enabling speakers to make
the good impressions that permitted other strengths to be seen.
This idea—a selling point really—is most strongly articulated
in the ads and prospectus. In the course, Cody also acknowledged
the more complicated point that correctness in language is rela-
tive. Standards fluctuate, and in order to use language well, it is
necessary to develop a feel for pronunciation, punctuation, and
grammar through reading, conversation, and study. Cody’s course
contains a fifth key idea as well—that a connection to good lit-
erature will provide both an understanding of human nature and
a broad view of the world necessary for a full life. We will return
to this idea in Chapter Seven, after we conclude our survey of
Cody’s grammatical and vocabulary lessons.
 six

Grammar and Vocabulary

zT hursdays were for grammar, and here Cody

shifted away from principles of composition
to focus on norms of grammar. As usual, the first lesson was a
timed self-diagnostic. The Lesson 1 self-test, which appears on the
previous page, covered ten points of usage: agreement, verb forms,
modification, pronouns, and the use of articles, adjectives, and
adverbs. It was a chance for students to assess their understanding
of traditional grammar, and Cody noted the benchmarks he had
established. Grammar school graduates averaged 13 errors out of
the 32 possible answers, high school graduates averaged 8 errors,
experienced stenographers 5 errors, and “even selected college
graduates average one mistake.”1
What points of grammar were tested? It was impossible to be
comprehensive, so Cody chose about ten grammatical concepts
and gave several items for each so that students had more than
one opportunity to check each concept. He tested common verb
form errors by asking readers to select the correct form in exam-
ples like The bird has (broke—broken) its wing. He also checked less
obvious verb agreement, like the agreement of verbs to subjects
quantified by each and every, verb agreement to conjoined sub-
jects like The woman or the tiger, and verb agreement to corporate
entities like Montgomery Ward. Cody also tested understanding of
62 S do you make these mistakes in english?
other kinds of agreement, such as that of articles with nouns (that
kind—those kind ), and that of verbs between clauses, such as It had
happened before I (saw—had seen) him. And he checked understand-
ing of subjunctive forms, asking readers to select between was and
were in counterfactual conditionals, such as If Anna (was—were)
here, she would nurse him.
Cody included examples of misplaced modification as well.
Students were asked to select between While sitting on my doorstep,
a beautiful butterfly caught my eye and While sitting on my doorstep,
I caught sight of a beautiful butterfly. The self-test included the dis-
tinction between adverb and adjective forms such as He feels
(bad—badly) about it, and Cody tested some esoteric points of
possessive usage, such as the distinction between objective and
possessive case with gerunds, as in What do you think of (me—my)
going to town? and apostrophe use in the phrase for (goodness’—
goodness’s—goodness) sake.
With a self-assessment as background, students began the gram-
mar lessons in the second week of lessons. Cody’s method was
often simply to note troublesome forms, such as singular nouns
ending in -s (politics, athletics, tidings, nuptials, ethics) or Latin plurals
(phenomena, curricula, alumnae). Among other things, he focused on
the forms of verbs like awake, drink, ring, sink, shrink, sing, spring,
and swim, which he saw as difficult for many speakers, and he gave
exercises distinguishing the often confused verb forms except and
accept, lie and lay, sit and set, let and leave, rise and raise, flown and flew,
loose and lose, and may and can.
Cody’s approach to grammar was sometimes prescriptive and
sometimes not. In the lesson dealing with pronouns, for example,
he advocated the generic masculine as the correct choice for
reference to nouns modified by each, any, and every. Exercises
included Every gentleman and lady left ( his—their) wrap in the ante-
room and Has anybody in the room dropped ( their—his) pocketbook?
On the other hand, the note associated with Whom will the paper
be read by? viewed the use of whom as awkward and pedantic, and
 grammar and vocabulary S 63
Cody suggested avoiding it by saying By whom will the paper be
read? or Who is it the paper will be read by? 2 It is unclear why Cody
did not opt for the simple Who will the paper be read by? Perhaps
he was attempting to finesse the grammatical case of the pronoun
by constructing the example with who as a predicate nominative
rather than as the object of the preposition by. In The New Art
of Writing and Speaking the English Language, Cody dismissed two
other prescriptive mainstays as well, the “myth that the infinitive
should not be ‘split’ ” and the rule about not ending a sentence
with a preposition, which “seems to have lasted far beyond its
period of usefulness.”3
His treatment of the pronoun none is another example of his
flexibility. Cody warned against being misled by the etymology of
none (as derived from no one), and in Lesson 8 he gave 25 examples
illustrating its variability between singular and plural, including
None of the men of our day (speaks—speak) so clearly as Wilson and
None of the Fifth Regiment (were—was) wounded. Cody explained
his reasoning in The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English
Language, saying that “In the past some critics have contended that
none is always singular, since it is evidently derived by a contrac-
tion of no one, but the best writers treat none as either singular or
plural according as the writer is thinking of the last person or the
last group of persons.”4 Overall, Cody recommended American
colloquial usage to the extent that he deemed it respectable and
reputable, and Cody’s choices are similar to those of his contem-
porary Henry Watson Fowler, the author of A Dictionary of Modern
English Usage. Regarding none, Fowler agreed that “it is a mistake
to suppose that the pronoun is singular and must at all costs be
followed by singular verbs,” citing the Oxford English Dictionary as
authority. And concerning who and whom, Fowler too noted the
common colloquial use of objective case who.5
Cody was, however, often dismissive of stigmatized forms,
remarking that “‘Ain’t’ is never a proper word to use.”6 He was
prescriptive as well in his discussion of the possessive, advocating
64 S do you make these mistakes in english?
its use for only for verbal nouns and for animate possessors.7 He
gave the hoary prescriptive rules for will and shall, writing that
“In ordinary statements of fact in future time, use shall after I and
we, will after other subjects. … But if there is determination of an
exercise of will, reverse the ordinary usage, and say I or we will,
you he, etc. shall.” Cody tempered this with a nod to usage for
should and would, telling students to follow the same rules as for
shall and will, “but observe that would after I and we is commoner
than will.”8
Sometimes descriptive and sometimes prescriptive, Cody was
above all a practical grammarian who offered his readers what
he thought they needed to know to avoid stigma, but he also
encouraged them not to find fault in the speech of others. Cody
advised that it was sometimes better to be ungrammatical than
rigidly proper: “Language exists for ideas,” he said in Lesson 23,
“not ideas for language.” The study of grammar is mainly to avoid
the “catastrophe” when the effect of language is lost because the
reader stops to criticize usage, grammar, or spelling.9 Though
Cody’s grammatical exposition and advice was often normative,
he consistently emphasized that “‘authority’ in grammar is an old-
fashioned and very poor appeal to as compared with reason,” and
he tried to balance the reality of language change with the social
expectation of following norms.10
Cody provided just a bare treatment of grammar in the 100%
Self-correcting Course. He gave a more systematic exposition in The
Art of Writing & Speaking the English Language and other works,
where he explained sentence diagramming, defined the parts
of speech, and even discussed the nominative absolute (as in He
knowing that, I had no choice but to act as I did ). In the 100% Self-
correcting Course, Cody’s grammatical recommendations some-
times differ from today’s usage, since both the colloquial standard
and prescriptive sensibilities have evolved. For example, Cody’s
choice of oftener in You must report to me (oftener—more often) would
be awkward usage today. And certain present-day grammatical
 grammar and vocabulary S 65
shibboleths were undiscovered in Cody’s time. There is no men-
tion, for example, of the pseudo-problem of hopefully as a sentence
adverb, which took hold in print in the 1950s and elicited a strong
reaction from conservative grammarians in the 1960s. In Cody’s
day, it was not an issue.
While Cody advocated flexibility in grammar, a weakness of
his course was that he made no changes in his grammatical work
as he updated and republished his course. There is evidence of his
evolving grammatical understanding in the supplementary books,
such as The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language,
but the course changed so little over the years that one reviewer
in 1940 dismissed Cody’s grammar advice as “sometimes debat-
able as to its correctness, and too frequently out of date in its
rulings.”11 What lessons does Cody’s approach have for today’s
English teacher? The lesson is perhaps more in the method than
in the grammatical advice. At the elementary, middle, and high
school levels teachers face an environment of widespread reliance
on standards and standardized testing. Their students are expected
to recognize and use correct grammar, and their state curricu-
lum standards may dictate grammar skills to be learned at each
grade level, sometimes labeled as proofreading or editing skills.
Like Cody, modern English teachers often begin by assessing
what students know about grammar. They may try to tease out
students’ knowledge of grammar terminology, their knowledge
of grammar concepts, and their ability to recognize and correct
different types of errors. Of the three tasks, recognizing and cor-
recting errors is thought to have the most practical importance,
just as in Cody’s time.
The teaching of English has moved closer to some of the views
that Cody outlined in his work and away from the mere exposition
of traditional grammar as a school subject. University researchers
in education and linguistics have investigated what effect gram-
mar teaching had on writing, and a 1963 review of the literature
in composition even claimed that teaching grammar as a separate
66 S do you make these mistakes in english?
subject was ineffective and took time away from other language
arts activities. Later studies, such as those of Robert Connors,
Andrea Lunsford, and Maxine Hairston, classified the types of
errors that student writers make as well as the responses of teach-
ers and business professionals. Such work has helped to provide
an empirical basis to our understanding of what errors are socially
significant.12 Teacher educators in turn have used this research to
be more selective in the application of grammar to the curricu-
lum. Educational linguist Rei Noguchi, for example, argues for
grammar instruction to “be made more cost-efficient than it is
now” and suggests beginning with just a few basic concepts like
sentence, nonsentence, subject, verb, and modifier. And teacher
educator Constance Weaver has advocated that a minimal gram-
mar focusing on punctuation, fragments, and readability probably
only requires about a dozen grammatical terms.13 Such proposals
are the natural heirs of the approach that Cody pioneered—sim-
plifying grammar to its manageable essentials.
While grammar and linguistics remain crucial for English
teacher education, teachers today tend not to rely on prescrip-
tive or descriptive grammar, but rather tailor grammar instruc-
tion to the needs of students and integrate it into the context
of writing and literature. There is still much professional dis-
cussion concerning how much and what kind of grammar to
teach, but many teachers opt for grammar instruction that is
informed by the role of teachers as researchers, by knowledge
of the sort of errors that beginning writers make, and by activ-
ity-based approaches to classroom grammar. A good test for a
bit of grammatical knowledge is to ask what problems of expo-
sition that knowledge will solve. This too is in the spirit of the
approach Cody suggested in his English Journal articles and in
Coaching Children to English. In Coaching Children, he wrote that
the best high school teachers organized grammar around activi-
ties such as “editing and publishing school papers, putting on
plays, organizing and conducting various kinds of clubs,” and
 grammar and vocabulary S 67
he advocated teaching grammar in the context of literacy prac-
tice for elementary education.14 While his grammatical advice
is outdated, the general tenor of his approach seems to have
held up well today.

What Are Your Mistakes in Grammar?

Try your hand at these grammar items from Cody’s Lesson 8.

1. The Company (has—have) issued its financial statement.

2. Our factory (have—has) established new rules for employees.
3. The United States Army in France (have—has) fought well.
4. An army of laboring men (was—were) pouring over the
bridge.
5. A few of the men (was—were) running.
6. A number of the men (was—were) running.
7. The number of men on the list (were—was) fifty.
8. A fixed number of men (is—are) drawn each year.
9. None of the men of our day (speaks—speak) so clearly as
Wilson.
10. None of the Fifth Regiment (were—was) wounded.
11. The Jones Brothers Tea Company (has—have) joined the
society.
12. Jones Brothers (has—have) joined the society.
13. Tait & Co. (have—has) joined the society.
14. Lloyd George’s Cabinet (have—has) decided to resign.
15. Mamie Brown, together with six other girls and five boys,
(have—has) appeared for examination.
16. Each of the sixteen companies of infantry and three
companies of artillery (is—are) now on parade.
17. Several of the sixteen companies of infantry and three
companies of artillery (is—are) on parade.
(continued)
68 S do you make these mistakes in english?

18. Every one of the forty seventh-grade boys and the

A division of girls (was—were) promoted.
19. The President’s staff, including Major-General Wood,
Colonel Lansing, and Major Downing, (are—is) leading the
procession.
20. The first essential in choosing your studies (is—are) definite
aims.
21. Captain Jones, as well as the sailors, (has—have) been
wounded.
22. None of these fifty men (are—is) eligible.
23. Our class of ninety-five (has—have) just graduated.
24. The congregation of the Episcopal church (are—is) voting
for a pastor.
25. The United States (are—is) demanding reciprocity.

Answers on page 192

BUILDING A BETTER VOCABULARY

Friday’s lessons focused on both vocabulary and reading. We
will discuss Cody’s advice on how and what to read in the next
chapter, and close this one with his advice on vocabulary build-
ing. Each Friday, Cody gave students a list of difficult words or
word pairs and had them compose sentences using the words.
Definitions and examples were given in an answer key on the fol-
lowing page, which allowed students to check their efforts imme-
diately. This sentence-composition work let students practice
distinctions such as those between affect and effect, accept and except,
compliment and complement, among and between, ability and capacity,
pupil and student, continual and continuous, and avenge and revenge.
Some of the vocabulary work also dealt with preposition choice
(for example, whether die with, die from, or die of was correct).
It also exercised the use of the singular/plural pairs data/datum,
 grammar and vocabulary S 69
curriculum/curricula, and genus/genera and explained the different
meanings associated with alternate plural forms such as dice/dies,
fish/fishes, staffs/staves, and alumni/alumnae.15 Cody added some
sentence-rewriting exercises in Lessons 19–24, presenting awk-
ward sentences to be reworded. For instance, Cody gave students
an opportunity to rewrite the sentences, “I am trying to get one
of my suits on 5,000 men’s backs” and “Say friend, send your
drug order to Brisley’s. No one has ever lived to regret it.”16
In order to explain vocabulary distinctions, Cody distin-
guished among different levels of usage just as a dictionary does.
He identified certain usages as old-style ( proven) or obsolete (dis-
remember) and others as Americanisms (depot, railroad, real, smart).
Certain words were identified as vulgar ( got married ) or collo-
quial (lots). And, going a step beyond what might be found in a
dictionary, he even identified some words as pretentious (reside).
Many of the distinctions that Cody included were familiar ones
from other nineteenth-century dictionaries of usage.17 And as
with grammar, some of his distinctions illustrate ways that usage
has changed in the last century. Discussing recipe and receipt, for
example, Cody remarked that “The preferred usage is recipe for a
drug mixture and receipt for cooking.” Today, of course, a recipe is
a set of instruction for anything (a recipe for disaster, for example)
and a receipt is a written acknowledgement. Cody also wrote
that claim applies to property rather than assertions: “I may claim
a piece of property, but I should not claim that this or that is
true.” Today claim is commonly used to mean “assert,” so perhaps
ideas have become metaphorical real estate. The usage examples
in the Friday lessons also give insight into Cody’s understand-
ing of semantics and the social attitudes of his time. Like some
nineteenth-century usage critics, Cody believed that vocabulary
should be organized on a principle of “one form, one meaning”
and that different words should have different meanings or uses. In
talking about love and like, for example, Cody opted for strictness
of sense by asserting that “we love people, but like pie.” And he
70 S do you make these mistakes in english?
distinguished the words lunch and luncheon by level, writing that
the latter is used by “ladies in society” and the former by “com-
mon folk.” For the semantically similar words person and party,
Cody made the one form–one meaning principle explicit, say-
ing that “it is contrary to the principles of languages to admit a
new word without some added meaning.” At times, too, some of
Cody’s social attitudes were evident in the usage notes. Writing
about the distinction between man and gentleman, he said that:
“The English call a laborer a ‘man,’ and an aristocrat who is just as
boorish a ‘gentleman’; but Americans prefer to reserve the word
‘gentleman’ for the man who has natural instructs of high breed-
ing.” And Cody also dismissed the -ess ending, remarking that
“Authoress is considered vulgar. Women who write prefer simply
to be called simply authors.”18 Cody’s comment also recognizes
a role for the preferences of the referents of a term in deciding
usage, a principle that is evident today in the guidelines of many
press organizations.
As was the case with grammar and punctuation, Cody relied
on a blend of illustration and explanation. For elder versus older
he said merely: “He was older than I, but I call him my elder
brother,” leaving readers to infer the principle behind the distinc-
tion.19 Describing a more abstract term like science, however, Cody
was expansive. He described science as “systematized knowledge,”
writing that “to be a true science it must be knowledge rather
than philosophy or art, and it must be thoroughly systematized. . . .
‘Scientific butter-making’ is straining a point in the effort to indi-
cate that the methods of butter-making are more exactly system-
atized than usual.”20 Perhaps Cody’s description of his own work as
scientifically tested should be read in this light: the applied science
of language teaching involved a thorough system of instruction
systematized to identify common problem areas and to allow pre-
cise measurements of improvement.
In the Friday lessons, Cody treats an occasional point of gram-
mar, but his usage work is primarily aimed at introducing practical
 grammar and vocabulary S 71
distinctions that would give students a correct, conversational way
of speaking. At times, however, Cody’s selection of material was
more esoteric than practical, as was the case in Lesson 6, where
he rewarded his students with a wonderful digression listing col-
lective nouns: a bevy of girls, pack of wolves, gang of thieves, host of
angels, shoal of porpoises, herd of cattle or buffalo, troop of children, covey
of partridges, galaxy of beauties, horde of ruffians, heap of rubbish, drove
of oxen, mob of blackguards, school of whales, congregation of worshippers,
corps of engineers, band of robbers, swarm of locusts, crowd of people, and
flock of birds. Even a meat-and-potatoes practical grammar requires
some dessert.
72 S do you make these mistakes in english?

Which Is It?

Cody shared his preferences for usage distinctions with his read-
ers. How do you use these words?

affects or effects aggravates or irritates

an historical or a historical at or in a small city
apt or likely continuous or continually
awful or awfully beside or besides
bring or carry between or among
die of or die from divers or diverse
each other or one another farther or further
forward or forwards man or gentleman
guess or think can’t hardly or can hardly
got or gotten saleslady or saleswoman
lit or lighted luncheon or lunch
née or né had only or only had
pair or pairs pants or trousers
permit or allow party or person
reared or raised proposal or proposition
practical or practicable pupils or students
seem or appear standpoint or point of
view
toward or towards to joyfully recall or
joyfully to recall
unbeknownst or unbeknown entire or whole

Cody’s answers on page 194

 seven

The Finishing Touches

zS herwin Cody’s 100% Self-correcting Course

offered more than spelling, pronunciation, punc-
tuation, grammar, and vocabulary.1 In the Friday lessons on
Conversation and Reading, Cody included essays on English
literature along with the vocabulary-building work. These liter-
ary essays advised his students on who and what to read, and
they were intended to create an understanding of literary cul-
ture—what counted as well-written English prose that Cody’s
students might benefit from reading. Explaining the connection
between literature and vocabulary, Cody suggested that reading
good literature provided examples of words in context and was
thus more useful than exercises aimed solely at developing a large
vocabulary. Cody remarked that “It isn’t more words that people
want, but more ways of using them. If more words were used,
common people would not understand them.”2 The way to gain
real freedom in the use of words, according to Cody, was by read-
ing well-written books, particularly fiction. And, he pointed out,
a knowledge of literature also served conversation by providing
people with something engaging to talk about.
The Friday essays on literature were also an opportunity for
Cody to promote his Nutshell Library series. First published in
74 S do you make these mistakes in english?
1907, each Nutshell volume presented an evening’s reading on a
particular author along with excerpts and abridgements intended
to give readers a taste of that writer’s best work. Readers of
the Nutshell volumes could then decide for themselves what
they wished to read more fully. The Nutshell Library included
Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Alfred
Tennyson, William Shakespeare, Washington Irving, William
Makepeace Thackeray, and Abraham Lincoln.3 Like all of Cody’s
work, the Nutshell volumes aimed at efficiency and self-direction.
Cody explained: “The best way to get interested in great litera-
ture is to take one author at a time, learn something about him as
a man of letters, and read a little now and then at odd moments
from his finest work. . . . If you read too much at one time, you
may get sick of him before you know him.”4 The volume on
Shakespeare, to take one example, gave a few pages of infor-
mation on Shakespeare’s life and then abridged The Merchant of
Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Most of the other books
followed this pattern, though the volume on Lincoln, the one
nonliterary figure included, was primarily biography. The Lincoln
volume included the First Inaugural Address, the Emancipation
Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address, as well as a selection
of Lincoln’s anecdotes. Cody seemed to be especially taken with
Lincoln’s prose, which he endorsed in the 100% Self-correcting
Course, as “The style admired and used in American business, in
advertising, in salesmanship, at the bar, and in the pulpit when the
highest effects are produced.”5
The initial volume in the Nutshell series, titled How to Read
and What to Read, was different from all the others. It was Cody’s
survey of literature, covering poetry, fiction, and essay writing in
“an attempt to separate the dead wood from the living.”6 In How
to Read and What to Read, Cody discussed what made good poems,
essays, and novels, and he picked landmarks of modern literature.
The volume was also Cody’s treatise on the study of literature,
 the finishing touches S 75
connecting literature to psychology and to the intellectual, ethical,
and aesthetic aspects of life. Literature should be uplifting rather
than merely representational, Cody felt, and it should do more
than provide depictions of “our lives of toil.”7 Cody saw litera-
ture as motivational and aspirational. It should, he said, “give us
ourselves idealized and in a dream, all we wished to be but could
not be, all we hoped for but missed.” Cody also saw books as serv-
ing a broader audience than the literary elite, remarking that the
authors in the Nutshell Library “are not called Masters because
they appeal to ‘highbrows,’ but because their work is so great
that it moves and stirs vast masses of people, millions of men and
women like you and me.”8
He also emphasized that if businessmen were going to lead
successful and well-rounded lives, more was needed than practical
communication skills. He reminded readers that life had a practi-
cal side in which a living was made and a personal side which
had to do with self-understanding. Reading good literature,
Cody said, teaches us to live “as a part of the larger sphere of
being.” But even as he advocated the larger sphere of being, Cody
recognized the limits of many literary works, writing that “Great
classics of the past are dead for us if they do not connect up with
our present thought and emotion.”9
While it may be tempting to gloss over Cody’s discussions of
literature as filler or even conceit given the largely practical ori-
entation of his course, Cody’s literary lessons fall in the American
tradition of self-education through books. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, Ralph Waldo Emerson was arguing for reading as a means
to self-reliance, self-knowledge, and self-trust—autonomy in the
intellectual sense. In his essay on “Books,” Emerson presented
general rules about what to read along with an annotated list of
the best reading. Influenced by Emerson, others developed their
own recommendations. Yale University president Noah Porter’s
Books and Reading: What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read
Them, published in 1870, contained advice on fiction, nonfiction,
76 S do you make these mistakes in english?
and religious reading, including a 40-page list of recommended
books prepared by James Hubbart of the Boston Public Library.10
And in Chapter Nine, we will look at Charles W. Eliot’s Harvard
Classics, which were a particularly salient influence for Cody.
For many, the pursuit of literature was associated with a search
for inward truth, and one’s character was both shaped and dem-
onstrated by books owned, read, or aspired to. In the Gilded Age,
American writers sometimes de-emphasized the connection of
book culture to wealth, even presenting the two as being at odds.11
Cody’s approach was of this tradition and apart from it. Like
Emerson, Cody stressed literature as a means of personal growth,
but he did not see humanistic values as opposed to materialistic
ones. Rather, he also saw literature as complementing an interest
in the commercial world—as a way in which a businessman could
engage in personal study for intellectual and moral development.
Cody dismissed the attitude of many aesthetes about materialism
and commerce. In the biographical entry in Lesson 24, he recalled
his rejection by literary friends when he turned to business:
According to the literary code of those days, I was a renegade from
art, and my friends in London disowned and condemned me
privately. Business was to them anathema, and I had adopted
the ideals of the philistines. But more and more, I felt that they
were wrong; and that advertising with its motto “Truth” and
salesmanship with its motto “Service,” in short American business,
were phases of a high game as daring, as noble in its possibilities as
the chivalry of the Middle Ages.12

It is no accident that Cody ends his course with these senti-

ments. He saw the promotion of a new literary art as one of his
life goals and thought that the Great War had created an audi-
ence ready for literature that catered neither to the “low ide-
als of a merely amusing fiction” nor to the tastes of “exclusive
aristocratic individuals who despise . . . the vulgar, swaying crowd
of ordinary humanity.”13 Middle-class book culture did in fact
 the finishing touches S 77
expand after World War I, and it also became increasingly guided
by experts. The New York Herald Tribune’s Books section, edited by
Stuart Sherman, was begun in 1924 and treated books as a form
of news.14 John Erskine initiated Columbia University’s Great
Books seminar in 1920 and promoted engagement with canonical
writers both in academe and among the general public, through
popular articles and volumes like The Delight of Great Books. And
the Book-of-the-Month Club used a panel of literary judges led
by Yale professor Henry Canby, who selected each month’s note-
worthy books, balancing the goal of educating and uplifting the
public with the practical issue of maintaining strong sales.15
Cody’s literary recommendations, like Stuart Sherman’s, John
Erskine’s, and Henry Canby’s, bridged tradition and modern-
ism. The Nutshell Library itself was clearly rooted in the nine-
teenth century, but Cody’s four-page list of recommended books
in How to Read and What to Read would eventually include such
modern writers as Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest
Hemingway, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham,
Thomas Mann, Booth Tarkington, and Thornton Wilder. Cody’s
recommendations also included many works by women, includ-
ing Pearl Buck, Willa Cather, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Ellen
Glasgow.16 Another indication of the changing market of litera-
ture was in the final chapter of How to Read and What to Read. In
his 1937 edition, Cody replaced an earlier discussion of children’s
literature with one about modern fiction, noting that the twenti-
eth century brought about an era of sexual frankness, “a complete
banishment of sentimental pretense,” and a focus on “social ambi-
tions and realistic life.”17 Society and literature were changing,
and the adult market for books was becoming as significant as the
school market.
Finally, Cody’s approach to literature also reflected his ambiv-
alence about the education he had received. As Christopher
Newfield has emphasized, apart from the cosmopolitan East Coast
78 S do you make these mistakes in english?
it was not widely evident why young people would want to
attend college or what practical benefits they would receive from
doing so.18 Dissatisfaction with the impracticality of higher edu-
cation was widespread in the nineteenth century, and as a result
the classical tradition was giving way to a more practical educa-
tion. As this shift occurred, the literary humanities were no lon-
ger the primary means of creating a disciplined, educated person.
Increasingly, the humanities were seen as finishing touches to an
otherwise practical education. Cody’s literary lessons fall in the
middle of this shift. His own tastes were formed in the nine-
teenth century, shaped by his studies at Amherst and his period
as a reviewer, biographer, and aspiring novelist, and he disdained
cheap fiction and the popular press. But his focus on the market
and on practicality led him to see the older canon as something
to be approached selectively. Cody never used the term middle-
brow, but his literary selections were aimed at “the average man
who reads the newspaper more than he ought, and would like to
know the really interesting books in standard literature which he
might take pleasure from and which might be of some practical
benefit to him.”19 Just as his advice on language embraced the col-
loquial while acknowledging the prescriptive tradition, his advice
on reading sought to find that which was useful in the tradition
and to discard the deadwood.
 eight

Every Day People

Judge You

zC ody’s 25-week course aimed at teaching the

practical norms of speaking and writing, encour-
aging a flexible, businesslike approach to grammar and an under-
standing of human nature through literature. His advertisements
tended to stress only the first of these, getting customers’ attention
with the promise of a patented shortcut to linguistic success, social
acceptance, and the appearance of breeding. Cody’s advertising
strategy was not alone in this approach, and in fact reflects broader
advertising themes common in the 1920s and 1930s. Historian
Roland Marchand has studied that period and has identified sev-
eral recurring themes of text and imagery, which he calls parables.
Two of the parables identified by Marchand are especially evident
in Cody’s ads: the parable of the first impression and the parable of
the democracy of goods. In addition, Cody’s advertising empha-
sized a third important theme not in Marchand’s typology, the
ethic of advancement through self-study. Consumers’ response to
these narratives was essential to the success of Cody’s course and
to other correspondence education as well.
We begin with first impressions.The parable of the first impres-
sion was simply the idea that the impression we make lays the
80 S do you make these mistakes in english?
groundwork for future interactions and success. Anxiety about
social judgment was used to sell dental care products, chewing
gum, bath soap, shaving cream, razors, and house paint. An early
ad for Listerine mouthwash, for example, showed a couple danc-
ing and asked “How’s Your Breath Today?” An advertisement for
Cutex nail polish had the caption that “Every Day People Judge
You by your Nails,” explaining that “just a few minutes’ care once
or twice a week” would result in nails that are “a decided addition
to your personal charm.”1 It was not just social acquaintances who
made judgments based on first impressions. Advertising campaigns
were built on the idea that the first impression you make with
managers determined your success or failure in the workplace:
The parable of the First Impression, for all its exaggerated dra-
matics, drew much of its persuasive power from its grounding
in readers’ perceptions of contemporary realities. In a relatively
mobile society, where business organizations loomed ever larger
and people dealt far more often with strangers, many personal
interactions were fleeting and unlikely to be repeated. In large
organizations, hiring and promotion decisions now often seemed
arbitrary and impersonal.2

Many workers assumed that personnel decisions were made

by a managerial group with more refined tastes and values, and
so appearances and impressions could make all the difference. In
order to get a chance, you needed to both know your job and be
clean, fresh-smelling, and well-spoken. And of course you needed
to stay that way.
The selling of first impressions was in some ways an extension of
a long-standing American concern for correct behavior. Etiquette
books and conduct books had been common since colonial times,
and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., has noted that works
like Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Eleazar Moody’s The School of
Good Manners, and Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman
were very popular among affluent colonials. Such books defined
 every day people judge you S 81
correct behavior in terms of respectfulness, modesty, and piety.3 At
the same time, there was another view of etiquette that held that
“good breeding was founded not upon considerations for oth-
ers, as the moralists taught, but upon consideration for self.”4 The
most influential early example separating ethics from morals was
Chesterfield’s Principles of Politeness. This work emerged from the
advice of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to his
illegitimate son. Published first as letters to his son in 1774, the
book contained exhaustive advice about how to impress, influ-
ence, and manipulate others. In various edited and expurgated
forms, Chesterfield’s book became popular in the nineteenth cen-
tury as a book of manners and behavior, and it was even published
in special American editions.
As Schlesinger emphasizes, changing social and economic
conditions nudged etiquette in America away from character
and toward behavior. The expansion of the nation, the rise of the
common man, and the social divisions between New England
and the South all fostered attention to outward manifestations of
behavior. Post–Civil War etiquette books recognized etiquette as
arbitrary convention, often dealing with such topics as facial hair,
tobacco, the use of calling cards, how long to keep callers waiting,
and when to use a knife, fork, or spoon. During the twentieth
century, mass production of body care products and the influence
of advertising strengthened the link between appearance and eti-
quette, and a positive first impression came to be seen as a way of
not offending others. First-impression dangers could be corrected
by products like mouthwash, razors, and nail polish. They could
also be managed by avoiding social and linguistics offenses, and
products like Cody’s 100% Self-correcting Course were part of the
same consumer consciousness as soap and deodorant.
Marchand identified another important narrative theme in
the advertising of the 1920s—one that he called the parable of
the democracy of goods. The democracy of goods refers to the
way that a rising standard of living, mass production, and mass
82 S do you make these mistakes in english?
distribution placed goods that were once prohibitively expensive
within reach. It meant, as Marchand writes, that everyone could
“enjoy society’s most significant pleasure, convenience, or ben-
efit.”5 Automobiles, washing machines, and better homes were all
possible, and advertisers stressed that what was once only for the
wealthy was now available to, and even expected of, the middle
class. One indication of the new attitude was introduction of the
phrase “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” taken from Arthur “Pop”
Momand’s comic strip, which debuted in 1913 and featured the
never-shown Joneses as a perpetual object of envy.
It wasn’t just durable goods that were more widely available. Ideas
and information once available only to millionaires now seemed
within the reach of the middle class as well. Applied science and
psychology were making education, training, and work more effi-
cient, and the distribution of information was becoming more
efficient and democratic as well. Mass production of books made
knowledge available to readers, and inexpensive magazines and
cheap postage provided ways to learn about the books you needed
to keep up with the Joneses. Marchand talks about the democracy of
goods, but it may be just as important to consider the democracy of
information that was made possible by mass production and media.
Cody’s advertisements were part of the democratization of
information. They did not have the look of many of the slick
magazine ads of the 1920s. Rather, the ads were intended for easy
reproduction in pulp magazine and newspaper formats, so they
are light on graphics and heavy on text.6 But Cody’s campaign
stressed first impressions as relentlessly as any slick magazine cam-
paign for razors, soap, or life insurance did. His ads reminded work-
ing and middle-class readers that, fairly or unfairly, they would be
judged by their speech and writing. And the references to Cody’s
“Wonderful New Invention,” his patented scientific method, and
the mere 15 minutes required invoked democracy and availabil-
ity every bit as much as ads for washing machines in the slick
magazines.
 every day people judge you S 83
The narratives of the democracy of goods and of first impres-
sions had staying power in the 1930s, as the Great Depression
led to more hard-edged advertising. When a rising standard of
living could no longer be marketed, the focus shifted instead to
holding onto your job and preserving economic security for your
dependents.The Prudential Insurance Company, for example, had
featured ads in the 1920s explaining that “life insurance provides
a way to give old age the comforts and consideration it so richly
deserves.” In the 1930s, Prudential explained instead that “Many
a lapsed policy has deprived a child of full-time schooling” and
warned that “The Life Insurance Policy that would have saved
their home was permitted to lapse.”7 Even ads for razors and paja-
mas focused on jobs: a Gillette razor advertisement from the 1930s,
for example, illustrated the impact of a five o’clock shadow on the
ability to get a job, as a dejected husband explains that “I didn’t
get the job.” And an ad for Duofold Health Underwear led with
the question “SICK—will you hold that job?”8 Cody’s ad, with
its appeal to first impressions and to the democracy of goods, did
well in both the ambitious 1920s and in the desperate 1930s.
Cody’s ads also featured a third narrative theme, not highlighted
by Marchand. This is the narrative of self-improvement, a theme
that overlaps with first impressions but is distinct from it. Cody’s
ads, like ads for other books and courses, stressed the long-standing
American belief in self-study. Workers of the 1920s and 1930s were
being introduced to the idea that practical learning was a life-
long commitment. By the 1920s, the 30-year-old International
Correspondence Schools offered technical and business courses
that ranged from accounting to wool manufacturing. ICS, as it
became known, advertised itself cozily as “The University of the
Night” in an ad which showed a man lying on the floor before
a fire, contentedly studying at home.9 But it also relied more
directly on the idea that success was due to self-study. One ad, for
example, showed a husband handing money to his wife and say-
ing, “Here’s an Extra $50, Grace—I’m Making Real Money Now.”
figure 8.1. An ICS “warning” ad.

84
 every day people judge you S 85
The ad copy celebrates the success of the couple due to his study
and her encouragement:
Yes, I’ve been keeping it a secret until pay day came. I’ve been
awarded a promotion with an increase of $50 a month. And the
first extra money is yours. Just a little reward for urging me to
study at home. . . . We’re starting up easy street, Grace, thanks to
you and the I.C.S.!10

Another ad took the opposite approach, implying that failure to

take an ICS course would mean being left behind. A manager
tells a downcast employee:11
We just can’t take any chances about promotions these days. We
must select a man on his ability to do the job, not on the basis
of his ability to make friends. I know you’ve been here for a
long time, but you know that you have never made any effort to
acquire training that would fit you for the jobs ahead. The men
I promote have been utilizing their spare time.

A first impression counted, but so did continual self-improvement.

Ads like these blended the promise of financial rewards, the fear
of missing out on promotions, and the ease of studying at home.
These three themes allowed advertisers to shape a powerful
message to American men and women in the 1920s and 1930s. It
was an uncertain world, in which a bad impression or grammar
error could do lasting damage. But knowledge was available to
everyone, even those with limited time and money. All that was
needed was the determination and character to study on your
own. The total effect was a persuasive case to readers that anyone
could get ahead, and keep up, if they wisely used products to
improve their skills and manage the impressions they made.
 nine

Just 15 Minutes a Day

zS elf-improvement was not just for getting

ahead at work. Some products also focused on the
presumed elite knowledge and the depth of intellect that arose
from serious books. Yet, as we shall see, impression management
and the democracy of goods were themes in these efforts as well.
Reading was a good thing in itself, but it could be done in an
efficient, egalitarian way and could help an average industrious
person attain the cultivation and gravitas of the very well-read.
A good place to begin is with Charles W. Eliot, the educa-
tion reformer and long-time president of Harvard University
who lent his university’s name to the series of books known
as the Harvard Classics. Eliot was himself a Harvard graduate
and taught there for a time before embarking on a brief busi-
ness career and then accepting a professorship at the nearby
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was tapped to be the
president of Harvard in 1869 at the young age of 35. Eliot served
more than 40 years as Harvard’s president, advocating practi-
cal education, science, modernization of the humanities, and
an elective system that tried to fit education to the individual.
Eliot became something of a celebrity public intellectual whose
opinions were sought after and seriously considered, and he was
a frequent commentator on academic and public policy issues
 just 15 minutes a day S 87
such as admissions quotas, football, imperialism, women’s rights,
racial equality, and prohibition.
As biographer Hugh Hawkins emphasizes, Eliot had been
impressed with the growth of correspondence schools and
Chautauqua reading circles, and his speeches often stressed the
importance of continuing education through reading good
books.1 He often claimed that, for the right person, a five-foot-
long shelf of great books could substitute for the liberal education
a college provided. In 1909, near the end of Eliot’s presidency, edi-
tors at Collier Publishing approached him with the idea of devel-
oping a library of such books. Eliot obtained permission to use
the Harvard brand, and his assistants identified a set of readings in
history, philosophy, religion, education, science, politics, literature,
and the fine arts.2 The choices included some of the dialogues
of Plato (the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo), the Odyssey,
the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Augustine’s Confessions, works
by Charles Darwin (The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the
Beagle) and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty and Mill’s Autobiography),
four plays by Shakespeare, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, and The
Thousand and One Nights.3 The Harvard Classics were in the tra-
dition of expert advice about reading and books that included
Emerson’s essay on “Books” as well as Noah Porter’s Books and
Reading. Eliot’s crimson-bound Harvard Classics, however, went
beyond previous reading guides, however, by providing excerpts
from the books rather than just advice for home reading. Just
as Cody saw his Nutshell Library as encouraging an interest in
great writers, Eliot had in mind a sampling of thought that would
encourage further reading.
Of course, when the idea of the Harvard Classics was
announced, Eliot’s celebrity status and the academic suspense
of what would be selected gave the project some public inter-
est and cachet. Eliot no doubt saw the Harvard Classics as an
opportunity to further serve the public as he entered the final
phases of his long career. The trustees of Harvard must have also
88 S do you make these mistakes in english?
seen an opportunity to spread the university’s influence and name,
but others questioned the handing over of the Harvard brand
to a commercial publisher like Collier. As Hawkins notes, John
Jay Chapman, a Harvard graduate from 1884 and a critic of the
Harvard Classics, wrote disapprovingly about the replacement of
intellectual values with business values and about the use of the
Harvard name in advertising.
One of Chapman’s critiques was that once the project was
underway, control would be ceded to Collier.4 Nowhere was
the handling over of control more evident than in the adver-
tising campaign for the Harvard Classics. Early ads focused on
the contrast with classical education (“No more Latin, no more
Greek, no more sittin’ on a hardwood seat”) and the enjoyment
of reading (“If you are a lover of books”), and some ads traded
on Eliot’s fame. Soon, however, Collier’s ads invoked the democ-
racy of goods, self-improvement, and the importance of first
impressions. “Why treat your mind like a merry-go-round” by
indiscriminately reading, one ad asked. Since Eliot had approved
the choices of what to read, elite education was available to all,
just like other mass-produced goods. Later ads stressed efficiency
in other ways, noting that the low price and easy terms meant
that “It May Never Again Be So Easy to Own the Famous
Harvard Classics.” Still other ads made direct appeals to financial
success, with headlines such like “What 15 Minutes a Day Has
Done to My Husband’s Earning Power.” And some touched on
psychology and class consciousness with the headlines “How to
Get Rid of an INFERIORITY COMPLEX” and “Why Envy
Them Longer?”5
Efficiency, first impressions, and self-improvement were
stressed in the ad copy. The Harvard Classics were presented as
a way to improve one’s mind, with readers reminded that “In all
of the world there are only a really few works that have made his-
tory,” and that “To read these few great works systematically and
intelligently is to be really well read.” The Classics were efficient as
 just 15 minutes a day S 89
well, and Collier emphasized that Eliot’s reading system was used
by 100,000 businessmen because it “shows how to select a library
without waste or worry, what books are worth while and what
are not.”6 The free prospectus booklet, the Fifteen Minutes a Day
Reading Guide, reiterated these themes, emphasizing the desire to
appreciate the best that the world had to offer:
But now, what of your mental life, your growth in vision and
power? Do you spend your precious reading time with the daily
paper or the book that happens to come your way? It all depends,
in the last analysis, on your ambition. If you are satisfied with
yourself, with your business and social position, with your mental
equipment—well and good. But if you want for yourself the best
that this eventful and fascinating world has to offer, you simply
cannot afford to overlook these stepping stones to achievement
that have been laid for you.7

The prospectus opened by reminding readers of the impor-

tance of books “in the matter of making a life as well as a living.”
And it emphasized that while the Harvard Classics entertained,
they also served a higher goal of mental growth. “The day of
the untutored success is passing,” it was noted.8 Being well read
was necessary for success, popularity, and confidence. The pro-
spectus appealed to the character of readers and their desires for
an efficient road to success, but it also directly addressed first
impressions. The page headed “15 Minutes a Day Makes All the
Difference” made it clear that acquiring a “rich mental back-
ground” can make the difference between being someone who is
“listened to eagerly” and being someone who has little to say. Like
Sherwin Cody’s 100% Self-correcting Course, the Harvard Classics
drew on anxieties at the same time that it stressed success through
efficient self-education. Eliot dealt with all the liberal arts and
Cody just practical English, but each tried to distill the tools for
personal growth, social success, and financial advancement to just
15 minutes of effort a day.
figure 9.1. From the Harvard Classics prospectus.

90
 just 15 minutes a day S 91
“I HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT YOU
ARE A BOOK-LOVER”
The 100% Self-correcting Course and the Harvard Classics illustrate
book culture as an important consumer trend of the early twen-
tieth century. And if those modern consumers were not enam-
ored of the traditional works excerpted in the Harvard Classics or
Nutshell Library, there was soon an alternative. In the 1920s the
Book-of-the-Month Club began to sell contemporary books by
mail, offering readers books that were serious but not academic.
The club was born out of an earlier venture called The Little
Leather Library, which had been the idea of booksellers Charles
and Albert Boni and two ad writers, Harry Scherman and Cody’s
friend Maxwell Sackheim.9 They had seen the market for the
classics evident in Eliot’s success, and in 1915 borrowed money
to publish 2,000 sets of 30 titles. With advance orders from the
Whitman Candy Company, the Little Leather Library Corporation
began by producing small leather-bound editions of Shakespeare
included as premiums with candy and soon moved on to depart-
ment store and direct mail sales. The list of titles expanded to
about 100, but according to Sackheim, by the mid-1920s, the mar-
ket was saturated, so Sackheim and Scherman thought of a new
way to market books by subscription. In 1926, together with a
businessman named Robert Haas, they came up with a plan to
capitalize on the public thirst for books. Scherman and Sackheim
knew from experience that it was difficult to sell single books,
and so they created a mail-order club to promote repeat business.
There were some problems at first. The original Book-of-the-
Month Club sent books to members without any advance noti-
fication, allowing people to return the book if they didn’t care
for it. Returns were a costly problem, however, and Sackheim
suggested providing notification to readers that a certain book
would be sent to them unless they returned a form. The advance
notification approach—known as the negative option—gave the
92 S do you make these mistakes in english?
Book-of-the-Month Club a healthy profit, and the Club prospered
independently for over seventy years.10
The success of the Book-of-the-Month Club was in part due
to unique marketing and distribution, but it was also due to the
role of books as symbols. Books and written language represented
education, and owning books was a form of impression man-
agement, creating a social display of intellect, class, and income.
Expensive-looking books, cultural historian Janice Radway has
emphasized, showed that a family “placed a high premium on
education, tradition, beauty, and taste.”11 As copywriters, Sackheim
and Scherman understood this instinctively. Their direct mail
appeal for the Little Leather Library began: “You don’t know me
from Adam, but I have been told that you are a book-lover, that
you have bought good books in the past, and that apparently you
like to have them around you.”12 The inaugural advertisement for
the Book-of-the-Month Club emphasized even more directly the
reader’s need to be included in the world of books:
How often have outstanding books appeared, widely discussed
and widely recommended books you were really anxious to
read and fully intended to read when you “got around to it,” but
which nevertheless you missed! Why is it you disappoint yourself
so frequently in this way?13

Like Cody’s and Eliot’s advertisements, this Book-of-the-

Month Club ad identified a problem—too many books in too
little time—and it offered an efficient solution in its product.
Though they were selling books and education, not blood bitters
and liver pills, the 100% Self-correcting Course, the Book-of-the-
Month Club, and the Harvard Classics relied on the advertising
techniques of the patent medicine tradition: disease and cure.This
simple technique was effective because the consumer conscious-
ness of the time stressed self-improvement, first impressions, and the
democratization of goods.The result of this mix of old ideas about
self-improvement together with new ideas that arose from social
 just 15 minutes a day S 93
and industrial change was a robust market for self-study books and
courses. It was a market that encompassed both the working class,
through projects like the International Correspondence Schools,
and the middle class, through the Harvard Classics and the Book-
of-the-Month Club. And Cody’s course, which advertised in both
the New York Times Book Review and adventure magazines like
Black Mask, aimed at both audiences.
 ten

A Better Self: Manners,

Music, and Muscles

zT he Harvard Classics, the Book-of-the-Month

Club, and the 100% Self-correcting Course reflect the
centrality of literature and language to early twentieth-century
self-improvement culture. But there were other ways to invest
in yourself as well. The physical culture movement, for example,
focused on exercise, strength, diet, health, and even sex. Another
market niche existed in teaching special skills that would impress
others. And there was always an interest in learning how to behave
properly. From the 1920s through the 1940s, etiquette, music, for-
eign languages, physical strength, self-confidence, and much more
were sold in advertising campaigns for special books and courses.
These advertising campaigns provide a further picture of the ways
in which anxiety and desire marketed self-improvement in the
early part of the twentieth century, and the ways in which self-
improvement was changing as well.
Etiquette is a good beginning, since books on correct behavior
have always been popular in America. As noted earlier, etiquette
was an evolving concept throughout the nineteenth century.
Conduct books for rural life gave way to books of manners, and
 a better self: manners, music, and muscles S 95
the focus of such books shifted from traits of character to traits of
behavior. The twentieth century also required a thoroughly mod-
ern notion of social correctness. People lived in different locales
and at different paces, they grew more affluent and expectant, the
roles of women began to change, and World War I and Prohibition
tested the limits of behavior. All of these things helped to push
aside many Victorian conventions and created the market for a
new series of etiquette books for the new century.1
The most famous of these was Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Blue
Book of Social Usage, published in 1922.2 A year earlier, however,
a woman named Lillian Eichler penned The Book of Etiquette for
the Nelson Doubleday publishing company. Eichler was a young
advertising copywriter at Ruthrauff & Ryan, and she had written
the ad copy for an older etiquette book by Doubleday. While her
ad was remarkably successful, the book itself had a high return
rate, so Doubleday commissioned Eichler to write a modern eti-
quette manual that would stay sold. Eichler took on the commis-
sion and wrote the Book of Etiquette and its ads.3
While ads like Cody’s and Eliot’s addressed the reader directly
to explain the benefits of the product, Eichler’s ad, like many oth-
ers of this era, used stories to suggest how people’s lives would be
changed by the product. Her most famous work was one titled
“Again She Orders—A Chicken Salad Please.” In this ad, a young
woman disappoints her date and herself by repeatedly ordering
the same meal when they dine out. The unnamed protagonist’s
life is limited because she is unfamiliar with the French items
on the menu and with the proper utensils for restaurant dining,
so again and again she orders a chicken salad. Another Book of
Etiquette ad, titled “Both are Embarrassed—Yet Both Could Be at
Ease,” explained:
Every day in our contact with men and women little problems of
conduct arise which the well-bred person knows how to solve. In
the restaurant, at the hotel, on the train, at a dance—everywhere,
96 S do you make these mistakes in english?
every hour, little problems present themselves. Shall olives be
taken with a fork or the fingers? What shall the porter be tipped,
how shall the woman register at the hotel, how shall a gentleman
ask for a dance—countless questions of good conduct that reveal
good manners.4

Eichler drew on insecurities about everyday social situations.

She reminded readers that there is no discomfort worse than not
knowing what to say and do at all times, and her ads keenly cap-
tured the social anxiety of twentieth-century etiquette. One series
of ads chronicled the misadventures of Violet and Ted Creighton,
a fictitious couple whose manners cost them dearly. In one, they
are having dinner with Ted’s boss. After several embarrassing faux
pas by Violet and Ted, the boss takes Ted aside to tell him that
“I’m sorry Creighton, but I decided to consider Roberts for the
vacancy. I need a man whose social position is assured.”5
Eichler’s ads treated etiquette as the finishing touches to social
conduct and as a route to social advancement. Her book itself took
a somewhat more nuanced view. Explaining the role of manners
in society, The Book of Etiquette explained that modern etiquette
involved respecting the conventions of society concerning “one’s
appearance, manner, and speech,” but that it also involved tolerance,
“carefully disciplined impulses,” and “regard for the rights of oth-
ers.”6 While etiquette defined in this way still had an association with
character, it was increasingly defined in terms of the first impres-
sions created by appearance and manner. This is clear in Eichler’s
discussion of language as an aspect of etiquette. In volume two of
The Book of Etiquette, she devoted consecutive chapters to Speech
and Dress.The chapter on Speech began by emphasizing that “One
is judged by his dress but this judgment is not final. A better index is
his speech. It is said that one can tell during a conversation that lasts
not longer than a summer shower whether or not a man is culti-
vated.” The same sentiment is found in Cody’s ads, which described
correct language as offering “a trade-mark of breeding.”7
 a better self: manners, music, and muscles S 97
Other mail-order possibilities went beyond the avoidance of
social gaffes to the idea of becoming more popular and admired.
The U.S. School of Music, founded in 1898, offered correspon-
dence instruction in voice and speech, singing, and instruments as
diverse as the piano and the ukulele. A classic 1926 advertisement
by Ruthrauff & Ryan copywriter John Caples characterized musi-
cal ability in terms of the admiration of one’s friends.Titled “They
Laughed When I Sat down to Play the Piano,” the ad began with
a narrative: “Arthur had just finished playing ‘The Rosary.’ The
room rang with applause. I decided that this would be a dramatic
moment for me to make my debut.” To the amazement of his
friends, the narrator ( Jack) played a difficult piece by Franz Liszt.
When asked how he had learned to play, Jack responded he had
never seen his teacher and a while ago couldn’t play at all:
Then I told them the whole story. “Have you ever heard of the
U.S. School of Music?” I asked. A few of my friends nodded.
“That’s a correspondence school, isn’t?” they exclaimed.“Exactly,”
I replied, “they have a new simplified method that can teach you
to play any instrument by note in just a few months.” 8

The ad explained the benefits of the U.S. School of Music

method: its simplified teaching method allowed progress in just
a few minutes of study each day and at a cost of just a few cents
a day. It required “no laborious scales” and no teacher. If readers
were unsure whether they had any musical aptitude, they could
send for a free booklet which provided a Musical Ability Test,
and if they lacked musical instruments, those could be provided
as well. “They Laughed When I Sat Down to Play the Piano”
appealed more to the desire to impress than to fear of embarrass-
ment, and the approach worked so well that Caples repeated it
in other ads, including one for the French-at-Sight course which
led with the headline “They Grinned When the Waiter Spoke
to Me in French—but Their Laughter Changed to Amazement
at My Reply.”9
98 S do you make these mistakes in english?

figure 10.1. John Caples’s U.S. School of Music ad.

BEATING UP BULLIES
The ads by Eichler and Caples help to round out the advertising
themes of self-improvement and impression management preva-
lent in the 1920s and 1930s. Two other self-improvement courses
were getting their start led by men who would become much
more famous than Cody and whose courses are still in existence
today: Dale Carnegie and Charles Atlas. The next chapter looks
at the life and career of Dale Carnegie. In this section, we focus
on bodybuilder Charles Atlas.
It may come as no surprise that the man we know as Charles
Atlas was not born with that name. Angelo Siciliano was born
in southern Italy in 1892, and his parents brought him to New
York in 1905. Growing up in New York, Siciliano settled into a
new American name (Charles Siciliano) and a career in leather-
work. He also became an amateur bodybuilder and developed
his techniques of isometrics after noticing that lions and tigers
at the Bronx Zoo had well-developed muscles but no barbells.
Siciliano was also particularly taken with classical body imagery,
 a better self: manners, music, and muscles S 99
and he adopted the name Atlas after his friends told him that he
resembled a statue of the Greek titan that was on top of the Hotel
Atlas in Coney Island. He later even named his children Herc and
Diana.
Charles Siciliano’s life changed when he entered a photo com-
petition sponsored by Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture maga-
zine in 1920. In 1921, he also won the Physical Culture contest
Macfadden sponsored at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Judged by a panel of medical experts, educators, and even an
anthropologist, the contest featured a $1,000 prize for the most
perfectly developed man, with the winner’s measurements pre-
served for posterity. Charles Atlas went on to a new career as a
Coney Island strongman, a pitchman for muscle-developing prod-
ucts, and an artist’s model, often for sculptural pieces. According
to a New Yorker profile, Atlas’s torso was the model for busts of
George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and others.10
In the 1920s, Charles Atlas and his business partner Charles
Roman developed a mail-order bodybuilding course. Toward
the end of the nineteenth century, there had been keen inter-
est in physical fitness, promoted by the YMCA and other advo-
cates of what was known as Muscular Christianity.11 Secular
approaches to physical culture emerged, promoted by entrepre-
neurs like Macfadden, who advocated exercise, fasting and natural
foods, fresh air, and sex. In the early 1900s a number of body-
builders, such as Eugene Sandow, Lionel Strongfort, and Earle E.
Liedermann, appealed to boys’ and men’s insecurities about their
physical strength and their bodies. Alois Swoboda even offered
“Conscious Evolution” courses with the jarring headline “YOU
ARE INFERIOR.” Swoboda promised a system that would
enable you to “dominate others” and would “double your energy
and earning power.”12
The Charles Atlas course of the 1920s was a relative newcomer
to the bodybuilding business, but his advertising had a lighter
touch than courses like Swoboda’s. Many Atlas ads drew on the
100 S do you make these mistakes in english?
self-improvement theme of transformation.They did not focus on
book culture or the world of work, but were as much about social
success and self-confidence as any other ads of the time. Atlas’s ads
focused on the efficient transformation from weakling to he-man,
alluding to the power of physique in creating a good impression.
An ad titled “Life’s Most Embarrassing Moment” begins with the
sentence “When the girl you were keen about saw you in a bath-
ing suit and yelled ‘Hello skinny!’” Another ad led with word and
thought balloons: “She said: ‘I’m sorry I can’t go out with you
tonight.’ But she really thought ‘I’m ashamed to be seen with
such a skinny weakling.’” A muscular build—or a muscular boy-
friend—was part of the impression one made on others.
The most famous ad was one titled “The Insult that Made a
Man out of Mac.” In this comic strip ad, an attractive girl and
a skinny boy, Mac, are on the beach. The girl is wooed away by
a muscular beach bully. After completing the Atlas course, Mac
returns to the beach, knocks the bully to the ground, and wins
back the girl. The story was variously represented as something
that happened to Atlas and something he witnessed at Coney
Island, and it presented a before-and-after story in a modern
comic-strip format suitable for those who aspired to action rather
than reading.13 Atlas’s actual course did involve reading, however,
and it came in the form of a dozen lessons written as letters to
his students. He provided a regimen of isometric and calisthenic
exercises, and he also offered advice on proper food and drink,
external and internal cleanliness, fresh air, posture, sleep, and self-
control. His exercises and health advice often drew on analogies
to nature, religion, and mechanical engineering, and Atlas encour-
aged his students to think positive thoughts because worry and
anger were poisons. He prescribed sunbathing, milk, cold show-
ers, and good music as a mental tonic.14 Priced at $30 to $35,
the course was a great success over the years. Charles Roman
served as president of Charles Atlas, Ltd., and handled the business
affairs, while Atlas served as the chief spokesman and role model.
 a better self: manners, music, and muscles S 101
That involved public performances such as pulling railroad cars,
bending nails and metal rods, and unbending horseshoes. Atlas and
Roman understood how to get the public’s attention, and one of
his feats of strength was a demonstration bending a metal bar at
Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York.
In some ways Cody’s course and Atlas’s approaches could not
have been greater opposites: brain and brawn, book culture and
beach culture. Yet they both had the same basic appeal, portray-
ing life as a series of tests in which those with ability, physical
or grammatical, were in the best position to seek good fortune
and avoid embarrassment. Both claimed to be scientifically tested
and were patented (in Cody’s case) or trademarked (in Atlas’s), and
both promised to help users gain autonomy, influence, and admi-
ration. The feats of the inventors were selling points—what Cody
did at Gary and what Atlas did at Sing Sing—and each course
required just 15 minutes a day. Like Cody’s campaign, Atlas’s drew
on the narratives of self-improvement, the democracy of goods,
and first impressions. He offered self-improvement and impres-
sion management by means of a better physique, better health,
and better prospects for happiness. And his course was quintes-
sentially democratic, requiring no gymnasium and no barbells or
special equipment.
When Atlas died in 1972, The New York Times reported that
his course was still being taken by about 70,000 people annually.
Roman, who had become the sole owner in 1969, remained asso-
ciated with the company for over 70 years until finally selling it in
1997, and the Charles Atlas course is still being offered and adver-
tised today. The phrases Dynamic-Tension and “The Insult That
Made a Man out of Mac” are trademarked by Charles Atlas, Ltd.,
but the Atlas imagery has very much entered the larger sphere of
popular culture. The Atlas story is retold in comic-book form in
the origin of heroes like Captain America, a weakling rejected
as an army recruit but converted to a super-soldier by science
and exercise. And the image of a sand-kicking bully was used by
102 S do you make these mistakes in english?
George H. W. Bush to describe Saddam Hussein in 1991. Famous
alumni of the course included Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Arun
and playwright David Mamet, who has described receiving the
lessons in a plain brown wrapper.16
From the International Correspondence Schools to the
Charles Atlas course, self-improvement products were remark-
ably successful and popular in the early twentieth century, with
a strong appeal to both men and women. We have looked at a
few of the many offerings that promised to improve people’s
lives, but we have only scratched the surface. The advertising of
the day promoted books and home-study courses for everything
from dancing, shorthand, and cartooning to bust-development to
cures for stuttering, smoking, and alcoholism. The Encyclopædia
Britannica let readers know “There IS an aristocracy in America!
It is an Aristocracy of KNOWLEDGE.” Nelson Doubleday, Inc.,
advertised “The Famous Pocket University—A Liberal Reading
Education,” and Count Rafael Diez de la Cortina offered phono-
graph records that allowed you to “Speak French at Once!” Not
to be outdone, the Rittenhouse Press promoted its 10-volume set
on Woman with the headline question “How would you like to
spend an hour with Cleopatra?”17
Correspondence courses and home-study books promised
cheap, efficient remedies for modern anxieties. They offered help
with career management and with the creation of good impres-
sions. They filled gaps in education and training. As a genre,
home-study courses appealed to the American passion for self-
improvement, but they also appealed to worry—worry about
keeping up in a competitive world of new knowledge, worry
about dealing with new social relationships and new values, worry
about social correctness, and worry about being judged by oth-
ers. Advertisers positioned self-improvement products as cures for
loneliness, ridicule, weakness, and money troubles, tying together
promise and anxiety just as successfully as the old patent medi-
cine ads connected health and illness. Whether you were studying
 a better self: manners, music, and muscles S 103
grammar, etiquette, piano, bodybuilding, or the great books, you
could become better in the comfort of your home and at your
own pace.

Self-Improvement Products

Sherwin Cody’s 100% Self-correcting Course, The Book of Etiquette,

the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas course were just
some of the products available to consumers. The World Alma-
nac and Book of Facts, like the pulps, for many years contained
ad sections. Here is some of what was offered (from The World
Almanac and Book of Facts, 1940):

Linguaphone is the quick, easy, simple way to speak French,

German, Spanish,. . .
High School courses at home (The American School,
Chicago, Ill.)
To the man who wants to enjoy an accountant’s career
(LaSalle Extension University)
I’m having the time of my life—since I learned to dance
(Arthur Murray)
A WARNING to men who would like to be independent in
the next five years
(Alexander Hamilton Institute)
Just Listen to this Record—Speak Spanish at Once (Cortina
Academy)
Government Jobs, pay $1260-$2100 to Start (Patterson
School, Rochester, N.Y.)
Learn shorthand in six weeks (School of Speedwriting)
Want a career in photography? (New York Institute of
Photography)
Acquire law nights at home (LaSalle Extension University)
US Government Jobs (Franklin Institute, Rochester, N.Y.)
(continued)
104 S do you make these mistakes in english?

You’ve hoped for it! Now the day has come! (The Harvard
Classics)
Large Incomes from Swedish Massage (The College of
Swedish Massage)
HE Mailed This Coupon (Charles Atlas)
3 grades of applicants—each one making a definite
promotion step (American School)
WORDS can make YOU RICH! (The Grenville Kleiser
Course)
Did you ever take an internal bath? (Tyrrell’s Hygiene
Institute)
 eleven

Smile

zT he books and courses of the 1920s and 1930s

blended anxieties about the impression one made, the
promise of efficiency, and the drive for self-improvement. For a time
no single person was more at the center of this than Dale Carnegie,
the author of the best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence
People. Carnegie and Cody shared an advertising agency, Schwab &
Beatty, and Victor Schwab managed both of their accounts. Neither
Carnegie nor Cody ever mentioned the other in print, and there
is no evidence that the two ever met, but if they had run into each
other in the waiting room of Schwab & Beatty and compared notes,
they would have found that they had much in common.
Dale Carnegie was born in 1888 in rural Missouri, and he
grew up on his parents’ farm. His parents were poor, devout
and hard-working, and Carnegie’s mother hoped for him to
become a missionary.1 After graduating from the State Normal
School at Warrensburg, where he pursued debate, Carnegie tried
his hand at selling courses for the International Correspondence
Schools (unsuccessfully) and selling meat products for the
Armour company (successfully). To while away the hours when
he was on the road in the upper Midwest, he read books on the
psychology of salesmanship. In 1910, at the age of 22, Carnegie
moved to New York to study acting at the American Academy
106 S do you make these mistakes in english?
of the Dramatic Arts and to write. Carnegie failed as an actor
and as a novelist—he noted that his manuscript for The Blizzard
got a reception “as cold as any blizzard that ever howled across
the plains of the Dakotas.”2 To support himself in New York,
Carnegie began teaching adult education speech courses
through the YMCA, where his debate background and act-
ing training helped. As his public speaking course developed
and he came to understand what students responded to best, he
focused less on formal public speaking and elocution and more
on impromptu speaking and on ways to develop enthusiasm
and self-confidence.
Like Cody, Carnegie shifted his literary efforts from novels to
textbook writing, and in 1910 he coauthored a 512-page textbook
with Joseph Berg Esenwein. Their book The Art of Public Speaking
was a traditional public-speaking text dealing with inflection,
voice, precision, gesture, preparation, and memorization, with
suggested topics for speakers and an appendix of great political
and funeral speeches. There are hints of future ideas, of course. By
1913, Carnegie had a solo book dealing with the techniques of
speaking. Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business began with
the idea of developing self-confidence and discussed the training
and preparation necessary for effective speaking. Carnegie’s pri-
mary focus was on organization, clarity, and speech techniques,
though at the end of each chapter was a section called Speech
Building. Here he gave advice on Words Often Mispronounced,
Correct Usage, and Errors in English. In Public Speaking, Carnegie
also included examples of how some historical figures like
Benjamin Franklin prepared speeches, and he supplemented those
with examples of the speech preparation of contemporary public
figures like industrialist Charles Schwab, publisher B. C. Forbes,
and President Woodrow Wilson. Carnegie’s inspirational profiles
of famous people became another means of supporting himself
in those days, and in 1934 he published a collection called Little
Known Facts about Well Known People.3
 smile S 107
In the mid-1930s, Carnegie was approached by an editor at
Simon & Schuster to put together a new book based on his lec-
tures on public speaking. The result blended different perspectives,
presenting his ideas with the enthusiastic confidence of the sales-
man, the authority of a textbook, and the firsthand anecdotes of
the celebrity profile. The original How to Win Friends and Influence
People was made up of five sections, covering human nature and
rules for dealing with people, as well as a section on letter writ-
ing, which was dropped in later editions. It became a national
bestseller by providing advice on overcoming anxiety together
with advice on dealing with people—what today we call emo-
tional intelligence. Chapters focused on such topics as “Techniques
for Handling People,” “Six Ways to Make People Like You,” and
“Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking.” Carnegie
advocated giving people a sense of importance by praising them,
avoiding arguments, being courteous, and attending to the needs
and interests of others. He emphasized such techniques as letting
others take ownership of new ideas, supervising by providing indi-
rect criticism, and beginning a sales talk with questions that a per-
son will answer “yes” to. And, he said, you should always smile.
Under Victor Schwab’s watchful eye, the ad campaign for
Carnegie’s course drew on the same model of social anxiety and
financial success as Cody’s did.The early ads for How to Win Friends
and Influence People, for example, emphasized the financial value of
interpersonal skills.They began this way: “John D. Rockefeller, Sr.,
once said ‘The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a com-
modity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than
for any other under the sun.’” Other ads used the familiar patent
medicine approach: they identified the ailment of an inferiority
complex and offered a cure. One before-and-after story, for exam-
ple, told readers about a would-be salesman whose fear of public
speaking was cured when he took a Dale Carnegie Course.4
Dale Carnegie also had a flair for public relations that Sherwin
Cody did not. While Cody became famous through endurance,
108 S do you make these mistakes in english?

Consider the Case of Michael O’Neil

Michael O’Neil lives in New York City. He first got a job as a

mechanic, then as a chauffeur.
When he got married, he needed more money. So he tried to
sell automobile trucks. But he was a terrible flop. He suffered from
an inferiority complex that was eating his heart out.
On his way to see any prospect, he broke out into a cold sweat.
Then, before he could get up enough courage to open the door,
he often had to walk up and down in front of an office half a
dozen times.
When he finally got in, he would invariably find himself antag-
onizing, arguing. Then he would get kicked out never knowing
quite why.
He was such a failure he decided to go back to working in a
machine shop. Then one day he received a letter inviting him to
attend the opening session of a Dale Carnegie course.

from his many publications and his volume of print advertising,

Carnegie took a different, more media-savvy approach. His name
was originally spelled Carnagey, but when he rented office space
in New York’s Carnegie Hall, he adopted the spelling Carnegie.
He was also able to cultivate a radio presence because of his
friendship with the broadcaster Lowell Thomas, for whom he had
once worked. Carnegie also continued to interview the rich and
famous for his books and articles, and with the success of How to
Win Friends and Influence People, he became a celebrity himself.
Carnegie’s business model differed from Cody’s as well. Cody’s
school operated from a central headquarters in Rochester, which
kept track of students, answered inquiries, mailed course mate-
rial and books, and billed for tuition. Carnegie adopted a licens-
ing system for his face-to-face course in 1944 that enabled many
of his graduates to teach and market his course. He adopted a
 smile S 109
standardized curriculum of conversational and group techniques
together with class sessions in which students gave short presenta-
tions from their own experiences. Licensing and standardization
also paved the way for the course to continue after Carnegie’s
death. Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., was formed in 1954, and
after Carnegie’s death in 1955 it was run by Carnegie’s widow
Dorothy, who headed the company until her death in 1998.While
we no longer see print ads for How to Win Friends and Influence
People, the present-day Dale Carnegie course is thriving.

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESS

Carnegie’s and Cody’s courses differed in another, more funda-
mental way, in that they emphasized different qualities needed
for success. To appreciate the differences fully, we must take a
broader look at success rhetoric in America and ways in which
the two writers drew on traditional and emerging themes related
to self-improvement. Success and self-improvement writing in
America has to do with wealth, work, and worth, and its histori-
ans have often noted how the themes of religion, character, and
personality enter into the genre. Cotton Mather, the influential
New England Puritan, first set the tone for colonial success lit-
erature with his view that everyone had two callings—a religious
calling based on service to God and a personal calling to be use-
ful to one’s neighbors. In Mather’s view, the two callings should
be balanced, and if they were, individuals would be both hard-
working and generous. In some ways, Benjamin Franklin was
both Mather and anti-Mather. Franklin, born four decades after
Mather, promoted a version of success that fit his Pennsylvania
Quakerism. In The Way to Wealth, Advice to a Young Tradesmen,
and his Autobiography, Franklin emphasized such qualities of char-
acter as hard work and thrift, writing that “The way to wealth, if
you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly
on two words; industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor
110 S do you make these mistakes in english?
money, but make the best use of both.”5 Like Mather, Franklin
saw work as a means of moral improvement and wealth as a means
to an end. But for Franklin, the end goal was not just religious but
individualistic as well. Material success permitted the freedom to
practice self-improvement by study, conversation, and reading,
and the opportunity to improve the condition of others by phi-
lanthropy and good works.
Later success and self-improvement rhetoric would often
reflect the influence of Franklin’s humanitarianism and Mather’s
religiosity, tending in style more toward Franklin’s avuncular
approach than Mather’s fire and brimstone. Franklin’s approach
was spread through schoolbooks, conduct manuals, and novels.
William H. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers taught thrift and work and
made the connection between work, wealth, usefulness, and hap-
piness. Henry Ward Beecher’s Lectures to Young Men promoted the
values of work and wealth, and he warned of the many moral pit-
falls along the road to success. And Horatio Alger, with his scores
of books about boys overcoming adversity, defined a literary genre
of young adult success rhetoric that remained popular through
World War I. Alger’s literary formula involved showing how
character qualities of thrift and work would enable young men
to compete, grow wealthy, and use their wealth to serve others
(Sherwin Cody’s In the Heart of the Hills was a typical Alger-style
tale). Religious interpretations of success and character were also
spread through churches. Preachers like Russell H. Conwell, the
Baptist minister whose “Acres of Diamonds” speech was popular
on the lecture circuit for almost 50 years, claimed that it was a
Christian duty to become rich and to put wealth to good use.6
For Conwell, poverty was a character flaw.
The concentration of wealth in the late nineteenth century also
prompted men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Sr.,
to reflect publicly on the stewardship of wealth and its relation to
character. Carnegie’s famous 1889 essay “Wealth” acknowledged
the social friction caused by industrial progress and maintained
 smile S 111
that the rich had an obligation to give their money away for the
good of the poor. Carnegie even argued for a graduated income
tax, writing that “Men who continue hoarding great sums all their
lives . . . should be made to feel that the community, in the form
of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share.”7 John D.
Rockefeller, too, subscribed to a version of Carnegie’s gospel of
wealth, seeing “the power to make money [as] a gift from God to
be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of
mankind.”8 Carnegie and Rockefeller began their lives in relative
poverty, and as they promoted the Horatio Alger ethic of wealth
and stewardship through work, thrift, and piety, they created a
powerful cultural image of what success meant.
At the same time, the changing nature of work generated new
ideas about the traits of workers and managers. As work shifted
from individual agricultural production or craftsmanship to labor
in a factory or bureaucracy, managers began to think about work-
ers’ character in terms of dedication to assigned tasks.This attitude
was exemplified by Elbert Hubbard’s famous story “A Message to
Garcia,” which celebrates a solider who carries out a difficult mis-
sion without question or complaint (in that case, getting a message
to General Calixto García, the leader of the Cuban insurgents in
1898). Hubbard’s story became widely used as a motivational mes-
sage to employees, promoting and reinforcing the qualities that
American business valued at the time. The character of managers
and independent businessmen, in turn, was increasingly defined
by the notion of service. Since not everyone could become a
steward of great wealth like Carnegie or Rockefeller, the next best
justification of business was in service. Service encompassed two
ideas—adding value commercially by serving customers well, and
adding value socially by improving public welfare and doing other
good works. The establishment of business service organizations
such as the Rotarians, the Lions, and the Kiwanis in the period
from 1905 to 1917 reflected this second outlook on success as ser-
vice to the common good.9 Cody, for example, subscribed to the
112 S do you make these mistakes in english?
service ethic of American business and to the goal of providing
“personal service” that had “true value.”10
This model of success was challenged by novel ideas which
suggested alternatives to industriousness, thrift, and service. One
came from the New Thought religious movement of the late 1800s,
which adapted Christian mysticism, Buddhism, and American
transcendentalism. New Thoughters believed that the divine spirit
was everywhere as a universal mind and that mind power was the
only real power in the world. Tapping mind power, they believed,
was the means to success, health, and happiness, and New Thought
promoted positive thinking, affirmation, autosuggestion, and visu-
alization in the place of hard work, thrift, and service.
While New Thought was suggesting that all minds were con-
nected, the science of psychology was providing insight from
another direction by helping to explain the attitudes and behav-
iors of other minds. William James had promoted the idea of
habit as underlying behavior, and applied psychologists like Harry
Overstreet and Walter Dill Scott were suggesting ways that psy-
chology could be applied in advertising and sales to influence
people’s hopes, desires, and actions. In his 1926 book Influencing
Human Behavior, for example, Overstreet explained that effective
speaking, writing, and persuasion began from the proposition that
“What we attend to controls our behavior. What we can get oth-
ers to attend to controls their behavior,” and he offered a variety
of practical techniques for getting others to attend to a message.11
From the applied psychologist’s viewpoint, the problem of suc-
cess was not (or not just) managing and improving oneself, it was
dealing with other people. Mind power and psychological under-
standing soon made their way into the success literature. Historian
Warren Susman has described how business advice manuals
changed their focus from building character to developing per-
sonality. As one example, he points to two books by Orison Swett
Marden, the founder of Success magazine, which in the course of
two decades shifted from mental and moral traits to charm, poise,
 smile S 113
and likeability.12 Marden’s 1899 volume was Character:The Greatest
Thing in the World; his 1921 book was titled Masterful Personality.
A third factor affecting the literature of success was the shifting
nature of work itself. As twentieth-century work became more
situated in large organizations and hierarchies, the conditions for
success increasingly involved matters of fitting in and understand-
ing others rather than working hard and understanding oneself.
By the 1950s, sociologists like C. Wright Mills and William H.
Whyte were talking about organizational advancement in terms
of one’s ability to fit socially, to manage others, and to be man-
aged. Looking specifically at success literature, they found a shift
away from individual initiative, hard work, and efficiency. In The
Organization Man, Whyte wrote that “A half-century ago the
usual self-improvement book bore down heavily on the theme
of individual effort to surmount obstacles.” By the 1950s, how-
ever, “what they tell you to do is to adjust to the situation rather
than change it.” Similarly, in White Collar, Mills found that the
old entrepreneurial model of success “linked with the sober per-
sonal virtues” of perseverance, work, and thrift was giving way
to a pattern of success based on “the climb within and between
prearranged hierarchies.”13
Factors like New Thought, applied business psychology, and
the white-collar mindset were coming together in new approaches
to success in the twentieth century, many of which involved skills
of understanding and influencing people, organizations and orga-
nizational forces. Where do Carnegie and Cody fit in this evolu-
tion? How to Win Friends and Influence People was the top-selling
nonfiction book in 1937, and it is often seen as a watershed event
signaling a new focus on personality and interpersonal communi-
cation.14 Of course, many success, self-improvement, and etiquette
works touched on both character and personality, so we should
not think of Carnegie’s book as marking a sudden shift in success
rhetoric from character to personality. Writers like Carnegie and
Cody had a toolbox of ideas and images to draw on, and we can
114 S do you make these mistakes in english?
look at them not as opposites but rather in terms of their relative
focus on certain themes.
Both were grounded in the techniques of business writing,
practical teaching, and sales, though with different emphases. The
100% Self-correcting Course arose from Cody’s work as a teacher of
letter writing and copywriting rather than public speaking. While
he and Carnegie drew on the same ideas about sales psychol-
ogy, Cody based his psychology in literature as a guide to human
reactions, desires, and motivations. Carnegie’s sales experience, on
the other hand, was face-to-face, and his teaching experience was
in terms of classroom work on speech, poise, and presence. His
psychological advice was framed in terms of anecdotes from his
interviews and personal contacts.
The two approaches reflect a written versus spoken emphasis
in other ways. Cody described himself as interested in painting pic-
tures with words, and his perspective on letter writing and adver-
tising was one of mass communication. Carnegie, on the other
hand, aimed at solving “the biggest problem you face,” which was
“dealing with people.”15 Carnegie’s book focused on motivating
people by building personal relationships, and so his perspective
was that of interpersonal communication; he emphasized overcom-
ing the anxiety of speaking, practical negotiation, and motivating
and managing others. Cody’s perspective in the 100% Self-correcting
Course was largely technical advice aimed at meeting the expecta-
tions of correct (linguistic) behavior. This was evident in another
way in Cody’s success book Business Practices Up to Date, which
was subtitled How to Be a Private Secretary and which explained
how to be a good employee.
As a success writer, Cody seemed more firmly rooted in the
camp of character than Carnegie was. Cody’s 1913 Principles of
Success in Business discussed efficiency topics such as how to
receive and give supervision for maximum effect, but he also
included a section on “positive personal qualities” for workers.
Here he stressed “clear and careful thinking” as an employee’s
 smile S 115
most important quality but also identified good health (arising
from sleep, diet, exercise, cleanliness, and fresh air) and reliability.
Cody’s focus on reason, health, and reliability falls squarely in the
character approach to success. He also included a short section
on developing a pleasing personality in his success advice, but his
advice on personality is stated in terms of service: “There is only
one way to develop a pleasing personality,” Cody writes, “and that
is to set the mind steadfastly on hope, courage, helpfulness to oth-
ers who especially need help (helping those who don’t need help
is sycophancy).” Carnegie’s discussion of helpfulness was more
instrumental. Carnegie described helpfulness in terms of “wants”
rather than “needs,” saying that “the only way to influence other
people is to talk about what they want and show them how to
get it.”16 Describing a university study of business leaders atti-
tudes, Carnegie reported that “85% [of financial success] is due to
skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead
people.” Cody had summarized the same report by saying that
“85% of success in any field of business is due not to superior busi-
ness knowledge—but to superior ability in influencing others. Since
words are the tools we use to accomplish this, how vital it is that
you make a masterly command of English YOURS!”17
Both Cody and Carnegie were certainly aware of mind power
literature. Cody hinted at the power of positive thinking, writ-
ing that “everyone must admit that setting the mind resolutely
on cheerfulness and success is the greatest possible step toward
getting them.”18 There are stronger elements of New Thought
in Carnegie’s work, including the principle of attracting posi-
tive results with positive behavior. And in his later book How to
Stop Worrying and Start Living, Carnegie described the “magic
of thought” and wrote that “the longer I live the more deeply
I am convinced of the tremendous power of thought. . . . I know
that men and women can banish worry, fear and transform their
lives by changing their thoughts. I know! I know!! I know!!!”19
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, however, Carnegie’s
116 S do you make these mistakes in english?
exposition and principles were psychological, instrumental, and
transactional, citing psychologists like William James and Harry
Overstreet rather than mind power proponents.20 His instrumen-
talism was often mocked by critics (like Sinclair Lewis, who saw
the book as teaching people “how to smile and bob and pretend
to be interested in people’s hobbies so that you might screw them
out of things”).21 But Carnegie believed that by showing inter-
est in others, you became interested in them, and he felt that by
understanding human relations and getting along with people, you
became not just a better manager of people but more confident,
sincere, and happy. He had in mind a “New Way of Life” in which
people were not merely pretending to be interested in others but
changed their personalities to become genuinely interested.22
Over the years, Carnegie’s emphasis shifted from techniques of
public speaking to developing an influential personality to con-
quering anxiety and worry.23 Carnegie’s trajectory—from skill-
building to leadership to happiness—recapitulated in some ways
the trajectory of self-improvement literature from self-education
to self-help.24 Cody’s approach, on the other hand, was situated in
that older tradition of correctness, canon, and work, and his touch-
stone seems to have been the Harvard Classics. Cody’s course and
success advice tied the grammatical and literary tradition to busi-
ness success and personal fulfillment. Sociologist Richard Huber
summarized the character and personality approaches by suggest-
ing that “The problem for the character ethic was not people, but
the individual’s own inner resources,” while for the personality
ethic “the big obstacles were not in the individual himself . . . , but
in the responses of other people.”25 Huber’s summary encapsulates
the difference between Cody’s and Carnegie’s emphases as well.
 twelve

Language, Culture, and

Anxiety

zC ody’s course was a great success in the 1920s

and 1930s, and it continued strong into the 1940s.
His ads periodically updated the number of students served,
which grew to 50,000 in 1928, 100,000 in 1937, and 150,000 in
1950. Students paid about $30 for the course materials, so we can
estimate the gross annual revenue from 1928 to 1937 as averag-
ing $160,000 per year and the revenues from 1938 to 1950 as
averaging $125,000 per year.1 Even accounting for overhead costs
associated with the Rochester operation, Cody was making a
good income from the 100% Self-correcting Course.
We have already discussed some of the factors that contrib-
uted to the success of the course: the emergence of the advertising
industry and the importance of books and magazines. The growth
of correspondence education also played a role, and we will look
at that in Chapter Fourteen. But the most important condition
underlying Cody’s success was the long-standing anxiety about
correctness in language. As we have seen, Cody’s ads appealed
directly to insecurity about language and culture and to the social
and economic benefit of correct behavior. The background of these
linguistic insecurities is our point of departure in this chapter.
118 S do you make these mistakes in english?
The nature of educated speech and correct writing has
always been a concern of Americans. In colonial times, writers
like Franklin argued that the English of America was not up to
the standards of British cultural authorities. Chief among these
authorities was Bishop Robert Lowth, one of a group of English
writers who attempted to codify grammar in order to slow lan-
guage change. Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar, first
published in 1762, critiqued usage and promoted the method of
teaching by false syntax—that is of teaching by citing examples of
errors. Other American writers, such as Thomas Jefferson, resisted
English cultural authorities like Lowth. Jefferson instead favored
the approach of Joseph Priestly, who proposed to resolve ques-
tions of grammar by attention to educated usage and by extension
of the regularities already existing in the language. In embracing
language change, Jefferson envisioned the American language as a
social and moral force that would recognize innovation and that
would codify populist rather than privileged usage. He was joined
in this preference by Noah Webster, who felt that a uniform
American language would promote a national identity. Webster
was critical of Lowth and of the English lexicographer Samuel
Johnson as well, and he was sympathetic to early nineteenth-
century critics who saw them as smothering Anglo-Saxon lan-
guage traditions with Latinate and French influences.2
Throughout the nineteenth century, language issues remained
important in the United States. Westward expansion meant that
other parts of the country defined themselves in relation to the
cultural centers of the East. In this expansion, language was a
means of social status, and books codified and promoted linguis-
tic information. Authoritative language increasingly came to be
that which was approved by dictionary-makers and grammarians.
And while books on grammar and usage had an American flavor
and used American spellings, they were still often largely based
on the tradition established by Lowth. Lowth’s works themselves
were not intended for widespread school use, but both his rules
 language, culture, and anxiety S 119
and methods were soon adapted by popularizers such as Lindley
Murray, one of the best-selling authors of his time, whose gram-
mar books sold over sixteen million copies.
Grammars and dictionaries had a continually strong mar-
ket, but the advance of book learning in the United States in the
nineteenth century was double-edged. As historian Kenneth Cmiel
has emphasized, schooling and the sale of home dictionaries and
grammars spread the authority of linguistic refinement but under-
mined that authority at the same time. As more people became
familiar with the prescriptions of traditional grammar, the variance
of their everyday speech from those prescriptions became apparent.
People naturally wondered what was so wrong with the way they
talked, and the emphasis on politely literary English was increasingly
associated with pretentiousness and elitism.3 The tendency toward
anti-elitism can be illustrated by reaction to the language style of
Andrew Jackson, who was perhaps the first American president to
embody the colloquial style. By the time he was president, Jackson
could shift his style from informal to refined depending on his audi-
ence. But as linguist Allan Metcalf notes, Jackson was portrayed by
his political opponents as a poor speaker and writer. John Quincy
Adams, Jackson’s rival for the presidency in 1824 and 1828, referred
to him as “a barbarian who cannot write a sentence of grammar
and can hardly spell his own name.” The focus on Adams’s greater
formal education, however, largely backfired. Metcalf reports the
story of a farmer who was persuaded by an Adams supporter that
Adams was the better-educated candidate. The farmer nevertheless
declared he would vote for Jackson, saying “I never found a diction-
ary man that wasn’t half a fool. I’m for Hickory, I believe.”4 True or
apocryphal, the anecdote illustrates the way in which refinement
was portrayed as foolish affectation rather than cultural authority,
and in the election of 1828, Adams carried the New England states
and Jackson most of the rest of the country.
In the United States, language was linked to the question of who
had the right to be heard and taken seriously. Fault lines existed
120 S do you make these mistakes in english?
between East and West, North and South, rural and cosmopolitan,
educated and unschooled, male and female, black and white,
and immigrant and native. Attention to language differences was
intensified by the spread of popular culture in the nineteenth cen-
tury. The growth of newspapers and the penny press, for example,
favored the tastes of a broad readership rather than a narrow one,
and it established a natural medium for colloquial speech and
diverse voices. Populist editor Horace Greeley aimed his New York
Tribune at a mass audience and was an early and vigorous defender
of the colloquial. His paper and his own editorials were noted
both for slang and for common, direct language. The competing
New York Times criticized Greeley’s paper by writing that “We see
no reason why the language of a newspaper should be differ-
ent from the language of decent society, from the language used
by gentlemen in their daily intercourse.”5 American fiction was
coming into its own as well, and writers like Charles F. Browne,
George Washington Harris, and of course Mark Twain used slang
and dialect stylistically. In his essay “Concerning the American
Language,” Twain wrote that standards of language could no lon-
ger come from “that little corner called New England” and that
a nation’s language “is not simply a manner of speech obtaining
among the educated handful, the manner obtaining among the
vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.”6
The debate about usage was also evident in the marketing of
dictionaries, which were increasingly popular among the grow-
ing professional class and in schools. The country’s best-known
lexicographer, Noah Webster, was perceived by many as a lin-
guistic radical for his idiosyncrasies of spelling and etymology. By
mid-century, Webster’s dictionary saw stiff competition from The
Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language published
in 1846 by Joseph Worcester, a one-time employee and long-time
rival.7 Eventually the Webster camp prevailed, largely by winning
school contracts in the East and later in the Midwest. As new
editions of Webster’s and Worcester’s dictionaries appeared, their
 language, culture, and anxiety S 121
differences grew smaller. But for several years, as the rival camps
battled for market share, partisan reviews appeared in the national
press. The reviews are interesting not so much in determining
which dictionary was better, but in what the public expected.
A dictionary was seen as a conservative text, preserving the form
of language in order to ensure civil behavior. As The New York
Times wrote in 1860:
There are thousands of words used colloquially, or in newspapers,
or belonging to the repository of slang, whose incorporations in
work claiming to be arbiter elegantiarum of speech would be either
needless or positively objectionable.8

The spread westward also created new cultural images of coarse

cowboy language, and frontier teachers and ministers took up the
challenge of bringing Eastern values westward.William Chauncey
Fowler, a Webster son-in-law, warned in his 1868 English Grammar
that “As our countrymen are spreading westward across the con-
tinent, and are brought into contact with other races, and adopt
new modes of thought, there is some danger that, in the use of
their liberty, they may break loose from the laws of the English
language, and become marked not only by one, but by a thousand
Shibboleths.”9 Back in the East, cities were perceived as problem
areas, and urban dialect was criticized by writers like Jacob Riis
as a multiethnic garble and a source of the careless speech of the
native working class.10 The speech of rural youths, many of whom
had migrated to cities and developed new usage habits, also raised
concerns, as did the speech of foreigners, workers, businessmen, and
the middle class, all of which supposedly showed signs of declining
intellectual and moral standards. Writers and scholars took up the
cause of defending refined speech in newspaper articles, lectures,
and books. For example, George Perkins Marsh’s Lectures on the
English Language, published in 1860, argued that popular literature
had grievously injured the language and morals of the country
and that “To pillory such offenses, to point out their absurdity,
122 S do you make these mistakes in english?
to detect and expose the moral obliquity which too often lurks
beneath them, is the sacred duty of every scholar.”11 In a similar
vein, language purist Edward Gould collected his newspaper and
magazine essays as the book Good English in 1867, especially tar-
geting misused words. Richard Grant White’s popular 1870 book
Words and Their Uses also focused on supposedly misused words
such as donate and jeopardize.12 And William Matthews published
Words, Their Use and Abuse in 1876, condemning “all inaccuracies
of speech” and adding the patriotic warning that “the corrupter of
a language stabs straight at the very heart of his country.”13 While
Marsh, Gould, White, and Matthews defended refined speech
against supposed grammatical and moral corruption, others were
developing practical tools for guiding and correcting writers and
journalists. In 1877 William Cullen Bryant published his Index
Expurgatorius, a list of incorrect and vulgar words not to be used
in his paper. And Thomas Embly Osmun, using the pseudonym
Alfred Ayres, published The Verbalist in 1881, the first alphabetical
dictionary of usage.
These writers were a learned group. Marsh was a diplomat,
Whig congressman, and early environmentalist. Gould was a
writer and translator. White was a Shakespeare scholar, journalist,
and musician, and Matthews had been a professor of rhetoric at
the University of Chicago. Bryant was a poet and editor-in-chief
of the New York Evening Post, and Osmun was writer on ortho-
epy, elocution, and manners as well as grammar. They wrote for
the general readers whose language, the authors believed, most
needed monitoring and correction, and the period from 1880
to 1900 saw over 100 manuals of usage published in the United
States. As Kenneth Cmiel notes, “Verbal critics identified particu-
lar errors with policemen, maids, waiters, clerks, shopkeepers in
the Bowery, entrepreneurs in general, rural schoolteachers (male),
farmers, wives of farmers, popular editors, labor leaders, politi-
cians, the young of virtually every social class, and the nouveau
riche both male and female.”14
 language, culture, and anxiety S 123
Grammar and usage were moving from the schoolhouse to
the general public and the workplace, guided by a literary elite.
However as the nation and the prosperity of the middle class grew,
correct speech could no longer be seen as that of a homoge-
neous refined class. The best communicators would be those, like
Jackson and Lincoln, who were comfortable with both the refined
and the colloquial and who could shift among styles appropriate
to audience and purpose. As society became more complex and
heterogeneous, communication and commerce would involve
interactions across lines of class, geography, race, and gender. By
the twentieth century, the colloquial was emerging as the norm
for the popular press, magazines, business communication, and
advertising. These verbal critics, however, would both lose and win
their battle. Even as practical language was gaining new authority
in publishing, advertising, and political speech, the verbal criti-
cism of nineteenth-century writers like Marsh and White would
remain a touchstone, contrasting a culture of refinement with
a mass culture. In 1905, for example, Henry James condemned
American speech, blaming common schools and newspapers
which were “excellent for diffusion, for vulgarization, [and] for
simplification” . . . and “quite below the mark for discrimination
and selection, for those finer offices of vigilance and criticism.”15
In dictionaries, usage books, and newspapers, there was an ongo-
ing tension between refinement and populism. Elegant language
was portrayed by its advocates as having the potential to transform
the common person into someone of learning. Colloquial lan-
guage, on the other hand, was viewed by its advocates as establish-
ing bonds of communication among real people in a world with
practical concerns.
This tension between refinement and populism is a classic
problem of usage, and it was one that Sherwin Cody had to con-
tend with as he began to teach English usage. Cody recognized
that language was important to anyone wishing to be distinguished
from the unrefined masses, and he emphasized this when he noted
124 S do you make these mistakes in english?
to potential students that they would “gain a mark of breed-
ing which will persist in you as long as you live.”16 At the same
time, Cody’s work in advertising and business writing led him to
favor the colloquial style and to pronounce that “traditional rules
of rhetoric are dead, useless baggage when it comes to getting
practical results.”17
The divide between the refined and popular was not unique
to language, of course. As we have seen, it existed in literature, and
the same distinction between popular and refined can be found
in the fine and performing arts. As historian Lawrence Levine
has emphasized, for much of the nineteenth century the arts in
America blended popular and refined themes. Levine notes that,
with little to choose from, elite and common audiences attended
the same cultural events, and audiences often responded to plays
and concerts in much the same way that mass audiences respond
to sporting events today—by cheering, booing, singing along, and
occasionally throwing things at performers. In time, however, the
appreciation of refined culture became professionalized by elite
interpreters in the same way that language had been a century
earlier. Levine writes that “Just as Shakespeare was increasingly
portrayed as a complex writer whom readers could comprehend
only if they armed themselves with a plethora of study aids, so too
was the sophistication and difficulty of all aspects of culture driven
home continually.”18 He sees the division of the arts into high and
low as part of a larger “sacralization of culture” which allowed
their signifying and transformative aspects to be emphasized.19
High and low culture provided a way of identifying people by
their choices of entertainment and their behavior in theatres, con-
cert halls, museums, and libraries. But there was also the potential
for social transformation: exposure to book culture, the arts, and
refined language could increase the sensitivity and the interests of
the common people.
For many, Cody was a guide in this social transformation. In
an age in which people felt increasingly pressed to be educated
 language, culture, and anxiety S 125

figure 12.1. A Cody ad stressing anxiety.

and aware of both correct language and the world of books, Cody
offered himself as a modern, practical guide. He did not seek to
convert readers into highbrows, but he could help them to avoid
being seen as lowbrows with his businesslike approach to language
and literature. He offered a transformative introduction for the
uneducated and an efficient refresher for the more cosmopolitan.
 thirteen

Linguistics and the

New Rhetoric

zS herwin Cody was not the only one thinking

about the English language in new ways, of course.
Language had been professionalized much earlier than art and
culture, by Lowth, Murray, and others, and by the late nineteenth
century scholars were rethinking the prescriptive tradition. The
frontiers of knowledge were expanding in nearly all fields. New
developments were coming forward in the sciences due to the
work of Darwin, Wallace, Mendel, and others, and in psychology
and philosophy due to the work of people like William James,
Charles Peirce, and Sigmund Freud. And American and European
linguistics was establishing a new foundation as well. In 1786, Sir
William Jones, a British jurist living in India, had sparked inter-
est in the comparative histories of languages with the publication
of his book The Sanscrit Language. Scholars began to understand
language change as Jakob Grimm, Karl Verner, and others for-
mulated correspondences among related languages, and work on
comparative linguistics uncovered the vast Indo-European family
tree which linked many of the languages of Europe and the East.
Linguists started to think about change as a feature of con-
temporary languages as well. By the late 1800s, thinkers like
 linguistics and the new rhetoric S 127
Ferdinand de Saussure and Max Müller in Europe and William
Dwight Whitney in the United States were beginning to treat
language as a system of social signs, and they were establishing
the groundwork for a science of language that would stand as its
own discipline. The linguistics of Saussure, Müller, and Whitney
diverged from both literature and rhetoric, and the three fields
came to have quite different approaches to language. While some
literary scholars, such as Whitney’s student Thomas Lounsbury,
did sophisticated work in both linguistics and literature, many
others labored under the oversimplifications of usage critics who
saw the language as steadily decaying. Such critics, as noted in
the preceding chapter, were committed to using and preserving
the most refined literary language, and they tended to see correct
language, logical thought, serious literature, and proper morality
as going together. The new discipline of linguistics had a more
complicated and democratic understanding of language variation.
The lexicographic, folklore, and dialect study traditions that influ-
enced linguistics recognized creative influences outside of refined
literature. These traditions led linguists to see different types of
language as being legitimately suited to different functions. In
America, Whitney pioneered a view of correctness as a matter of
fashion rather than authoritative tradition. His 1867 Language and
the Study of Language and later works explained the primacy of
speech over writing, the naturalness of language change, the rela-
tivism of usage, and the descriptive role of the grammarian.1 Early
twentieth-century educators like George Philip Krapp, Sterling
A. Leonard, and Fred Newton Scott developed these views fur-
ther and brought the idea of a new science of language to teacher
training in the English language arts.
Promoting linguistics among teachers was a slow and difficult
task, however. Many schools taught grammar using the methods
of Lowth and Murray, and teachers were influenced by the still
popular Richard Grant White and William Matthews, whose ideas
were reiterated by such cultural authorities as Henry James. At the
128 S do you make these mistakes in english?
beginning of the twentieth century, schools stressed traditional
grammar and elocution. In fact, when an Alabama teacher estab-
lished Better Speech Week in 1916, proper pronunciation became a
national phenomenon in schools. Better Speech Week even included
a pledge linking pronunciation and patriotism and echoing con-
cerns about un-American influences:
I love the United States of America. I love my country’s flag.
I love my country’s language. I promise: That I will not dishonor
my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllable of words. That
I will say a good American “yes” and “no” in place of an Indian
grunt “um-hum” and “nup-um” or a foreign “ya” or “yeh” and
“nope.” That I will do my best to improve American speech
by avoiding loud rough tones, by enunciating distinctly, and by
speaking pleasantly, clearly and sincerely.2

Much of the early twentieth-century debate on linguistics in

English education took place in the National Council of Teachers
of English (known by the acronym NCTE). Its English Journal
debuted in 1912 with an emphasis on grammatical terminol-
ogy and on proper—British—pronunciation. Most writers for
the Journal, and doubtless many readers as well, thought that a
uniform style of correct grammar and pronunciation was best
taught through drills and the memorization of rules. A minor-
ity, however, favored tolerance of dialect and variation, seeing
American speech as both natural and vigorous, and this minor-
ity pointed out that textbook grammar rules were very often at
odds with actual educated usage. In 1917 Fred Newton Scott pro-
vided a defense of American speech as opposed to British. In 1918
George Philip Krapp discussed unrealistic aspirations for speech,
and Sterling Leonard critiqued “Old Purist Junk.”3 Scott, Krapp,
and Leonard advocated research on actual usage as the means of
developing standards of speech and writing, rather than reliance
on drills of eighteenth century prescriptions. But linguistics was
slow to take hold.When Ella Heaton Pope argued in a 1919 article
 linguistics and the new rhetoric S 129
for linguistics to be a required subject in college and high school,
much of her English Journal article had to be devoted to simply
defining what linguistics was.4
The traditionalist viewpoint and the new scientific one aroused
considerable debate among English educators. At first prescrip-
tivism was widely favored, and from 1920 to 1923 articles in favor
of traditional approaches led by about four to one.5 However,
the progressives were undeterred, and the 1920s saw a number of
statistical studies of actual usage, by Leonard, Charles Fries, and
others, as well as the completion in England of the New English
Dictionary (now called the Oxford English Dictionary), a work based
on historical principles rather than prescriptive ones. By 1929, the
NCTE Committee on Language Courses had gotten to the point
of recommending training in phonetics, the history of English,
and modern linguistics.
Although proponents of traditionalism have sometimes por-
trayed linguists as advocating that one usage is as good as another,
this wasn’t the case at all. Krapp, for example, argued that good
English “has to do with the effective applications of language,
especially with the bond of union between the speaker or writer
and the rest of the world.”6 And Leonard advocated that gram-
mar instruction should follow the usage of educated speakers
rather than of dated authorities, and thus should change as edu-
cated speakers changed their habits. In order to be authoritative
about good English, Krapp and Leonard argued, it was necessary
to understand actual usage. Sherwin Cody was a frequent con-
tributor to the English Journal in its first decade, and though he
did not participate in linguistic debates, he was sympathetic to
the approach of linguists. In his 1912 English Journal article on
“Scientific Principles in the Teaching of Composition,” Cody
had approvingly cited Thomas Lounsbury’s article “Compulsory
Composition in Colleges,” which had explained that “grammar is
nothing but the generalization of the facts of utterance, so rhetoric
is nothing but the generalization of the facts of style.”7 Cody also
130 S do you make these mistakes in english?
cited Krapp, Leonard, and British phonetician Daniel Jones later
in The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language. There
Cody wrote that while he had already recognized the impor-
tance of the colloquial standard in the 1903 edition of The Art of
Writing and Speaking the English Language, Leonard had shown the
colloquial to be endorsed by the “highest authorities,” including
Otto Jespersen, C. T. Onions, and Krapp, as well as by authors like
Booth Tarkington and H. G. Wells and editors like H. L. Mencken
and William Allen White.8
Cody was no theoretician, of course, but his sentiments on
language and grammar ran parallel to those of the modern lin-
guists. He understood the standard language to be both a social
construct and a social necessity. In Commercial Tests and How to Use
Them, for example, he wrote that businesses expect employees
to follow fashion in language as well as clothing. One’s English
should be “correct without attracting attention, and so win the
approval of educated people without raising the suspicions of the
uneducated.”9 In The New Art, Cody commented further on how
this viewpoint was a break from the past:
The standard of correct English usage has changed slowly but
steadily since the opening of the twentieth century. In times past,
the educational world has felt a necessity for teaching and trying
to maintain the formal literary standard, according to which many
common colloquial expressions are condemned . . . [In modern
times, however, it] is infinitely more important . . . to know what
good colloquial usage is than what so-called formal literary usage
ought to be. The ordinary person is no longer misled into sup-
posing that his everyday speech should conform to the rules of
literary standards.10

Like progressive linguists, Cody recognized the value of actual

usage and criticized the practices of the schools. His “Scientific
Principles in the Teaching of Composition” argued that “with
a false hypercriticism, we are actually teaching innumerable
 linguistics and the new rhetoric S 131
errors—we are condemning as improprieties the fundamental idi-
oms of the language.”11 Cody held to this position throughout his
life, reiterating it in his advertisements and (32 years later) in his
Coaching Children in English. The National Council of Teachers of
English came to a similar conclusion, and by 1936 its Curriculum
Committee recommended that the teaching of grammar apart from
writing be discontinued.12 By the 1960s, many classroom educators
had come to this conclusion as well.13 The criticism that teaching
grammar as a separate subject does not improve writing was some-
times misunderstood as the attempt to do away with grammar, but
this was not Cody’s intent or that of the linguists. Rather, the com-
mon goal of Cody and of Krapp, Scott, Leonard, and others was to
improve the teaching of grammar, not to eliminate it.
Though Cody embraced the colloquial standard, his publica-
tions were outside of the academic discourse written for teachers,
opinion leaders, and scholars. Cody wrote primarily for business-
men, for home-study English students, and later for parents, and
to the extent that he was noticed by linguists, he seems to have
been dismissed on a misreading of his approach as rigidly pre-
scriptive. In his 1918 condemnation of language purists, Sterling
Leonard offered a blanket condemnation of manuals of busi-
ness English, saying that “misconceived dicta about usage are to
be found in newspaper style sheets and in manuals of business
English—places above all others where one would naturally look
for guides to practically effective expression.”14 Many years later,
Robert A. Hall, Jr., in his book Linguistics and Your Language, took
Cody to task more explicitly. Hall began the chapter called “Right
vs.Wrong” with a mock Cody ad. He remarked that “those who talk
or advertise in this way and offer to cure our errors in pronuncia-
tion or grammar are simply appealing to our sense of insecurity
with regard to our own speech.”15 Hall viewed purism as socially
divisive, saw prescriptive rules as misguided, and advocated stan-
dardizing changes that had become widespread. At the same time,
however, he acknowledged the social reality of norms:
132 S do you make these mistakes in english?
Often enough, we may find we need to change our usage, simply
because social and financial success depends on some norm, and
our speech is one of the things that will be used as a norm. In
a situation like this, it is advisable to make the adjustment; but
let’s do so on the basis of the actual social acceptability of our
speech, not because of the fanciful prescriptions of some norma-
tive grammarian or other pseudo-authority.16

Hall’s linguistic realism accepted norms as fashion rather than

higher logic or morality. The irony of Hall’s criticism is that he
and Cody both disdained pedantic authority and shared a view of
language as a social and economic tool. In Commercial Tests and
How to Use Them, for example, Cody emphasized the utility of
language and its social differentiation, making the same point as
Hall in a more colorful fashion:
The person who is a good talker and a correct writer will often
pass for a college graduate, though only a high school gradu-
ate. On the other hand, what contempt people have for college
graduates (of whom there are all too many) who can’t write a
decent letter, or who talk like baseball players, or beauty shop
sales girls.17

FROM RHETORIC TO COMPOSITION

At the same time that modern linguistics was emerging, changes
were coming about in the related discipline of rhetoric as
well. In the early nineteenth century, rhetoric instruction was
largely defined by the model of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric
and Belles-Lettres. First published in 1783, Blair’s Lectures were
just that—a compilation of 47 lectures given to students at the
University of Edinburgh, ranging over such topics as “Taste,”
“The Sublime in Writing,” “Means of Improving Eloquence,”
and “Epic Poetry.”18
 linguistics and the new rhetoric S 133
Blair’s approach blended writing and oratory together as gov-
erned by taste, which he saw as arising from a natural capacity to
respond to beauty that could be trained by the study and appre-
ciation of literature. For Blair, moral and aesthetic processes had a
common foundation in proportion and balance, and morals and
aesthetics developed in tandem.19 But Blair also stressed conven-
tions of taste as a way to take part in educated discussion and to
avoid social stigma. In Lecture 1, for example, he wrote:
In an age when works of genius and literature are so frequently
the subjects of discourse, when every one erects himself into a
judge, and when we can hardly mingle in polite society without
bearing some share in such discussions; studies of this kind, it is
not to be doubted, will appear to derive part of their importance
from the use to which they may be applied in furnishing materi-
als for those fashionable topics of discourse, and thereby enabling
us to support a proper rank in social life.20

Blair’s lectures were successful not just for their advice on spoken
eloquence and written style but because they linked taste with
success. In the United States, editions of Blair’s book became
especially popular classroom texts, and many included recitation
questions appended after the lectures. Books like Blair’s were very
much aimed at those who already had a high degree of literacy
and an understanding of grammar. However, it gradually became
clear that rhetoric separate from practical composition instruction
did little to improve writing, and after the Civil War higher edu-
cation began to link rhetoric, grammar, and composition in new
ways.21 Harvard University in particular was a catalyst for change
under the presidency of our old friend Charles W. Eliot. As presi-
dent, Eliot was quick to point out the weakness of English stud-
ies, arguing in his 1869 inaugural address that “English should be
studied from the beginning of school life to the end of college
life,” and he maneuvered to place it on a par with instruction in
the classical languages.22 Harvard imposed an English composition
134 S do you make these mistakes in english?
entrance requirement on the entering class of 1874, requiring a
literary essay that demonstrated correctness in spelling, punctua-
tion, grammar, and expression. By 1882, Harvard had added a
requirement that applicants be able to correct “specimens of bad
English” given in the entrance examination.23 The intent of the
entrance examinations was to refocus preparatory schools and
high schools on correctness in writing, so that the university could
continue to devote itself to higher learning. The prep schools
and high schools accommodated by adding more essay writing
to their curricula, but many students—as many as half—still fell
short in the exams. In 1885 Harvard instituted a temporary course
that combined the reading of model essays with practice in theme
writing. The course was intended to be in existence only until
new students could meet the admissions standards, so it was not
given any more descriptive name than English A. Other univer-
sities followed Harvard’s lead, both in the exams and in adding
coursework, and by 1890 a freshman composition requirement
existed at most universities. However, remediation and the daily
theme approach were unpopular with Harvard faculty and, as the
idea spread, with English professors elsewhere.
One result was the development of a new university workforce
of graduate students and writing instructors to teach the freshman
courses that many professors of literature were—or claimed to
be—unable to teach. Another result involved the nature of the
course. Since the early freshman composition classes sometimes
had over 100 students, the pressure to grade on superficialities was
considerable. The task of grading many sets of short essays led to
the quickest means of grading possible: correcting errors in gram-
mar, usage, punctuation, and spelling.24 The emphasis on correct-
ness also affected how writing and grammar were taught: teaching
focused on forms and rules. There were of course rules for the
avoidance of error in expression—for the mechanics of writing.
There were rules for the organization and development of the
final product, the formulaic five-paragraph essay. As composition
 linguistics and the new rhetoric S 135
became broadly institutionalized, the kinds of essays assigned also
shifted from the abstract to the personal and to simple modes
of expression, such as narration, exposition, argument, and per-
suasion, rather than literary, historical, or philosophic essays. The
positive result of the new rhetoric was that the teaching of writing
involved more actual production of student essays. The negative
result was that it did so by emphasizing superficialities.
Cody understood the limits of teaching writing by correcting
errors, and he understood that marking essays was both time-
intensive for teachers and of limited effectiveness for students.
Other than his comments on his Amherst education and John
Genung’s traditional rhetoric text, Cody did not write about the
college curriculum, but in the English Journal, he set forth a pro-
posal for composition study in the high schools. There he argued
that the conventional rhetorical modes of exposition, narrative,
description, and argumentation were “so artificial as to be use-
less.”25 In their place, he advocated that the first year of high school
English begin with exercises modeling business correspondence.
This, he thought, would allow students to practice an easy form
of exposition stylistically connected to conversational English.
The second year’s work would involve “the rewriting of selec-
tions from the standard authors,” and the third year would focus
on condensing and adapting short fiction (for example, “changing
one of Maupassant’s stories from a Paris setting to an American
setting and character”).26 The senior year would shift back from
literature to business writing. Cody saw career preparation as the
legitimate basis of the curriculum, and his proposal blended the
vocational with the literary. Seeing the two as having common
goals, he argued:

No better modern practical application of argumentation can be

found than in the study of salesmanship and advertisement writ-
ing. America is a business nation. Our education is urged largely
as a good preparation for success in doing business. . . . It would be
136 S do you make these mistakes in english?
difficult to choose better work for the last year in the high school
than practical sales letter writing, oral salesmanship talks, and the
writing of careful advertisements . . . 27

As he developed his views on rhetoric and education, Cody

naturally drew on and reacted to the work of his teacher John
Franklin Genung, who had emerged as a significant theorist of
rhetoric. Genung’s Practical Elements of Rhetoric was first published
in 1885, and it was the work that Cody studied carefully and
reproduced with his hectograph to sell to his classmates. Genung
modernized the approach of Blair, dividing Practical Elements into
sections on style and invention. Invention, in Genung’s view, had
to do with the selection of the appropriate mode of writing for a
particular purpose—description for the portrayal of objects, nar-
ration for the recounting of events, exposition and argumenta-
tion for establishing and substantiating the truth. Genung also
emphasized the role of practical psychology in invention, seeing
rhetoric as “the art of adapting discourse, in harmony with its
subject and occasion, to the requirements of the reader or hearer”
and distinguishing types of writing as appealing to the intellect,
emotions, and will.28 Genung preferred to write about invention
rather than grammar, but in his Outlines of Rhetoric he gave 125
rules for correct grammar and included a glossary of frequently
misused phrases.29 The book was mildly reformist as grammars
go, stressing brevity in the formulation of rules, the presentation
of rules as clusters of related ideas, and their statement as things
to do rather than things not to do. Genung also pioneered the
technique of numbering the rules in an appendix, which pro-
vided “the main procedures of the rhetorical art in a nutshell”
and which made marking papers more efficient, since teachers
could note the number of the rule in the margin rather than
writing corrections.30
Genung’s influence can be found in several of the ideas that
Cody took up in his course. The distinction between critical
 linguistics and the new rhetoric S 137
rhetoric and constructive rhetoric that appears in Cody’s The
Art of Writing and Speaking, for example, is from Genung’s works.
Genung saw criticism as disciplining a writer’s taste and percep-
tions, while the constructive rhetoric of invention and adapta-
tion actually developed the ability to write. Cody of course took
Genung’s ideas of constructive rhetoric in a different direction,
setting aside the traditional modes and emphasizing news writ-
ing, advertising, and business correspondence. Genung had also
stressed rhetoric as a liberal art and “concerned, as real authorship
must be, not with a mere grammatical analysis . . . but with the
whole man.”31 This too is reflected in Cody’s advocacy of litera-
ture and rhetoric as the foundation of psychology, conversation,
human relations, and a satisfying life.
Genung may have had another influence as well. For a
time in the early 1900s, the Amherst professor was associ-
ated with the Home Correspondence School of Springfield,
Massachusetts. The school offered courses in an Academic
and Preparatory Department, an Agricultural Department, a
Commercial Department, and a Normal and Common School
Department. According to an article in the New York Observer and
Chronicle, the faculty was made up of about two dozen scholars
from “Harvard, Yale, Cornell and other leading institutions.”32
Genung’s photo was featured in ads in the System and other mag-
azines, and he headed the English curriculum which prepared
students for college. Genung’s involvement in correspondence
education may have spurred Cody’s own efforts in this direction
as well. But while Cody held Genung in high regard and was
certainly influenced by his former teacher’s views, Cody saw
limitations in Genung’s approach. Cody did not see the compre-
hensiveness of Genung’s Practical Elements or Outlines as suited to
modern students’ needs. Instead, Cody reduced the grammar in
his course to a few points and emphasized the interactive game-
like method of self-test exercises. Cody organized his approach
so that students knew where they stood and could measure their
138 S do you make these mistakes in english?

figure 13.1. A Cody ad stressing method.

progress toward the practical goal of eliminating their personal

errors. Such a method, in his view, made the teaching of gram-
mar and language more transparent and also more interesting
to students by taking their knowledge into account. Cody even
advertised it as fun.
 fourteen

Study at Home

zT he intellectual environment in which

Sherwin Cody worked distinguished practical
introductory work from theoretical specialties, and Cody’s work
was clearly the former. Another crucial educational trend sup-
porting his course was the spread of correspondence learning.
As mentioned earlier, correspondence education had taken root
in the United States in the late 1800s. Organizations like the
Society to Encourage Studies at Home promoted home-study
groups, complete with rules and reading guides much like today’s
middle-class book groups. Cornell University, in rural Ithaca,
New York, founded a short-lived Correspondence University in
1883 to serve graduates, teachers, the military, and those prepar-
ing for civic service exams, among others. A few years earlier, in
1879,Yale professor William Rainey Harper had organized a sum-
mer language institute as part of the Chautauqua Camp Meeting
Association in New York, and he began to develop a correspon-
dence course to allow students to continue language study after
the summer session was over.
When Harper became president of the newly established
University of Chicago in 1892, correspondence education became
a feature of that university’s extension division. Education by mail
took hold in other midwestern universities as well, where many
140 S do you make these mistakes in english?
potential students were place-bound and rural. The University of
Wisconsin became a leader in correspondence instruction, and
one of its most popular correspondence courses was taught by
historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who viewed correspondence
education as “carrying irrigating streams of education in to the
arid regions.”1 Programs also sprang up at the Universities of
Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, Missouri, Colorado, Oregon,
California, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Even New York’s Columbia
University offered home-study college and college-preparatory
work, recruiting students with full-page ads in The New York Times
offering “the advantages of University Instruction” adjusted to
the needs of individual students.2 The student body for corre-
spondence education included immigrants, African-Americans,
women, veterans, rural teachers, and prisoners. During the
Depression, correspondence education expanded further as
classes were offered to Works Progress Administration clients and
in Civilian Conversation Corps camps. When the University of
Wisconsin offered its correspondence courses to military per-
sonnel in 1941, the U.S. Armed Forces Institute began. By 1946,
Foxhole University, as it came to be known, offered about 400
credit and noncredit courses.3
There were, of course, academic critics of correspondence
education. Sociologist Thorstein Veblen, for example, viewed the
University of Chicago’s efforts in correspondence education as
being outside the mission of higher education.4 And Abraham
Flexner, in his 1930 book Universities: American, English, German,
criticized the quality of correspondence courses at Columbia and
Chicago as well as the ethics of their marketing. Flexner wrote
that “it is absurd to suppose that to the hordes of extension and
home study students registered at Columbia any such opportunity
can be offered without lowering of standards.”5 In part because of
the ambivalence within traditional universities, correspondence
education grew as private business in the first half of the twentieth
century rather than a university enterprise.
 study at home S 141
In a sense, private correspondence education began under-
ground—from the needs of mine workers. In 1891, Thomas J. Foster,
the owner of the Mining Herald, began offering correspondence
courses to help miners pass new state examinations. His offerings
soon expanded to hundreds of areas. At the turn of the century, an
internal assessment report on International Correspondence Schools’
graduates listed over thirty separate ICS “schools” ranging from
Chemistry and Civil Service to Electrotherapeutics and Mercantile
Decoration. The report noted that students were “as a rule, young
men between the ages of 23 and 27 years,” and it even listed the
names and address of 54,500 students who had done satisfactory
work in a third of their courses. The total number of cumulative
enrollees in 1905 was 650,000, and ICS saw its 12.7% success rate as
good (even “astounding” and “extraordinary”), given the extenuat-
ing factors such as student preparation, motivation, time, study habits,
and incentives. The report also suggested that the results should be
viewed in light of the fact that “many of our students are foreigners,
with only a slightest acquaintance with the English language.”6
Private correspondence education was seen by its advocates as
responding to the new social and economic needs of the country
in a way that traditional colleges did not. In a speech presented at
the 20th-anniversary ICS banquet in 1911, the keynoter, Reverend
Joseph H. Odell, discussed “The International Correspondence
Schools as a National Asset.” Odell described the American eco-
nomic situation as involving “intelligent discontent” among the
working classes, a rising cost of living, social ambition, immigra-
tion, and both industrial and efficiency revolutions. Traditional
colleges were of limited help in training workers, since colleges
“had been grinding out graduates with practically the same cul-
ture that they gave centuries before—a broad, ennobling and
enriching culture of the mind in language and literature.”7 And
even as some colleges retooled toward technology and engineer-
ing, Odell noted that they were not at all positioned to help those
workers who could not devote four years of time to on-campus
142 S do you make these mistakes in english?
college studies. In his view, correspondence education, and ICS
specifically, would provide America’s new skilled workforce.
Cowpunchers, mule drivers, mill workers, and deckhands would
be retrained as architects, engineers, and managers, and ICS would
be “the saviour of industrial America.”8
ICS tracked the success of students. Then as now, part of the
marketing of long-distance education involved establishing cred-
ibility. Cody understood this need as well, since his early work
with the National Business Standards Association had been aimed
at providing both standards and credibility for business education.
He kept track of student completions and asked satisfied students
to volunteer feedback and testimonials. As private correspondence
education expanded, not all schools maintained the same standards,
however. John Noffsinger estimated that by 1926, there were about
350 private correspondence schools in the United States, with total
annual revenues of 70 million dollars, and he calculated that four
times as many students were enrolled in correspondence schools as
were enrolled in traditional colleges and universities.9 In his view,
“an appallingly large proportion of the schools” were “little better
than frauds.”10 Noffsinger pointed out that some private correspon-
dence schools were diploma mills offering dubious PhD degrees,
that others were teaching bogus healing arts such as “electro-
theraputics” and “masso-therapy,” and that some were offering
instruction in vocational areas not at all suited to correspondence
learning. Noffsinger also criticized the business practices of some
schools, calling the overemphasis on sales “the most serious criti-
cism to be made against the system of correspondence education.”
He suggested stronger licensing of correspondence schools, and
his National Home Study Council, founded in 1926, helped to set
standards for correspondence education and to provide consumer
advice.11 By the 1920s and 1930s, many states had begun to regulate
correspondence course sales with fraud laws.
Education researchers would also look critically at corre-
spondence school curricula. In 1938, Ella Woodyard studied
 study at home S 143
13 correspondence schools as part of a research project for the
American Association for Adult Education. Woodyard (or a con-
federate of hers) enrolled in the courses under an assumed name
and kept notes documenting work done, grades, contacts with
the schools, and achievements. Woodyard reported on correspon-
dence courses in nursing, crime detection, civil service, industrial
management, advertising, radio repair, drawing, etiquette, French,
and English.
Her chapter “Mastering English Usage” reports on Cody’s
course, though she does not mention it by name.Woodyard wrote
to Cody’s Rochester school assuming the identity of a middle-
aged women embarrassed by her lack of education. When she
asked whether she could “keep up with the class,” she was told
that if she had finished the sixth grade, she should be able to com-
plete the work successfully. Overall Woodyard rated Cody’s course
as good. She thought that Cody’s time schedule of 15 minutes
a day was reasonable—she was able to complete the lessons in
about five minutes and a Nutshell book in about 40 minutes. She
also found the course material well organized and the method “as
good as could be devised for the self-correction of errors.” The
main problem, she wrote, was that the content was “often trivial,
sometimes debatable as to its correctness, and too frequently out
of date in its rulings.” Woodyard suggested that with conscientious
revision and proofing “there would be little fault to find with the
course,” thought she also noted that public libraries offered the
same information at no cost.12
Woodyard’s book provided an independent assessment of the
strong points and the deficiencies of Cody’s course. More gener-
ally, her study reflected the evolving and conflicted attitudes about
private correspondence schools. Woodyard spoke favorably
about the anonymity of correspondence education in which “the
paper alone is scored, not the paper of the school hero nor the
paper of its glamour girl.”13 She also found correspondence edu-
cation useful for its flexibility of time, for providing a method of
144 S do you make these mistakes in english?
on-the-job training, and for helping to productively structure lei-
sure time. On the other hand, she reported that all of the courses
she examined over-advertised the ease of instruction, the benefits,
and the degree of learning that could be obtained. She wondered,
facetiously, why a course was needed at all if the knowledge is so
easy to obtain, but she chided consumers as well by adding that
“schools that promise more than they perform would find it hard
to thrive in a country where no one wanted to get rich quick or
to pass for more than he was worth in his job or in society.”14
Woodyard’s observations highlight the fundamental double
nature of self-improvement courses like Cody’s. Advertisements
promised to raise people’s financial and social status by focusing
on appearances and impressions. But in promising the appearance
and impression of an elite education in just minutes of self-study
a day, such courses also subverted the value of those appearances
and impressions. If the essentials of an elite education could be
obtained for 30 dollars, was such an education really important?
Cody thought that it was, and the contrast between his adver-
tising and his course suggests that he recognized this fundamental
problem in his approach. He saw the work on appearances and
impressions as the starting point to learning, rather than the end-
point, and he saw the 15 minutes a day as developing habits of
learning rather than a mere shortcut. Like Charles Eliot and Dale
Carnegie, he was offering a product that was transformational—
that he hoped would lead to a long-term engagement with sig-
nificant ideas. It is no small irony that the first impression Cody
made on consumers was often grounded in the narrative of first
impressions. But before Cody could introduce his larger ideas and
new literary art, it was necessary to market the courses, and to do
that the focus had to be on practical concerns. It is not so different
for today’s colleges and universities, which must blend an interest
in the vocational with their commitment to the liberal arts. In
many areas, we advertise impression management and practical
skills but are really hoping to provide something more.
 fifteen

School’s Out

zI n the 1920s and 1930s, Cody’s wealth grew.

He continued to write and publish, working from
his home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he became a lead-
ing citizen. Cody enjoyed a good life, and he and Marian found
time for the arts, including classical music and both Broadway and
local theatre.1 The Codys were able to vacation and travel as well.
They bought a summer home in upstate New York and visited
Europe by ocean liner on several occasions. For a time, Cody
continued to promote the National Ability Tests with articles in
Forbes and other magazines, and he published books related to
the tests, including Standard Test English, which appeared in 1920,
and Sherwin Cody’s Business Ability Development Course, released in
1923.2 But eventually he put that work aside. Cody also returned
to his interest in Edgar Allan Poe, reworking his introduction to
Poe’s tales and publishing an anthology titled Poe—Man, Poet, and
Creative Thinker in 1924, though the book was not well received.3
During the 1930s, Cody became very involved in real estate
development. When he and Marian decided to move to Dobbs
Ferry, Cody bought a large tract of land there in 1928, near what
is now the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the area was subdi-
vided into home sites. Reporting on a unique home design in
1934 and later on the appointment of an official architect to the
146 S do you make these mistakes in english?
development, The New York Times referred to the area as “Sherwin
Cody’s Hilltop Park Community.” Cody’s 1950 entry in Who’s
Who in America described it as “Hilltop Park, a community for
college profs.”4 Cody may have been intending a planned com-
munity of academics, but the project never came to fruition, and
Cody sold the Hilltop Park land in the 1950s.
Much of Cody’s time and energy, of course, was still devoted to
writing and publishing his educational materials. Cody arranged
for translations of his books into Spanish, French, German, and
other languages. In the 1930s, he updated his 1903 series as The
New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language, publishing
it in a single volume with new introductory material and with
updated discussions of some topics.5 Cody also revised his course
in the 1930s. The 1936 revision of the course retained most of the
1918 material but had a number of changes.The revision included
extra pages in each Tuesday lesson on pronunciation, with addi-
tional discussion of silent letters, exercises on finding the accent
(word stress), and more exercises in identifying vowel length.
The Friday lessons on Conversation and Reading were renamed
Reading and Vocabulary, and the literary discussion of the earlier
version was condensed by about half. This allowed more space
in each booklet for vocabulary-building exercises. Some of these
asked readers to identify synonyms for such words as thrilling, gla-
brous, allay, enervating, stilted, scurrilous, peremptory, refulgent, polyglot,
and retracted.6 Others provided new stylistic advice, cautioning stu-
dents against awkward repetition (such as We got up early and got
breakfast) and reminding them to find substitutes for overused “pet
words,” such as nice, lovely, and funny.7 Cody added writing exer-
cises in which students updated literary examples to modern style,
a favorite technique of his.There was a new discussion of etymol-
ogy in the 1936 edition, including suggestions about the use of
Latin and Anglo-Saxon words for variety. Cody also expanded the
material on the pronunciation of foreign words, perhaps reflect-
ing his continued travels, the increased internationalism of the
 school’s out S 147
1930s, and the role of radio in making the spoken word more
prominent.
In several lessons the opening essays on rhetoric in the 1936
version are identical to those of the 1918 version. But others are
more concise and show signs of revision and tightening. Lesson 3
on “How to Get Rid of Self-Consciousness,” for example, con-
denses to two paragraphs what was a full page in the 1918 version,
while at the same time broadening the discussion to include self-
consciousness in conversation as well as writing. The first lesson
of the 1936 course was also revised to ask readers to conduct a
self-evaluation by answering the following questions:8

Is your education up to your personal qualities, or do you

have more talents than your education enables you to show
up to advantage?
Is your general personality attractive, just average, or rather
negative?
What sort of voice have you? . . .
Have you a manner that is pleasant and attractive? Or do you
incline to be silent?
How much work are you willing to do to improve your weak
points?

In all, the 1936 discussion of rhetoric and conversation was

less literary and less introspective than the 1918 version had been.
Cody’s advice became more modern and struck many of the same
themes as Dale Carnegie’s did, encouraging attention to emo-
tional and affective interactions. Lesson 1, for example, noted that
“Success in language is fifty percent a matter of knowing your man
or woman,” and Lesson 8 emphasized tact and the need to avoid
“flat-footed, uncompromising statements about religion or any
other subject that other people hold dear.” Cody warned against
“personal criticism in public,” “disregard for people’s feelings,” and
148 S do you make these mistakes in english?
“too much talking about one’s self and one’s personal interests.”9
And he explained how to handle parties and “office forces” by tak-
ing a personal interest in employees and by being friendly.10
There were other updatings as well. Adolf Hitler is cited as
having “an unstable emotional nature” and a poor “command of
language.” Cody comments that Hitler “won his position chiefly
by talking with passionate intensity. His fiery words overcame all
his handicaps. But it requires a sort of fanatic determination.” In
a lesson that had earlier mentioned only Woodrow Wilson, Cody
added Franklin D. Roosevelt, who “spoke with a cultured distinc-
tion such as we expect from a President, but his easy conversational
tone never failed him.”11 In Cody’s view, Wilson and Roosevelt
had the same effective mix of colloquial and refined speech as
Lincoln did, and they joined him as models of speech. Despite
the various changes and updatings, however, Cody’s core opinions
about usage continued to be evident. He still advised students to
cultivate colloquial vocabularies for “conversations, letter writing,
and business” and he dismissed pretentiousness, reminding readers
that “all the old formal literary writing has gone by today.”12
While Cody’s views remained steady, his interests grew with
the times, and he often searched for new markets and opportuni-
ties. In 1944, at the age of 75, Cody addressed parents in Coaching
Children in English. In the first half of the book, Cody stressed to
parents that English skills are fundamental for children’s social-
ization and social mobility, and he once again emphasized the
importance of colloquial English, reading, and letter writing.13 He
told parents that classroom drill on grammar “creates more confu-
sions than it corrects,” dismissed the practice of marking errors as
largely ineffective, and suggested that academic writing resulted
in “dull intellectual criticisms.” Instead, he advocated a student-
centered approach involving individual coaching and sequential
activities that build interest in interacting with and making a good
impression on “other well-educated children or adults.”14 The
guided self-criticism he suggested was essentially a version of the
 school’s out S 149
self-correcting method of his correspondence course.15 By 1944,
Cody’s understanding of the importance of English skills had
expanded in its goals as well. In his early works, the goal was to
motivate vocationally minded students to master English for their
own financial advancement and for the needs of business.16 In
Coaching Children, however, Cody seemed equally worried about
the social consequences caused by inferiority complexes, of which
“the English language is the principal source.”17 He wrote that:
The schools are a great social grinding machine. Four million go
into the hopper every year, and only two million graduate. What
becomes of the other two million? Why, they are “retarded,” they
are branded as “too stupid to learn.” They get an inferiority com-
plex. They learn to hate their teachers. They begin to play truant.
Before you know it they are in the juvenile courts—or some-
place that is just about as bad.18

In Coaching Children, Cody also promoted Maria Montessori’s

ideas at a time when interest in her approach had waned in the
United States. Montessori’s principles, first elaborated in 1912,
involved children working at their own pace, often with imagi-
native, self-directed, and self-correcting materials. As biographer
Rita Kramer notes, Montessori often told teachers that “When
you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the
child, you have solved the entire problem of education.”19 Cody,
whose ads sometimes stressed making learning like a game, agreed
that English was an “unconscious art.” But he also thought that
English instruction “must be carefully organized so that emphasis
is placed upon the confusions and difficulties of our language, so
that explanations are easily at hand, and so that the whole subject
can be handled in the normal childish rhythms.”20 He advocated a
naturalistic method of learning English at the elementary level—
through reading, storytelling, letter writing, and other activities—
but insisted that attention be paid to the 100 confusing points
of usage, to the 250 troublesome words, and to the handful of
150 S do you make these mistakes in english?
principles of form and punctuation “necessary to give the appear-
ance of ‘literacy’ to a child’s letters and composition papers.”21 The
teaching material presented in the appendix to Coaching Children
was intended to facilitate this natural method, and Cody described
it as fun, fast-paced, and scientifically tested.22
Cody continued working through his seventies and eighties. In the
1940s he began preparing a series of picture books to teach English to
speakers of other languages and to help non-natives understand the
differences between British and American usage. Cody had gotten
interested in the linguistic work of British writer C. K. Ogden,
whose Basic English was an attempt to simplify the language and cre-
ate a universal international English that would be easy to learn.The
simplest version of Basic English included just 850 words—mostly
nouns and words which could be taught through pictures—plus a
small set of simplified rules of grammar. Odgen explained that
Basic English is . . . a language of eight hundred and fifty English
words which will say clearly and simply almost everything we
normally say with fifteen or twenty thousand. . . . Basic is less con-
cerned to alter the way we speak than to encourage a different
attitude to what we say. For the foreigner it provides a means of
communication which will be indistinguishable from Standard
English; to the English-speaking peoples it offers an educational
instrument by which contexts and connections can be analyzed
in the interests of a fuller appreciation of the resources of the
language as a whole.23

In a series of letters to Ogden in 1943 and 1944, Cody pro-

posed a collaboration in which he would use Basic English and
promote it in his new course on English for non-native speak-
ers. Cody’s proposed English Self-Taught Through Story of Life in
America would include pictures of scenes he thought would be
familiar to immigrants (a dock, customs, a baggage porter, a taxi,
etc.) along with exercises and vocabulary keyed to those settings.
Explaining his idea to Ogden, Cody noted that while his 100%
 school’s out S 151
Self-correcting Course was a great success, it required a fifth-grade
education and was thus unsuitable for the “20,000,000 near illiter-
ates we have in America, as well as people in Russia, China, etc.”24
Cody and Ogden were never able to come to agreement, Ogden
apparently fearing that Cody wished to trade on the notoriety of
Basic English. But Cody got far enough along on the project to
request permission from the U.S. Treasury to picture currency in
the book. Cody’s letters to Ogden grew increasing chilly (their
salutations going from Dear Sir to Dear Dr. Ogden to Dear Professor
Ogden to Dear Mr. Ogden) and Cody at one point added a post-
script that “No one has a mortgage on the English language.”25
Cody’s final publication seems to have been a letter to the
New York Times in 1952, disagreeing with a review of Cornelia
Otis Skinner’s one-woman show “Paris ’90.” Cody wrote that
Skinner’s play provided characterizations that were “quite in the
same class with the drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec and the other
great artists who have pictured the women of Paris.”26 Despite
his age, he was still planning book projects in the 1950s. In 1956
he wrote to Alfred Knopf about a book he was planning on writ-
ing styles. Explaining that he lacked American examples, Cody
asked if there might be a short selection of H. L. Mencken’s that
would be interesting to contemporary readers.27 Neither of his
last planned projects saw publication, however. Cody suffered a
stroke in 1957 and moved to the home of his friend and care-
taker, Nellie Brink, in Brooklyn, New York. He passed away two
years later in the Woods Nursing Home on April 4, 1959, at the
age of 90.

SERIOUS, HARD-WORKING, INDEFATIGABLE

In the early part of the twentieth century, Cody launched a
humor magazine called The Touchstone. It lasted only five issues
and may simply have been the wrong genre for his talents. By
many accounts, including his own, he had a serious, Victorian
152 S do you make these mistakes in english?
character. He started work at a young age due to his economic
and family circumstances, and he was driven by his promise to his
mother, by his outsider social status at Amherst, and by the rejec-
tion of the literary friends who thought his turn to business made
him a philistine. Cody became both a habitual entrepreneur and
workaholic. Even on vacations, he focused on business. When the
family visited Italy in 1910, Cody immersed himself in the study of
Italian, and he spent time arranging for translations of his books on
letter writing. His grandson, Peter Malcolm Cody, recalls that on
family outings Sherwin would bring along a portable typewriter
in his Packard (he purchased a new Packard every few years) and
would sit in the woods working at his books. Peter Cody remem-
bers his grandfather as something of a curmudgeon who occasion-
ally emerged from his study to take him for a walk, although he
notes that Sherwin did seem to mellow as he grew older.
A measure of Cody’s nineteenth-century reserve is that he never
mentioned Marian by name in his books and had relatively little
to say about her in his running autobiography. For their time, the
Codys had an unusual marriage. They kept separate finances, and
Marian often traveled back to her native England by herself. In a
1981 reminiscence, the Codys’ son Morrill wrote that Sherwin had
promised her an opportunity to visit home every few years, and that
Morrill and his mother spent half-years in England on several occa-
sions. Marian had a literary background herself, and Morrill reported
to Carter Daniel that she was the actual writer of most of the poetry
anthology that Cody published at the turn of the century.28
Sherwin Cody seems to have been a distant parent. Morrill
was educated largely at boarding schools in France and in Indiana,
and he recalled once traveling back to New York from England
alone during World War I. His father was supposed to meet him
at the docks, but arranged instead for Morrill to be picked up by
a friend. The friend never arrived, and it was left to a priest to
arrange for Morrill to catch the train to Illinois.29 Carter Daniel
reports that Morrill admired his father’s great drive, but thought
 school’s out S 153
him boring and self-centered, and Morrill described his father
to Daniel as puritanical, bigoted, and miserly. Daniel also notes
that, in Morrill’s view, Marian was often bored with Sherwin as
well.30 It is clear that Sherwin thought highly of his own talents,

Morrill Cody

In 1901 Sherwin and Marian Cody had their only child, a son
named Edward Morrill Cody. Morrill, as he was known, was edu-
cated in Paris and at the Interlaken School, where he roomed
with the nephew of Henry Ford and the future head of Sears
Roebuck. He followed in his father’s steps by attending Amherst
College, graduating in 1921.
Morrill’s early travels and foreign experience gave him a fluency
in French that led to a career as a foreign correspondent, journal-
ist (for The Dial and Literary Digest), and magazine editor in Paris
in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1941 through 1976, he worked in
the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in Paraguay, Argentina, Mexico,
Washington, Paris, Stockholm, Madrid, and New York. During
the Kennedy administration he was Deputy Director of the U.S.
Information Agency, where he worked under Edward R. Murrow.
He ended his career in Paris as bureau manager for Radio Liberty
from 1965 to 1976.
Morrill Cody was an amateur painter with a lifelong inter-
est in art and literature. He wrote or cowrote four books about
France: This Must Be the Place, the reminiscences of a famous bar-
man, James Charters (later published as Hemingway’s Paris); The
Women of Montparnasse; The Favorite Restaurants of an American in
Paris; and Passing Stranger, a novel. He was also acquainted with
the Paris-based writers and artists of the day, including Heming-
way, the Fitzgeralds, Dali, Duchamp, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Djuna
Barnes, Isadora Duncan, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Alice
B.Toklas, and Sylvia Beach. Morrill Cody was married four times,
to Frances Ryan, Marian Holbrook, Verna Feurheim, and Jane
Hoster, and had three children, Peter Malcolm Cody, Judith Alden
Cody Kirk, and Gabrielle Hamilton Cody.
154 S do you make these mistakes in english?
importance, and personal mission as an educator—even to the
extent of including his own life story in a practical course on
grammar. He seems to have had a negative view of the average
person’s intelligence, but he was nevertheless utopian in many
ways and confident of the ability of applied science to improve life
for the great mass of people.Working essentially nonstop from the
time his mother died in 1880 until his stroke in 1957 and publish-
ing over 200 articles and books, he was, as The Nation called him
in a 1918 book notice, “indefatigable.”31

MAYBE YOUSE DON’T TALK LIKE THIS

The Sherwin Cody School of English struggled in the 1950s as the
cost of ads began to outstrip the revenue from the course. With
the retirement of Walter Paterson and Charles Lennon in 1953,
Cody closed the Rochester office. He transferred the franchise to
George Kemp’s U.S. School of Music, and the school was sold
again after Cody’s death.32 His long-running advertising campaign
in The New York Times ended in December of 1959, although ads
for The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language continued
in comic books into the 1960s.
Why did the Cody course falter in the 1950s? One factor,
naturally, was Cody’s advanced age and failing health. But there
is more to the end of the Sherwin Cody School than simply a
business venture that failed to outlive its founder. In a way, the
school suffered from its own success, doing well enough for so
long that no changes were made in the basic business model
until it was too late. Perhaps if Cody had organized his school
differently to establish local franchises or other enterprises,
things might have turned out differently. The International
Correspondence Schools and the Alexander Hamilton Institute
reinvented themselves over the years to find new niches, and
self-improvement products like Charles Atlas’s Dynamic-Tension
and Dale Carnegie Training have remained strong. The Carnegie
 school’s out S 155
course, for example, evolved from an emphasis on interpersonal
skills, likeability, and happiness to an international training pro-
gram that offers courses and seminars in organizational develop-
ment, change management, sales, team building, and executive
leadership. By expanding its focus from individuals to organi-
zations as made up of individuals, the Carnegie organization
has proved durable in the marketplace. Dale Carnegie’s franchise
system was also certainly a factor in the long-term success of his
courses. Equally important was the role that Carnegie’s widow
Dorothy played after his death in 1955, leading the business
for the next four decades. Today Dale Carnegie Training offers
programs in 70 countries and in more than 25 languages, and
over seven million people have completed a Carnegie course
or seminar.33 Cody, however, did not have a natural successor to
manage his course into the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury. Marian Cody had passed away in 1943, and Morrill had his
own literary interests and career in the U.S. Foreign Service. The
main collaborators for Cody’s school, other than Walter Paterson
and Charles Lennon, were Schwab and Beatty. But Schwab and
Beatty were also approaching retirement after many years in the
ad business.34
By 1950 Cody’s ad had run for over 30 years, mostly with the
same picture of the middle-aged Cody—which Morrill described
as being as familiar as the Smith Brothers whose faces decorated
boxes of cough drops. For all those years, the marketing message
remained essentially static—explaining why people made mistakes,
extolling Cody’s work in the Gary, Indiana, schools, and promis-
ing a self-correcting device. The advertising campaign may simply
have become so familiar to readers that it was easily skipped over.
Also, by the 1950s, the context of Cody’s ad had become that of an
increasingly skeptical popular culture, and the ad was satirized in
the newly founded Mad magazine with a parody that asked “Do
People Laugh at You for Reading Comic Books?”35 Schwab and
Beatty would even poke fun at it themselves in a 1957 New York
156 S do you make these mistakes in english?
Times advertisement. The standard body of the Cody ad was used,
but with a new headline that read “Maybe youse don’t talk like
this, but—.” The ad did not turn the fortunes of the course around,
though it did stimulate a mocking critique in the trade magazine
Advertising Age. The columnist writing the Creative Man’s Corner
wrote that Cody had erred in abandoning his famous caption
because the phrase “Maybe youse don’t talk like this” was “cer-
tainly not addressed to us and, in our opinion, the person who
does actually say ‘yuce’ (or ‘yous’) would be too insulted to read
the thing.” The Advertising Age column in turn elicited a reply by
George Kemp of the U.S. School of Music, who noted that the
youse ad actually had a higher immediate response than the old
standard.36 It was, however, too late for new advertising to reverse
the fortunes of the 100% Self-correcting Course.
Cody’s static business model, the lack of a succession plan, and
the staleness of his ads were probably not the only factors in the
decline of the 100% Self-correcting Course. When the course was
sold a final time after Cody’s death, George Kemp suggested that
“The correspondence courses used to be popular among people
who wanted to advance themselves and speak better. Now no one
cares about grammatical errors.”37 Kemp was not the only one
suggesting a public indifference toward good grammar. Historian
Jacques Barzun was drawing the attention of intellectuals to a sup-
posed decline in grammar and culture. Barzun had been featured
on the cover of Time magazine in 1956 and became provost and
dean of the Columbia University faculty in 1958, so he had some
measure of authority as an advocate of linguistic propriety.38
Kemp may have assumed that radio and television were sub-
verting grammatical correctness by emphasizing the spoken lan-
guage over the literary standard. Television and radio did in fact
help to promote colloquial usage in entertainment programs and
commercials. For example, the television program Who Do You
Trust? involved host Johnny Carson speaking to real people, and
the show promoted itself by flaunting the supposed incorrectness
figure 15.1. Reaction to the Youse ad (reprinted with permission
from the April 14, 1958, issue of Advertising Age, Copyright, Crain
Communications, Inc., 1958).
158 S do you make these mistakes in english?
of its grammar. Advertisers used colloquial speech in such slogans
as “Winston tastes good—like a cigarette should.” As the “Maybe
youse don’t talk like this” advertisement suggested, bad grammar
was becoming good advertising. But at the same time, the broadcast
media relied on manuals like the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation,
just as the print media relied on house style guides for written
usage.39 And high schools, colleges, and universities continued to
teach grammar and usage, even as they experimented with new
approaches.
Social and market changes probably had a greater effect on the
decline of the 100% Self-correcting Course than did attitudes about
English. The rise of television was changing the advertising mar-
ket. Television competed with pulp magazines and newspapers
for consumers’ attention, and the natural constituency for Cody’s
message—the working-class and middle-class reader—was turn-
ing to new forms of mass media. The pulps drastically lost cir-
culation in the mid-forties as production costs and competition
increased, and Sunday newspaper circulation, which had grown
significantly from 1920 to 1950, also began to flatten.40
New demographics of education and new competition within
the education market were also factors. Adjusting to criticisms
and legal controls, private correspondence schools survived the
depression and World War II, and in the postwar era began pro-
viding consumers with more and more comprehensive offerings.
According to the National Home Study Council, correspondence
schools were still a $50,000,000 business in 1961, and The NewYork
Times estimated that 1,500,000 students were enrolled in com-
mercial correspondence work that year.41 As the correspondence
school industry grew, Cody’s piece of it faced ever-increasing
competition.
Universities were competing better as well. After World War
II, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the “GI Bill of
Rights”) provided tuition for veterans to attend colleges and
universities, and by 1946 more than one million veterans enrolled
 school’s out S 159
in college through the GI Bill. Many veterans choose correspon-
dence schools, but traditional colleges also established special pro-
grams to attract veterans. As a diverse group of veterans entered
higher education, there was a renewed interest in basic English
skills in colleges and universities. And higher education would
expand for many years, accommodating not just the returning ser-
vicemen but, after a brief lull, the first wave of the baby boomers
and the Vietnam generation. As these ever larger pools of students
entered universities, the attention to practical English education
remained intense.
For the Sherwin Cody course, there was increasing competi-
tion from all sides. Private correspondence schools were offering
English, accounting, and even law. Colleges and universities were
reaching out to broader student populations, and new practical
grammar books were entering the market. And as tastes continued
to change in language and culture, Cody’s course on English and
reading, largely unchanged since 1918, must have seemed increas-
ingly dated. By the time of the 1969 moon landing, ten years
after Cody’s death, the phrase “Do You Make These Mistakes in
Grammar?” was already a bit of history.
 sixteen

The Sherwin
Cody Legacy

zS uccessful entrepreneurs have an understand-

ing of the direction of a culture and the needs of
a society, they create things that address those needs, and they
understand how to communicate their ideas in mass markets.
Sherwin Cody was such a person. Like many entrepreneurs, he
worked across boundaries—across the boundaries of business,
grammar, literature, testing, self-education, publishing, and adver-
tising. Cody was not always the originator of new ideas, but he
had the great skill of pioneering and marketing them. From his
early experiences with the typewriter and the hectograph to his
final idea of using pictures to teach non-native speakers, Cody was
often at the leading edge of changes that have today become part
of the norm.
As a way of taking stock of Cody’s contributions, it helps to
sort them into business and educational innovations, although the
two categories often overlap. His business efforts included ven-
tures in publishing, marketing, and advertising psychology. When
lower-cost postage established mail-order advertising and bulk
correspondence as a new marketing technology, Cody made this
the center of his business activities. Always mindful of efficiency,
 the sherwin cody legacy S 161
he was a great recycler of material and reissued parts of his works
in many different combinations. Cody also understood the con-
nection of narrative literature to applied psychology and of applied
psychology to sales practices. As an advertiser and consultant, he
promoted the formula of Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action,
and as a mail-order businessman himself, he advocated putting
attention on the customer rather than the manufacturer. His “sci-
entific approach” to business involved tracking the results of ad
campaigns to provide correction and to improve sales. And he was
an experimenter, trying new techniques like the negative option,
an innovation in mail order later made famous by the Book-
of-the-Month Club.
As an educator, Cody’s emphasis was on the vocational and
nontraditional student, and as an education critic it was on the
failure of the schools and the limitations of formal literary conven-
tions.Working without an institutional home or disciplinary affili-
ation, Cody was an early advocate of using the colloquial language
in business and business education. Today the colloquial—simple,
conversational, and direct language—is accepted as the standard
by most of the knowledgeable educational establishment and by
publishers. In the early 1900s, however, this was still in many ways
a controversial view, especially among English educators.
Cody also helped to define vocational English education with
letter writing as the pedagogical bridge between speaking and
writing. If he were alive today, he would doubtless be focusing
on the relation between spoken language and electronic mail.
He was a relentless critic of “unscientific” composition pedagogy,
and he disliked both traditional grading methods and laissez-faire
progressive ones, favoring guided self-correction. As a critic of
university education, Cody faulted liberal arts curricula based
on the classics and on passive recitation of theory and defini-
tion. And while Cody did not have the impact of others, he was
among the early adopters of aptitude testing and outcomes assess-
ment, connecting these developments to business progressivism
162 S do you make these mistakes in english?
and meritocracy. In Cody’s view, efficiency, testing, and incentives
would together provide a rising standard of living for those will-
ing to put in effort.1
Cody also advocated student-centered education that motivated
and interested students. He sought to make study less time-
consuming, less tedious, and less dull—more like a game or ath-
letic contest—so that the average person would enjoy learning.
Even as he encouraged his students to approach self-education in
a businesslike fashion, committing daily time to improvement, he
also understood the need for learning to be pleasant. Enjoyment
was the key to lifelong self-improvement.

CORRECTING YOUR SELF

Sherwin Cody’s background had convinced him that one’s worth
was determined by aptitude, work, and reliability rather than by
the circumstances of birth, and he thought that anyone’s life
would improve through self-study. Cody committed himself to
making this possible, and his work was influential to the read-
ers of his dozens of books, to his 150,000-plus correspondence
students, and to the fields of business communication, English
education, and advertising. However, he did not have the impact
of a John Franklin Genung, Sterling Leonard, Charles Eliot, or
Dale Carnegie, receiving scant mention in the fields of testing,
psychology, English linguistics, or literature. Still, his is an impor-
tant story in many ways.
The story of Sherwin Cody and the 100% Self-correcting Course
is about how impressions—in this case, impressions created by
language—matter. The durability of his famous advertisement and
the success of his course testify to the power of grammar anxiety
and the durability of the success and self-improvement narrative.
At the core of this narrative is the belief that language education
teaches conduct, manages impressions, instills self-confidence, and
helps us find happiness.The management of linguistic impressions
 the sherwin cody legacy S 163
remains with us today, though it is addressed in ways other than
correspondence courses: we find it in middle school and high
school English classes, in college composition courses, and in prac-
tical handbooks, remedial workbooks, test preparation courses,
business grammar seminars, grammar web sites, and accent reduc-
tion courses.2 And of course other types of instruction in conduct,
self-confidence, success, and happiness are with us as well. Today
we still attempt to avoid anxiety and achieve fulfillment through
new generations of products and self-help activities.
Sherwin Cody’s story is also a story about the democratization
of language.The 100% Self-correcting Course succeeded for so many
years by defining good English in practical ways, with instruction
that was more down-to-earth and practical than school textbooks
of the same period. Cody understood and embraced the aver-
age person’s interest in knowing the standards and rules signifying
social class—the telling “mistakes” by which potential is judged.
At the same time, he encouraged realism of another sort, remind-
ing his students to attend not only to the standards of social class
but also to the expectations of real listeners and real audiences.
Language that was too pedantic, too formal, or too literary was
just as wrong as language that was provincial, vulgar, or unedu-
cated. To succeed in the world, people needed to pay attention
not just to linguistic norms but to how their speech and writing
was perceived by others. In helping his students to understand
language in this way, Cody recognized and promoted the idea
that the twentieth century was becoming a new social, linguistic,
and educational frontier in which good English belonged to its
speakers.
Finally, Sherwin Cody’s story is about what it means to suc-
ceed. Cody’s modern view of correctness held that good language
was colloquial and that norms were relative, but Cody did not see
people as mere linguistic chameleons. He encouraged his students
to develop taste by conversation and reading and to improve their
inner lives by engaging with high culture. In this, Cody’s work
164 S do you make these mistakes in english?
reminds us of how self-improvement brings together opposites,
treating culture and language as tools for impression-management
and also as tools for fulfillment and self-growth. Everyone wanted a
measure of security, respect, success, and happiness, Cody believed,
and ongoing self-study was the key to making that happen. The
real Cody legacy may not be in the grammatical work, the busi-
ness-like approach, the clever advertising, or the literary recom-
mendations, but in how he guided individuals to take responsibility
for their own education through ongoing study and reading. We
know Sherwin Cody first from his signature question—“Do You
Make These Mistakes in English?” But we should understand him
in terms of the title of his course—The 100% Self-correcting Course
in English Language. It was a course about correcting the self.
 Notes

Chapter One
1. Julian Lewis Watkins included it in his 1949 book The 100 Greatest
Advertisements, and a panel of 97 advertising professionals placed it in
the bicentennial collection of 200 top ads. See Julian Lewis Watkins,
The 100 Greatest Advertisements: Who Wrote Them and What They Did
(New York: Moore, 1949; rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1959), 68–69; Frank
Rowsome, Jr., They Laughed When I Sat Down: An Informal History of
Advertising in Words and Pictures (New York: Bonanza Books, 1959),
152–155; editors of Advertising Age, How It Was in Advertising: 1776–1976
(Chicago: Crain Books, 1976), 46. A Cody ad was mentioned as early as
1929 in the unpaginated Illustrated Appendix to Frank Presbrey’s The
History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
Doran, 1929).
2. In Lesson 15, Cody explains that “the past tense indicates time wholly past.”
Sherwin Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course in English Language (Rochester,
NY: Sherwin Cody School of English, 1918), 15, 7.
3. See page 42 for an example of a longer ad.

Chapter Two
1. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 2, 2. The course included a run-
ning autobiography of Cody’s first 50 years, and Cody notes that his pater-
nal great-grandfather had had 11 children, one of whom was Buffalo Bill
Cody’s father.
166 S notes to pages 13–23
2. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 6, 2.
3. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 11, 2. Cody reflected that he would
have had more opportunity to earn money attending college in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, than in Amherst.
4. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 12, 2.
5. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 14, 2.
6. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 14, 2. Cody recognized that the
classical perspective was important because “The practical things one learns
in any school are usually quite out of date when the time comes for one to
use them.”
7. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 14, 2.
8. Sherwin Cody, Good English Form Book in Business Letter Writing (Chicago:
School of English, 1904), 25. Cody reproduces a sample job application let-
ter he sent to Marshall Fields outlining his work history after college. The
interview with Holmes was from the Dec. 19, 1891, issue of the Chicago
Tribune and is reported on in “Holmes Interview Presented to School,”
Chicago Daily Herald, Nov. 11, 1966.
9. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 17, 2.
10. Sherwin Cody, The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language:
Constructive Rhetoric (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 11, 22, 30.
11. Cody, Constructive Rhetoric, 24–25.
12. According to Cody, the book arose when a reader of his newspaper writing
contacted him to study story writing, apparently by correspondence. Cody
described the book as the first of its kind.
13. Sherwin Cody, In the Heart of the Hills (London: J. M. Dent, 1896), 294.
Later Cody arranged for the book to be serialized in some American
newspapers.
14. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 17, 2.
15. Sherwin Cody, The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language,
1938, 331–32.
16. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 20, 2.
17. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 20, 2.
18. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 20, 2.
19. “New humorous magazine,” New York Times Book Review, Dec. 16, 1905,
899.

Chapter Three
1. Francis Weeks, “The Teaching of Business Writing at the Collegiate
Level, 1900–1920,” in Studies in the History of Business Writing, ed. George
 notes to pages 23–28 S 167
H. Douglas and Herbert W. Hildebrandt (Urbana, Ill.: Association for
Business Communication, 1985), 204.
2. As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger has noted, works like W. H. Dilworth’s
The Complete Letter-Writer were popular even in the late eighteenth cen-
tury as part of the training of newly prosperous merchants and tradesmen:
Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New
York: Macmillan, 1946), 9.
3. Cody, The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language, vol. IV, Constructive
Rhetoric (Chicago: The Old Greek Press, 1903), 13.
4. See Joseph M. Williams, Style:Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1990) and William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed. (New York:
Harper Collins, 1995).
5. Sherwin Cody, How to Do Business by Letter, 62 (Chicago: School of English,
1908).
6. Cody, Constructive Rhetoric, 11.
7. Cody, How to Do Business by Letter, 7.
8. J.Willis Westlake, How to Write Letters: A Manual of Correspondence, Showing the
Correct Structure, Composition, Punctuation, Formalities, and Uses of the Various
Kinds of Letters, Notes, and Cards (Philadelphia: Sower, Potts, 1876). John
Hagge, a historian of business communication, emphasizes Westlake’s role in
“The Spurious Paternity of Business Communication Principles,” Journal of
Business Communication 26(1989): 33–55. More broadly, Hagge sees modern
techniques of business communication not as new ideas but as reinventions
of rhetorical notions that can be traced to the Greeks.
9. Weeks, “The Teaching of Business Writing,” 202. Hotchkiss included the
idea of “character,” which covered both politeness and friendliness. In 1916
Hotchkiss developed a college textbook, Business English, Its Principles and
Practice, coauthored with Celia Anne Drew (New York: The American
Book Company).
10. Edwin H, Lewis, A First Book in Writing English (New York: Macmillan
& Co, 1898). According to Weeks, the Alexander Hamilton Institute and
the A. W. Shaw Company also issued early books for home study in letter
writing.
11. Carter Daniel, “Sherwin Cody: Business Communication Pioneer,” Journal
of Business Communication 19(1982): 3–14.
12. See William H. Burnham, “Principles of Municipal School Management,”
The Atlantic Monthly 92(1903): 105–09, and Raymond E. Callahan, Education
and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 10.
13. See Cody’s Business Practices Up to Date: Or How to Be a Private Secretary
(Chicago: School of English, 1913), 159. Cody also cites Frank Gilbreth and
Harrington Emerson as leaders in the scientific management movement
168 S notes to pages 28–36
and Arthur Frederick Sheldon and Walter Dill Scott as influences in personal
salesmanship and advertising, respectively.
14. Sherwin Cody, “Scientific Principles in the Teaching of Composition,”
English Journal 1(1912): 164.
15. Cody, “Scientific Principles,” 163–64.
16. Cody, “Scientific Principles,” 168. He followed up in English Journal with
a two-part article in 1914 on “The Ideal Course in English for Vocational
Students,” English Journal 3(1914): 263–81 and 371–80, continued in 1917
with “Organizing Drill on Fundamentals Like a Football Game,” English
Journal 6(1917): 412–19.
17. Sherwin Cody, Coaching Children in English (New York: Good English
Publishers, 1944), 11.
18. The movement of students from room to room for different activities and
studies led to this sometimes being known as the “platoon system.” Today
the Gary senior high school is the William A. Wirt School.
19. William Wirt, “Scientific Management of School Plants,” American School
Board Journal 42(1911): 2.
20. John and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
1915), 175–204, 252–69.
21. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 136–38.
22. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 23, 2.
23. “Opening the Door to the Employee: An Effort at Co-operation to Put
Commercial Education on a Better Basis,” New York Times, April 11, 1915.
24. Sherwin Cody, Commercial Tests and How to Use Them (Yonkers-on-Hudson,
NY: World Book Company, 1919), 12.
25. Cody, Commercial Tests, 20.
26. Cody, Commercial Tests, 208.
27. Sherwin Cody, Standard Test English. New York: Association Press [YMCA],
1920.
28. Cody, Commercial Tests, 2.
29. Cody, Commercial Tests, 8.
30. Cody, Commercial Tests, 6.
31. Cody, Commercial Tests, 20.

Chapter Four
1. Robert R. Doane, The Measurement of American Wealth (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1933), 10–11, cited by Schlesinger, 83. According to Doane,
wealth rose from $30,400,000,000 to $126,700,000,000 from 1870 to 1900
and to $254,200,000,000 by 1914.
 notes to pages 37–46 S 169
2. Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of
Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
56.
3. Barton, Bruce, The Man Nobody Knows (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925).
For a recent assessment, see John Ramage, Twentieth-Century American Success
Rhetoric: How to Construct a Suitable Self, chap. 2 (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2005).
4. Calvin Coolidge, “The Economic Aspects of Advertising” (reprinted in
Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 620).
5. Roland Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream: Making Way for
Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 27.
6. Maxwell Sackheim, My First Sixty Years in Advertising (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), 80.
7. Sackheim himself noted the ad’s use of the patent medicine formula in
creating a disease out of relatively innocuous symptoms and then offering a
cure. My First Sixty Years, 80.
8. Sherwin Cody, How to Deal with Human Nature in Business (Chicago: School
of English, 1915), 199.
9. By coding the reply coupons, copywriters meticulously tracked the
response rates from different version of ads and from different placements in
magazines.
10. Victor O. Schwab, “An Advertisement That Is Never Changed,” Printers’ Ink
Monthly, Sept. 1939, 10–11, 64–65.
11. John Caples, Making Ads Pay (New York: Dover Publications, 1966, reprint of
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 77–78. See also his Tested Advertising
Methods, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1984), 128.
12. “Which Ad Pulled Better?” New York Times, July 16, 1956.

Chapter Five
1. Sherwin Cody, How You Can Master Good English—in 15 Minutes a Day
(Rochester, NY: Sherwin Cody School of English, 1929), 5.
2. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 3, 4.
3. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 4. A bit later he reminds readers
that “Good English and good manners seem to go together in the minds of
many people, and an offence on either score causes them such annoyance
that they refuse to associate with people who violate the ethics of breeding”
(ibid., 14).
4. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 6–7, 14–15. Another example
involved a man whose sales letters were correct but “colorless” but who
increased the response rate by studying with Cody.
170 S notes to pages 46–55
5. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 6, 8, 17, 20. A sidebar explains that
the course is designed for non-native speakers, grade school and high school
dropouts, workers, businessmen, professionals, political activists, young men
and women, wives, and parents. Testimonials were included from students
and from English educators. Frederick H. Bair, a prominent school super-
intendent, wrote that the Cody system “deserves careful study on the part
of school superintendents everywhere,” and Ernest R. Clark, a well-known
English educator in Rochester, added “I believe you have hit—as closely as
it can be hit—the need of a student who has lost the opportunity for high
school and college training” 26, 30.
6. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 23.
7. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 23.
8. Form letter from A. E. McCarthy, Supervisor of Study, dated June 12, 1924.
9. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 24, 2.
10. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 2, 3.
11. Cody, Word Study (The Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language, vol.
I) (Chicago: The Old Greek Press, 1903), 29.
12. Cody, The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language (New York:
The Sun Dial Press, 1938), 109. Cody also referred readers to Daniel Jones’s
Pronouncing Dictionary for British English and to George Philip Krapp’s Modern
English.
13. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 3, 3. As an example of a vowel
whose length is determined by stress he gives nā ‘tion. As an example of
length determined by derivation he gives hē ro’ ic from hē’ ro.
14. Cody transcribes this difference inconsistently, using both c and k for k
sounds (kōrs and rek’omend, but comit’e and cordyuly).
15. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 5, 3.
16. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 1, 4.
17. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lessons 4, 4; 17, 4; 15, 4; and 13, 4.
18. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 20, 4.
19. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 21, 3; 19, 3.
20. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 22, 3.
21. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 22, 3.
22. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 15, 5. Dashes “indicates an
abrupt transition—a positive stopping and then going ahead again, a
break in the logical continuity of the sentence,” and Cody perpetuates
the idea that the overuse of dashes is feminine style, saying “Women in
society almost have a fad for using dashes at the ends of sentences in
place of periods.”
23. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 20, 5.
 notes to pages 55–66 S 171
24. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 19, 5.
25. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 4, 5.
26. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 6, 5.
27. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 7, 5. He does use the term “restric-
tive” in the answer key, however, but without defining it explicitly.
28. Cody, New Art, 1938, 81–2.
29. Cody, New Art, 1938, 75. Cody also suggested that the modern style was to
leave commas out unless they were needed for contrast or emphasis.
30. Cody, Brief Fundamentals (Rochester: Sherwin Cody School of English,
1936), 33–36.

Chapter Six
1. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 1, 7.
2. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 3, 8.
3. Cody, New Art, 49, 51.
4. Cody, New Art, 32. See also the Grammar and Punctuation volume of the Art
of Writing and Speaking the English Language, 42, for an earlier phrasing.
5. Henry W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1944), 381, 723.
6. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 1, 10. In Lesson 1, he gives the self-
test item I am going to have a piece of cake (ain’t—aren’t—what) I? and rejects
all of the options in favor of am I not?
7. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 19, 7. He also allows the possessive
for things that may be personified, such as the name of a city and such idi-
oms as a day’s work or for goodness’ sake.
8. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 14, 7.
9. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 23, 7.
10. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 21, 7.
11. Ella Woodyard, Culture at a Price: A Study of Private Correspondence School
Offerings (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1940), 22.
An example of the sort of changes Cody made is his discussion of generic
pronouns. By the 1930s, Cody recognized the need for an occasional his or
her, though he continued to treat the singular use of the pronoun they as an
error (New Art, 46).
12. Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer wrote that “The
teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces
some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect
on the improvement of writing”: Research in Written Composition (Urbana,
Ill.: NCTE, 1963), 37–38. See also Stephen D. Krashen, Writing: Research,
172 S notes to pages 66–73
Theory and Applications (Beverly Hills: Laredo, 1984). The study by Robert
J. Connors and Andrea A. Lunsford appears as “Frequency of Formal Errors
in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research,” College
Composition and Communication 39(1988): 395–409. Maxine Hairston’s “Not
All Errors Are Created Equal: Nonacademic Readers in the Professions
Respond to Lapses in Usage” was in College English 43(1981): 794–806. See
also Larry Beason, “Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors,”
College Composition and Communication 53(2001): 33–64.
13. Rei R. Noguchi, Grammar and the Teaching of Writing (Urbana: NCTE, 1991),
36 and Constance Weaver, Teaching Grammar in Context (Portsmouth, N.H.:
Boynton/Cook, 1996), 142–47.
14. Cody, Coaching Children in English (New York: Good English Publisher),
16–17.
15. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 12, 10: “Dies are used to stamp out
metal, but dice are cubes for gaming.” “Generals in the army have their
staffs, but barrels have staves.” “We speak of a hundred weight of fish (in
bulk), but fifty different species of fishes.” The Friday lessons also included
some discussion of voice and oral reading, with Cody encouraging students
to develop a natural voice which avoids “sing-song” changes in pitch, over-
emphasis, or mechanical pronunciation. The last few lessons also contained
some exercises calling on students to rewrite sentences.
16. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 23, 10.
17. For example, see the glossary to John Franklin Genung’s Outlines of Rhetoric
(Boston: Ginn, 1894), 301–32, or Frank H. Vizetelly’s A Desk-Book of Errors
in English (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906).
18. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 14, 10; Lesson 5, 10; Lesson 9, 10;
Lesson 11, 10; Lesson 6, 10; and Lesson 2, 10.
19. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 11, 10.
20. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 15, 10. Cody’s views on science fol-
low those of John Franklin Genung, who distinguished the science of criti-
cal rhetoric, “the laws and principles of discourse . . . exhibited in an ordered
system,” from the art of constructive rhetoric, which was “knowledge made
efficient by skill”: The Practical Elements of Rhetoric (Boston, Ginn & Co.,
1896), 4.

Chapter Seven
1. In his advertising prospectus, Cody claimed that the literary lessons in his
course gave it a competitive advantage over other language instruction:
“Sherwin Cody gives something more. He gives his student the finishing
touch that makes the man of education.” How You Can Master Good English,
20.
 notes to pages 73–76 S 173
2. 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 1, 1.
3. Later editions also included Mark Twain, whom Cody called the Charles
Dickens of America.
4. Cody, How to Read and What to Read (Rochester: Sherwin Cody School of
English, 1937), 9. Cody’s penchant for efficiency shines through in his discus-
sion of literature as well, and he recommends moderation in reading in order
“to let a few great things sink in deeply, yet not in such a way to make them
narrow specialists.” Cody also suggests reading judiciously, by skimming an
author’s work and deciding where to invest one’s time. It is “far better” he
says, “to read a few books or even a few pages carefully, slowly, even painfully,
than to slip easily over many.” 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 24, 9.
5. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 5, 9. Cody also considered Woodrow
Wilson “one of the great world writers, in the same class as Lincoln,” noting
that Wilson was not afraid to use “the kind of language American advertis-
ing would like us to use” (Lesson 6, 9).
6. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 2, 9.
7. Cody, How and What to Read, 15–16.
8. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 21.
9. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 2, 9. Literature provided enjoyment,
truth and inspiration, but it was also a practical way to make our lives more
comprehensible in a changing world, which was necessary if work was to be
meaningful. At the same time, literature could provide a broad understand-
ing of the world and of human nature necessary to business success, and in
addition, the study of narrative, metaphor, and rhetoric enabled business
writers to know their customers and develop “a clear, decisive tone, with a
sharp emphasis on the points you want to get across” (Lesson 19, 1).Though
he did not use the terms, Cody emphasized the blending of practical and
liberal learning, using each to justify the other.
10. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Society and Solitude, vol. 7 (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–04),
189–221, and Noah Porter, Books and Reading or, What Books Shall I Read and
How Shall I Read Them? (New York: Scribner, 1877).
11. See Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 2–4, for a brief overview. As
Rubin notes, there was also a parallel religious tradition, with American
religious philosophers like Harvard’s Joseph Buckminster developing a view
of virtue and salvation through reading and contemplation. Others, like
sociologist Thorstein Veblen, viewed the reading habits of the middle class
as part of their attempt to emulate the wealthy.
12. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 24, 2.
13. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, Lesson 24, 2.
174 S notes to pages 77–81
14. The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art began in 1896 and
moved to the Sunday paper shortly afterwards.
15. For Erskine’s views, see The Delight of Great Books (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1927) and Gerald Graff ’s Professing English (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989). As Rubin notes in The Making of Middlebrow
Culture (chapters 2–4), projects like the Great Books seminar and the Book-
of-the-Month Club generated new public discussions over what sort
of books people should be reading and what they ought to be getting out of
books. Public critics like Sherman, Erskine, and the Book-of-the-Month
Club’s lead judge Henry Canby tried to balance the elitism of a literary
canon with the goal of broad public participation in culture, and their own
attitudes evolved as their perspectives broadened from the academic to the
public sphere.
16. He also included Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna
St. Vincent Millay, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Agnes Repplier, Louisa May
Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Elliot, Elizabeth C. Gaskell, and
Edith Wharton.
17. Cody, How to Read and What to Read, 118–122.The 1927 list of recommended
reading does not include many of these writers.
18. Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the
American University, 1880–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 41.
19. Cody, How to Read and What to Read, 7. The terms highbrow and lowbrow had
been adapted from the anthropological practice of estimating intelligence
by measuring the size and shape of the cranium. The term middlebrow, first
used in the 1920s, seems to have come into wide use among critics in the
1930s, in a 1933 essay by Margaret Widdemer in The Saturday Review of
Literature and later by such critics as Virginia Woolf, Russell Lynes, Clement
Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald. See Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow
Culture, xii–xiv.

Chapter Eight
1. James D. Norris, Advertising and the Transformation of American Society,
1865–1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 65.
2. Roland Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 208. Marchand
capitalizes his “parables,” and I have retained that capitalization here.
Elsewhere I refer to them in lowercase as a matter of style.
3. See Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Russel B. Nye
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), Eleazar Moody, The School of Good
Manners (New London, Conn.: Timothy Green, 1715), and Henry Peacham,
The Compleat Gentleman (London: Constable, 1622). One example of the
role of etiquette in education is young George Washington’s copying out of
 notes to pages 81–87 S 175
110 rules of conduct as an exercise.The importance of character is shown in
the first rule, which was that “Every Action done in Company, ought to be
with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.” George Washington,
Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 3. Charles Moore’s introduction to Washington’s
rules notes that the etiquette list is contained in one of the two school
exercise books preserved in the George Washington Papers at the Library
of Congress. For more on etiquette books, see Sarah E. Newton’s Learning
to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900 (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1994) and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners
in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990).
4. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave, 11. Ben Franklin’s advice on success, for
example, often blended concern for others with self-interest and impression
management.
5. Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 217–18. Even the rich could
suffer from athlete’s foot, bad breath, or bad grammar, and Marchand
describes a democracy of afflictions that linked the rich, poor, and middle-
class. Inexpensive remedies were available to those smart enough to buy
them. Just as the democracy of goods put status in the reach of anyone, the
democracy of afflictions implied a leveling of the inherent advantages of
wealth and position. Marchand also discusses two other narrative types: the
parables of Civilization Redeemed and of the Captive Child.
6. Erin Smith notes that many text-heavy pulp magazine ads of the 1920s
reinforced the audience’s notion of themselves as readers. See Hard-boiled:
Working-class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2000), 65–66.
7. Prudential ads can be found in Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple,
Advertising in America:The First 200 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990),
151, 153.
8. Frank Rowsome, Jr., They Laughed When I Sat Down: An Informal History of
Advertising in Words and Pictures (New York: Bonanza Books, 1959), 177, 178.
9. The “University of the Night” ad appears in Watkins, The 100 Greatest
Advertisements, 36.The ad was written by Raymond Rubicam and headlined
by George Cecil.
10. “Here’s an Extra $50” first appeared in 1919 and is reprinted in Watkins, The
100 Greatest Advertisements, 112.
11. “You’re a Fine Fellow” appeared in The World’s Work, Jan. 1932, 5.

Chapter Nine
1. Hugh Hawkins, Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of
Charles W. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 292. As Edward
176 S notes to pages 87–92
H. Cotton noted, the selections chosen as classics were criticized for com-
plexity and dullness and for omitting nineteenth-century fiction: The Life of
Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1926), 274. A supple-
mentary Harvard Classics Fiction Shelf was added as well later as well as a
set of Junior Classics. By 1926, Collier had sold 14,541,426 volumes (285,126
sets) of the Harvard Classics, along with 1,187,040 volumes of fiction and
1,190,500 of the Junior Classics (Cotton, Life of Charles W. Eliot, 276–77).
The idea of the Harvard Classics was still an object of derision in 1940 when
Mortimer J. Adler published his How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and
Schuster), in which he argued that the Harvard Classics method “will make
you a literary butterfly, not a competent reader” and that the reading plan of
the Harvard Classics was “about as intelligible as a college course under the
elective system” (131).
2. The actual selection of readings was done by Eliot’s editorial assistant,
Harvard English professor William Allan Neilson, who later became presi-
dent of Smith College; see Margaret Farrand Thorp’s Neilson of Smith (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
3. See Adam Kirsch, “The Five-foot Shelf Reconsidered,” Harvard Magazine,
Nov.–Dec. 2001.
4. Hawkins, Between Harvard and America, 293.
5. The Harvard Classics ads “No more Latin, No more Greek” appeared
in Youth’s Companion, Nov. 9, 1911, 45, and “If you are a lover of books”
in Current Opinion, June 1913, 38. “Why treat your mind like a merry-
go-round” appeared in the New York Times Magazine, November 4, 1923;
“What 15 Minutes a Day Has Done to My Husband’s Earning Power”
was in the New York Times Book Review, January 10, 1926, 21; “Why Envy
Them Longer?” was in the Book Review for Oct. 24, 1941, 17; “It May
Never Again Be So Easy to Own the Famous Harvard Classics” was in the
World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1942, 16A; and “How to Get Rid of an
INFERIORITY COMPLEX” appeared in the World Almanac and Book of
Facts for 1938, 12.
6. From the ad copy for “Do you know her tragic story,” written by Bruce
Barton and reprinted in Watkins, The 100 Greatest Advertisements, 28.
7. Charles W. Eliot, Fifteen Minutes a Day Reading Guide (New York: Collier,
1926), 20.
8. Eliot, Fifteen Minutes, 5, 7.
9. Sackheim, My First Sixty Years, 104–09. Cody had also worked on the idea
of developing cheap editions of Shakespeare around 1900, but few seem to
have been published. See Daniel, “Sherwin Cody,” 6.
10. The Club was acquired by the media conglomerate Bertelsmann in 2000
and merged with other book clubs.
 notes to pages 92–99 S 177
11. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books:The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste,
and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997), 160. Radway confirms the role of books as symbols, citing an internal
Club finding that people joined not to read any particular book but because
they were interested in acquiring an extensive home library (312). She also
notes that early mailing lists for the Club included the New York Social
Register and a number of university alumni lists, and she suggests marketing
targeted “that fraction whose social position was based on its command of
cultural and intellectual capital, on a certain acquaintance with the cultural
tradition and a measure of specialized knowledge and expertise” (295).
12. Sackheim, My First Sixty Years, 107.
13. According to Sackheim, the first Book-of-the-Month Club ad appeared in
the New York Times of April 25, 1926: My First Sixty Years, 117–18.

Chapter Ten
1. One indication of the significance of etiquette is that fact that 146 different
adult etiquette books were published between 1918 and 1945. See Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Sr., Learning How to Behave, 51.
2. By Funk & Wagnalls. The book, after various reprinting and editions, led to
a radio show, newspaper column, and in 1946, the Emily Post Institute.
3. Rowsome, They Laughed When I Sat Down, 155.
4. Rowsome, They Laughed When I Sat Down, 154.
5. Red Book, Feb. 1922, 13, cited by Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness:
Manners, Morals and Misbehaviors in Modern America (New York: Picador,
1999), 27–28.
6. Lillian Eichler, The Book of Etiquette, vol. 1, 2, 3, 5 (Oyster Bay: Nelson
Doubleday, 1921).
7. Eichler, Book of Etiquette, vol. 2, 135; “Do You Make These Mistakes in
English,” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 11, 1928, 32.
8. Rowsome, They Laughed When I Sat Down, 153.
9. John Caples, Making Ads Pay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 41–43,
47–50. His French-at-Sight ad became such an item of popular culture that
it was commented on in the press, vaudeville, cartoons, and radio and even
parodied in magazines.
10. Robert Lewis Taylor, “Profiles: I was once a 97-pound weakling” New Yorker,
Jan. 1, 1942, 21–27; see also Elizabeth Toon and Janet Golden “Rethinking
Charles Atlas,” Rethinking History 4(2000), 80–84.
11. On muscular Christianity see, Clifford Putney’s Muscular Christianity:
Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001); for a biography of the colorful Bernarr Macfadden,
178 S notes to pages 99–111
see Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime:The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1991).
12. World Almanac and Encyclopedia (New York: New York World, 1918), 186–87.
13. “The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac” is reprinted in Rowsome,
They Laughed When I Sat Down, 159. “Life’s Most Embarrassing Moments”
and “She said: ‘I’m sorry I can’t go out with you tonight’” are on the Atlas
website: www.charlesatlas.com/classicads3.htm and www.charlesatlas.com/
classicads4.htm [accessed Sept. 7, 2007].
14. Elizabeth Toon and Janet Golden “‘Live Clean, Think Clean, and Don’t Go
to Burlesque Shows’: Charles Atlas as Heath Advisor,” Journal of the History
of Medicine 57(2002): 51–58.
15. For many years, the Atlas ads ran in comic books, pulps, tabloids, and muscle
magazines, and according to Roman, the average student was 15–25.
16. The observations about George H. W. Bush, David Mamet, and Arun
Gandhi are due to Elizabeth Toon and Janet Golden: “Rethinking Charles
Atlas,” Rethinking History 4(2000): 81, 82.
17. “There IS an aristocracy in America! It is an Aristocracy of KNOWLEDGE”
appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Feb. 1, 1931, 15. “The Famous
Pocket University—A Liberal Reading Education,” was in the New York
Times Book Review, Nov. 4, 1923, 32, and “Speak French at Once!” was in the
World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1939, 7A. “How would you like to spend
an hour with Cleopatra?” appeared in The World’s Work for Sept. 1929.

Chapter Eleven
1. The details of Carnegie’s life story rely on the biography by Giles Kemp
and Edward Claflin titled Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) and sociologist Richard M. Huber’s The
American Idea of Success (New York: Pushcart Press, 1987).
2. Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (New York: Pocket
Books, 1974), 88.
3. Dale Carnegie, Little Known Facts about Well Known People (New York: Blue
Ribbon Books, 1934).
4. The story of Michael O’Neil is from a Carnegie ad reprinted by Watkins in
The 100 Greatest Advertisements, 92.
5. Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman, in Autobiography and Other Writings,
167.
6. Conwell did so himself by founding Temple University in Philadelphia.The
title of his famous speech warned against sojourns in search of acres of dia-
monds when riches might be in one’s own backyard.
7. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review, June 1889, 653–64.
 notes to pages 111–115 S 179
8. The quote is cited in Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934), 325, and in Peter Collins and David
Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1976), 47.
9. See Clifford Putney, “Service over Secrecy: How Lodge-Style Fraternalism
Yielded Popularity to Men’s Service Clubs,” Journal of Popular Culture
27(1993): 179–90. The champion of the service ethic was undoubtedly B. C.
Forbes.
10. Cody, Business Practice Up to Date: Or, How to Be a Private Secretary, With
Commercial Map of the United States (Chicago: School of English, 1913),
158–59. Cody mentions the “American man of business,” but adds that busi-
ness “is a game in which American women have a part that has never been
told and in which more and more girls will take an equal part with boys.”
11. H. A. Overstreet, Influencing Human Behavior (New York: W. W. Norton,
1925), 9. Overstreet (page 22) cites Cody’s How to Deal with Human Nature
in Business.
12. Warren Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth Century
Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 279. Huber has also
documented the shifting away from character and toward personality in The
American Idea of Success, and John Ramage, a rhetorician, has noted that in its
religious and spiritual manifestations, success rhetoric of the 1950s increasingly
became a matter of having religion serve people rather than people serving
religion: Twentieth-Century American Success Rhetoric, 111–17.
13. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1956), 252–53; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 260, 262. Whyte cites
Reinhard Bendix’s Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in
the Course of Industrialization (New York:Wiley, 1956) as noting the influence
of New Thought.
14. Huber, for example, writes that the book was “the symbol that marked the
transition” in focus from character to personality: American Idea of Success,
226.
15. Carnegie, How to Win Friends, xiv.
16. Carnegie, How to Win Friends, 33. Carnegie adds that “Every act you have
performed since the day you were first born was performed because you
wanted something.”
17. Carnegie, How to Win Friends, xiv; Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 5.
18. Cody, Business Practice Up to Date, 175. Cody added that “The most cheerful
people in the world are the Christian Scientists, who have made a religion
out of denying that there is any such thing as pain, suffering, and failure.”
180 S notes to pages 115–117
19. Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, 104. Carnegie’s connection
to New Thought is emphasized by Ramage in Twentieth-Century American
Success Rhetoric, 114.
20. In his 1913 book Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, Carnegie
included three appendices—Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” Conwell’s
“Acres of Diamonds,” and a mind power essay titled “As a Man Thinketh”
by James Allen. He noted that these were not directly related to public
speaking but thought that they would be of great interest to readers.
21. “Car-Yes-Man,” Newsweek, Nov. 15, 1937, 31. Modern writers echo this
criticism as well. Micki McGee sees Carnegie as describing “a Hobbesian
world in which smiles and good cheer were a kind of currency, with every
man and woman able to advance themselves by understanding that all oth-
ers were only out for themselves”: Self-help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American
Life (New York: Oxford University Press. 2005), 61.
22. Carnegie wrote that “A show of interest, as with every other principle, must
be sincere. It must pay off not only for the person showing the interest, but
for the person receiving the attention. It is a two-way street—both parties
benefit” (How to Win Friends, 64). But as Ramage points out, Carnegie con-
flated sincerity with mutual benefit, and Carnegie’s definition of sincerity is
not fully convincing because he is unable to provide techniques for sincerity
other than appearing sincere: Twentieth-Century American Success Rhetoric, 109.
23. See his How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
24. Biographers Kemp and Claflin note that Carnegie would have “felt com-
fortable” with psychologists of the transactional analysis school, and they
emphasize parallels with the approach of Norman Vincent Peale in the
1950s and other “positive thinkers”: Dale Carnegie, 111, 189–95. The nature
of personal success has also changed, moving from the notion of correct
behavior and courtesy toward others to self-realization, healthy relation-
ships, and happiness. Religious, business, and personal approaches to suc-
cess often overlap, blend, and influence one another. Ramage, for example,
has noted the blending of morality and efficiency in the work of Stephen
Covey and of interpersonal awareness and corporate efficiency in the work
of Tom Peters (in Twentieth-Century American Success Rhetoric). And in Self-
help, Inc., McGee has emphasized the consistent ability of self-help books to
recycle and reinvent earlier themes.
25. Huber, American Idea of Success, 238.

Chapter Twelve
1. Some students bought supplementary materials, and doubtless many who
began the course never completed it. In addition, there were often specials
and discounts given.
 notes to pages 118–122 S 181
2. See David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986) for discussion of Jefferson (32, 243) and
Webster (57, 68). See also Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to
America (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 127.
3. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow and Company,
1990), 79. Cmiel also notes that grammar was spread by etiquette books as
well.
4. Allan A. Metcalf, Presidential Voices (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 93.
Jackson was accused of murder and adultery as well as bad grammar.
5. “Good Manners in Journalism,” New York Times, April 15, 1868. Slang was a
particular concern, with Boston’s Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writing that
its use “is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy”: “Mechanism in
Thought and Morals,” Pages from an Old Volume of Life (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1891), 275.
6. Mark Twain, “Concerning the American Language,” The Stolen White
Elephant (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1888), 265–67.
7. Webster’s modest 1806 dictionary was followed by the two-volume An
American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. A new edition was pub-
lished in 1841, edited by his son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich, a professor
of rhetoric at Yale, and in 1864 the Webster editorial group, controlled by
George and Charles Merriam, published a revision edited by Noah Porter,
with etymologies revised by the German lexicographer C. A. F. Mahn.
This first unabridged Webster’s dictionary adopted the popular features of
Worcester’s dictionary, omitted many of Webster’s idiosyncrasies, and cor-
rected word histories which had been based on Biblical misunderstandings.
8. “The War of the Dictionaries,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1860.
9. Fowler, cited by Dennis Baron, Grammar and Good Taste (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982), 163.
10. See Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1890) and, for a discussion of dialect literature,William Dean Howells,“New
York Low Life in Fiction,” New York World, July 26, 1896.
11. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (New York: Charles Scribner, 1860),
644. The United States as a whole was still defined linguistically in com-
parison to England. In 1864 Henry Alford, dean of Canterbury, published
A Plea for the Queen’s English, which argued that the purity of the English
language was in danger from the exaggeration and incongruity of American
usage. Alford attributed the decline of American speech to the same moral
laxity that caused the Civil War. Writer George Washington Moon replied
in a work that eventually became titled The Dean’s English, and the ensu-
ing controversy signaled a trend of usage criticism that endured for the
182 S notes to pages 122–128
remainder of the nineteenth century. See Edward Finegan, Attitudes toward
English Usage: The History of a War of Words (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1980), 68–70.
12. Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1870), 205, 207, 214, 215.White went so far as to deny the authority of usage
and to assume that there was only one correct way of expressing some-
thing; see the chapter titled “Jus et Norma Loquendi” (“The law and rule of
speech”).
13. William Matthews, Words,Their Use and Abuse (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1876),
335, 91.
14. Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 133–34. The count of usage manuals in the
National Union Catalog is from Cmiel, 264.
15. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906),
44. The book was based on a commencement speech given at Bryn Mawr
University.
16. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 23. He added that they gain “the
self-confidence and self-respect which this ability inspires, and which no
one who is uncertain of his English can ever possess.”
17. Cody, How You Can Master Good English, 18. Cody also drew on the cachet
of Shakespeare, reminding readers that the poet never studied rules of gram-
mar and rhetoric.
18. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 211. As Levine notes,
there were similar changes going on in the newly expanded library and
museum systems, as well.The question naturally arose of whether they ought
to encourage or discourage the general public from attending by the hours
they kept, the exhibitions and collections they developed, and so forth.
19. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 85–168. Interestingly, he also identifies the
decline of formal oratory as one of the causes of this shift in the theatre; see
page 76.

Chapter Thirteen
1. William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language:Twelve Lectures
on the Principles of Linguistic Science (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867). As
the author of a grammar textbook and editor of the Century Dictionary,
however, Whitney would occasionally condemn popular usage as well.
2. Better Speech Week was developed by Claudia E. Crumpton and reported
on in “Speech Betterment in Alabama,” English Journal 6(1917): 96–102.
The pledge is cited in Betty Gawthrop’s chapter “1911–1929,” in Raven
I. McDavid, Jr., ed., An Examination of the Attitudes of the NCTE Toward
 notes to pages 128–131 S 183
Language: An Analysis of the Development of Ideas on Language Study as Reported
in Journal Articles Published by NCTE (Urbana: National Council of Teachers
of English, 1965), 9–10.
3. See Fred Newton Scott,“The Standard of American Speech,” English Journal
6,(1917): 1–11; George Philip Krapp, “The Improvement of English Speech,”
English Journal 7(1918): 87–97; and Sterling Leonard, “Old Purist Junk,”
English Journal 7(1918): 295–302.
4. Gawthrop, “1911–1929,” 11; Ella Heaton Pope, “Linguistics as a Required
Subject in Colleges and in High School,” English Journal 8(1919): 28–34.
5. Gawthrop, “1911–1929,” 12.
6. George Philip Krapp, The Knowledge of English (New York: Holt, 1927), 178.
7. Thomas Lounsbury, “Compulsory Composition in Colleges,” Harper’s
Monthly, Nov. 1911, 866–80, cited by Cody in “Scientific Principles in the
Teaching of Composition,” English Journal 1(1912): 161.
8. Cody, New Art, 4–5; Cody was referring to Leonard’s book Current English
Usage (Chicago: The Inland Press, 1932). I have not found references to lin-
guists Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in Cody’s work, though they
were publishing at the same time.
9. Cody, Commercial Tests, 51. He added that speech “should not be extreme to
the point of being pedantic or affected.”
10. Cody, New Art, 3.
11. Cody, “Scientific Principles,” 162. He also called attention to class size as
affecting the health of teachers and driving the best ones out of the field,
166–67.
12. C. Michael Lightner, “1930–1945,” in An Examination of the Attitudes of the
NCTE Toward Language, 23. See also Wilbur W. Hatfield, An Experience
Curriculum in English (Champaign, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of
English, 1935). Historically there have been two main reasons given for
grammar teaching in the schools: its supposed usefulness in helping students
to master standard forms of English and its supposed usefulness in improv-
ing writing.
13. See Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, Research in
Written Composition (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English,
1963), 37–38.
14. Leonard, “Old Purist Junk,” 295–96. Leonard does not mention Cody by
name, but in an earlier essay, “In Praise of Prevision,” English Journal 4(1915):
500–07, Leonard had noted that Cody’s suggestion that students write essays
twice was “a valid and useful device” (501).
15. Robert A. Hall, Jr., Linguistics and Your Language (New York: Anchor Books,
1960; rev. ed. of Leave Your Language Alone!, Linguistica, 1950), 9. The chapter
184 S notes to pages 132–136
begins this way: “How many of these frequent errors in English do YOU
make? Do YOU say KEW-pon for KOO-pon, ad-ver-TISE-ment for ad-
VER-tise-ment, or AD-ult for ad-ULT? Almost everybody makes these
blunders in English: between you and I, it’s me, those kind of books. Even the
greatest writers sin against the laws of grammar. We have all seen advertise-
ments in newspapers and magazines, with messages like those just quoted,
implying to the reader ‘shame on you if you are one of those who sin!’—
and of course offering to teach him better.”
16. Hall, Linguistics and Your Language, 29.
17. Cody, Commercial Tests, 13.
18. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-Buckley
and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
2005). See also Robert J. Connors, Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory,
and Pedagogy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 74–75, and
James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 25–28. Two other
popular rhetoric texts were George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)
and Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (1828), which were sometimes
used together with Blair’s.
19. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran, Introduction to Blair,
Lectures, xxxvi, xxxviii.
20. Blair, Lectures, 7.
21. Connors, Composition-Rhetoric, 126.
22. Charles W. Eliot, “Inaugural Address as President of Harvard College,”
Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Century, 1898), 121,
cited by Albert R. Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900 (Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1990), 33.
23. Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 35.
24. College composition texts adapted to this model and reinforced the idea of
grammar as the avoidance of error rather than as an element of style and
variation. See Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 203–04, and Connors,
Composition-Rhetoric, 94–95.
25. Cody, “Scientific Principles,” 164.
26. Cody, “Scientific Principles,” 165.
27. Cody, “Scientific Principles,” 165–66.
28. Genung, Practical Elements of Rhetoric (Boston: Ginn, 1896), 1.
29. Berlin, Writing Instruction, 64–65, discusses Genung’s approach to invention.
Genung, along with Harvard’s Adams Sherman Hill and Barrett Wendell,
helped to set the theoretical stage for modern composition for many years. See
Kitzhaber, Rhetoric, 63–65, for a brief note on Genung as a teacher and scholar.
 notes to pages 136–142 S 185
30. Genung, Outlines of Rhetoric (Boston: Ginn, 1894), iv. The technique of
numbering the rules was intended to provide an efficient way for teachers
to refer students to the explanatory principles underlying their errors, and
was later used with great effect by John Hodges in the Harbrace Handbook
series.
31. Genung, Practical Elements, vii.
32. “Education by Mail,” New York Observer and Chronicle, Aug. 30, 1906.

Chapter Fourteen
1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Extension Work of the University of
Wisconsin,” in Handbook of University Extension, ed. George F. James and
Edmund J. James (Philadelphia: American Society for the Extension of
University Teaching, 1893), 315, cited by Barbara L. Watkins in “A Quite
Radical Idea: The Invention and Elaboration of Collegiate Correspondence
Study,” in The Foundations of American Distance Education: A Century of
Collegiate Correspondence Study, ed. Barbara L.Watkins and Stephen J.Wright
(Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 1991), 11.
2. From an ad in the New York Times Book Review, Feb. 26, 1927.
3. Sylvia N. Rose, “Collegiate-based Noncredit Courses,” in The Foundations of
American Distance Education: A Century of Collegiate Correspondence Study, ed.
Barbara L.Watkins and Stephen J.Wright (Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 1991), 80.
4. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum on the
Conduct of Universities by Business Men (Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954),
191–92. He writes that “a variety of ‘university extension’ bureaux have
been installed, to comfort and edify the unlearned with lyceum lectures, to
dispense education by mail-order, and to maintain some putative contacts
with amateur scholars and dilettanti beyond the pale.”
5. Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968 reprint of the 1930 original), 55. He begins the quote
conceding that “Doubtless, now and then, an earnest student may safely
dispense with continuous, full-time schooling.” See also pages 134–47.
6. The ICS System of Instruction by Mail and the Results Achieved (Scranton: ICS,
1905), xv–xix, iii–vi.
7. John Odell, The International Correspondence Schools As a National Asset
(Scranton: ICS, 1911), 3, 7.
8. Today ICS operates as Penn Foster Career College, offering about 80 courses
of study by distance learning.
9. Noffsinger, Correspondence Schools, Lyceums, Chautauquas (NewYork: Macmillan,
1926), 15–16. Noffsinger estimated the number of students being instructed
by correspondence schools in 1924 as somewhere between 1,750,000 and
186 S notes to pages 142–146
2,000,000. He also estimated that 80% of private schools were controlled by
single individuals. In 1938, Ella Woodyard estimated the correspondence school
industry as having $30,000,000 in annual revenues and 500,000 enrollees.
10. Noffsinger, Correspondence Schools, 33–34.
11. Noffsinger, Correspondence Schools, 42.
12. Ella Woodyard, Culture at a Price: A Study of Private Correspondence School
Offerings (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1940), 22.
She also found fault with Cody’s grammar in some instances. An earlier
review in 1920 described Cody’s course as a model self-instruction sys-
tem, writing that “Each lesson sets up certain objectives which . . . are put
before the student in an interesting way and are arranged so that the student
may see for himself whether or not he has made progress.” Ernest Horn,
“A Suggestive Plan of Individual Instruction in English,” The School Review,
Feb. 1920, 153–54.
13. Woodyard, Culture at a Price, 117.
14. Woodyard, Culture at a Price, 107–08.

Chapter Fifteen
1. The Civic Theatre of Dobbs Ferry was opened “at the suggestion of Sherwin
Cody, well-known educator and a resident of Dobbs Ferry,” according to
Albert McCleery and Carl Glick, Curtains Going Up (New York: Pitman,
1939), 38.
2. See “Pays to Test Your Stenographers,” Forbes, May 29, 1920, 137–38;
“Enlarging the Scope of Mental Measurement,” Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology and Scientific Methods, 17(1920): 572–79; and “How to Spot Defects
in Business Brains,” People’s Favorite Magazine, Nov. 1920, 26–31.
3. See “Books in Brief,” The Nation, Oct. 22, 1924, 450, for a short, negative
review.
4. “‘House That Grows’ Designed for Westchester Site,” New York Times, March
18, 1934; “Architect Builds His Residence of Native Stone,” New York Times,
May 30, 1937; Who’s Who in America, vol. 26 (Chicago: A. N. Marquis, 1950),
517. Cody’s interest in design and real estate can be traced back to his college
years and to his pamphlet on “How to Build a Cheap House.” He also wrote
an approving architectural review of a Bahai center in Chicago: “An Exotic
Temple for a Chicago Suburb,” New York Times Book Review and Magazine,
Aug. 1, 1920, 53.
5. The New Art was first issued as a series in 1933 and then as a single volume
in 1938.
6. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course in English Language, 1936, Lesson 1, 11.
The synonyms were exciting (thrilling), bald (glabrous), calm (allay), weakening
 notes to pages 146–152 S 187
(enervating), stiffly formal (stilted), abusive (scurrilous), decisive (peremptory), very
bright (refulgent), linguist (polyglot), and withdrew (retracted).
7. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, 1936, Lesson 4, 11; Lesson 6, 11.
8. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, 1936, Lesson 1, 1.
9. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, 1936, Lesson 6, 11; Lesson 8, 1.
10. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, 1936, Lessons 8, 10, 14, 16, 18, all p 1. Other
lessons dealt with making new acquaintances, with embarrassing moments,
and with the relation between good talking and acting.
11. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, 1936, Lesson 6, 11.
12. Cody, 100% Self-correcting Course, 1936, Lesson 18, 11, Lesson 3, 1.
13. The remainder of the book was made up of English in a Nutshell for Children
and sample tests of the Good English Institute.
14. Cody, Coaching Children in English, 13–16.
15. Cody, Coaching Children, 22, 27, 28. The link between classroom instruc-
tion and the self-correcting method can be found as early as Cody’s 1912
“Scientific Principles in the Teaching of Composition.”
16. The best example is his 1919 book Commercial Tests and How to Use Them.
17. Cody, Coaching Children, 12.
18. Cody, Coaching Children, 11.
19. Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 217.
20. Cody, Coaching Children, 27.
21. Cody, Coaching Children, 17.
22. The teaching material geared to this method was presented in pages 107–74
of Coaching Children, as the “English in a Nutshell for Children” workbook,
a set of exercises in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and correspondence,
together with explanatory material for parents to use with students.
23. C. K. Ogden, Basic English and Grammatical Reform (Cambridge: The
Orthological Institute, 1937), 2. Basic was an acronym for “British American
Scientific International Commercial” English; it captured the attention of
Winston Churchill, who became a staunch proponent in the 1940s.
24. Cody’s letters are in the C. K. Ogden collection at McMaster University;
Ogden’s replies are not preserved.
25. From the Cody letters in the C. K. Ogden collection.
26. “Letters Found in the Drama Mailbag,” New York Times, April 13, 1952.
27. According to a letter in the Knopf archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center at the University of Texas.
28. Daniel, “Sherwin Cody,” 6.
29. Information on Morrill Cody can be found in Bill Cody’s “Author-
Diplomat Morrill Cody: He Was There As History Pages Turned,” Lost
188 S notes to pages 153–158
Generation Journal, Winter 1981, 2–5 and Tom Wood’s “Cody Best Known
Among Literati,” Lost Generation Journal, Winter 1981, 6. Like many people,
Sherwin Cody seems to have been a more affable grandparent than parent,
and he had a particularly strong relationship with his granddaughter Judith.
30. Carter Daniel, personal communication. Daniel interviewed Morrill in the
1980s, and I am grateful to him for sharing his recollections.
31. The context was a book notice of new editions of several of his books on
letter writing. The reviewer commented that “The indefatigable Sherwin
Cody has revised his textbooks” and that “his little manuals have rendered
wide service to those who have grown rusty in their English, as well as to
those who have awakened too late to the fact that writing is not a superflu-
ous accomplishment but a practical necessity,” The Nation, Sept. 7, 1918, 272.
32. Peter Bart, “Advertising Slogan is Disappearing After Forty Years,” New York
Times, Feb. 14, 1962.
33. Dorothy Carnegie passed away in 1998. Charles Atlas’s body-building course
also survives today. Atlas lived longer than Cody and Carnegie, until 1972,
and his long-time business partner Charles Roman helped to guide the
course through the last half of the twentieth century. As the bodybuilding
culture grew as a niche, Atlas’s advertising shifted from the general market to
the fitness and health magazines and today is even attracting senior citizens
for whom Charles Atlas is a familiar name from their youth.
34. Schwab retired in 1962 and moved to Torremolinos, Spain. In 1972 the
agency he and Beatty built was acquired by Marsteller Inc., which then was
bought by Young and Rubicam. Schwab died in 1980.
35. “Do People Laugh at You for Reading Comic Books?” Mad, June 1954, 17;
Mad satirized the intellectual success culture more generally in pieces like
“How to Be Smart” (Mad, April 1956, 9–15).
36. The critique appeared in “The Creative Man’s Corner: How Do Youse Feel
About It?” Advertising Age, April 14, 1958, 84, and Kemp’s letter in Advertising
Age, May 5, 1958, 160. Given Cody’s seriousness, it may be that the ad
appeared after his 1957 stroke.The Creative Man’s Corner piece also elicited
a reply by Cody’s cousin Aldus Cody, who countered that “the people who
say ‘can’t hardly’ and ‘youse’ are not insulted by this advertising”: Advertising
Age, May 5, 1958, 160.
37. Peter Bart, “Advertising Slogan is Disappearing After Forty Years,” New York
Times, Feb. 14, 1962.
38. Barzun found particular fault with linguists and English educators; see my
book Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 55–58.
39. The distinction between formal and colloquial English was not disap-
pearing, it was just becoming more widely visible through the broadcast
 notes to pages 158–163 S 189
media and more hotly discussed through public debates about the National
Council of Teachers of English report on The English Language Arts (New
York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1952). The heat continued into the 1960s
with the commentary surrounding the publication of Webster’s Third New
International Dictionary, which was described as “a kind of Kinsey Report
in linguistics”; see Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip
Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics, 309, n. 23, quoting a review in
the Detroit News (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
40. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University
of Illinois, 1964), 309, for discussion of the pulps, and Benjamin Compaine,
The Newspaper Industry in the 1980s (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry
Publications, 1980), 28, for newspaper circulation. According to Compaine,
Sunday newspaper circulation grew from about 17 million in 1920 to about
46 million in 1950, and then grew just modestly for the next 20 years to 49
million in 1970.
41. William D. Smith, “Study by Mail is Gaining Favor,” New York Times, July
1, 1962. The Times also reported correspondence school owners’ optimistic
forecasts of continued profitability based on population growth, automation,
the need to retrain unskilled workers, and other factors.

Chapter Sixteen
1. By providing self-study materials for potential test-takers, he also helped to
pave the way for the business of test preparation, taken up by contemporary
businesses like Kaplan Test Prep and The Princeton Review, among others.
2. In addition, the stoking of grammatical anxiety through books of verbal
criticism remains a thriving market niche today.
 Answers to Exercises

Answers to “Subordinate Clauses”

punctuation exercise (page 56)

This Lesson 6 exercise asked readers to “Decide which clauses in

the following are to be set off by commas and which not, insert-
ing also periods and capital letters.” Readers were also instructed
to mark simple subjects, predicates, subordinate conjunctions, and
relative pronouns. In the key, subjects are underlined, predicates
are italicized, and subordinating conjunctions and relative pro-
nouns are bolded.

Yesterday we went for a picnic to the woods which we

visited last summer. Even before the sun was up Harold and
Ellen were out of bed and getting dressed. As I had packed
our lunch basket the night before, we had only to dress and
get our breakfast. I told mother that I would not let the boys
go in swimming, and Ellen promised to see that the girls did
not take off their shoes. Mother was afraid that snakes might
bite their feet.
 answers to exercises S 191

Answers to Lesson 1 Grammar Self-Test (page 59)

1. Every one of those men (has his—have their) pickax. Each

point (is—are) as clear as a star. The woman or the tiger
(come—comes) out. Montgomery Ward & Co. (have—has)
settled the strike. The Montgomery Ward Company (have—
has) settled the strike.
2. The ship (sank—sunk). [sank or sunk is accepted] The bird
has (broke—broken) its wing.
3. He has (laid—lain) it down. When he came in he (set—sat)
down. I saw that the book (lay—laid) on the table. At eight
o’clock I (laid—lay) down. At eight o’clock I (set—sat) down.
4. The doctor said that fever (produces—produced) thirst. It had
happened before I (saw—had seen) him. From what I saw of
him he appeared (to be—to have been) a man of letters.
5. I wish Anna (was—were) here. If Anna (was—were) here, she
would nurse him. If Anna (was—were) there, she was the life
of the company.
6. While sitting on my doorstep, a beautiful butterfly caught my
eye—While sitting on my doorstep, I caught sight of a beautiful
butterfly. By doing so you will clear up the matter—By doing
so the matter will be cleared up. On weighing the sugar a short-
age was found—On weighing the sugar he found a shortage.
7. I saw (him—his) doing it. I approve (him—his) doing it.
What do you think of (me—my) going to town?
8. I was frightened at that examination’s length—the length of
that examination. For (goodness’—goodness’s—goodness)
sake. He spoke of the land’s fertility—the fertility of the land.
9. I do not like (those—that) sort of people. I belong to
(that—those) kind myself.
10. He feels (bad—bably) about it. It looks (good—well) to me.
The general stood (firm—firmly).

Grammar school graduates average 13 mistakes

High school graduates average 8 mistakes
Experienced stenographers average 5 mistakes
192 S answers to exercises

Answers to “What are Your

Mistakes in Grammar?” (pages 67–68)

From Lesson 8—Grammar

1. The Company (has—have) issued its financial statement.
2. Our factory (have—has) established new rules for employees.
3. The United States Army in France (have—has) fought well.
4. An army of laboring men (was—were) pouring over the
bridge.
5. A few of the men (was—were) running.
6. A number of the men (was—were) running.
7. The number of men on the list (were—was) fifty.
8. A fixed number of men (is—are) drawn each year.
9. None of the men of our day (speaks—speak) so clearly as
Wilson.
10. None of the Fifth Regiment (were—was) wounded.
11. The Jones Brothers Tea Company (has—have) joined the
society.
12. Jones Brothers (has—have) joined the society.
13. Tait & Co. (have—has) joined the society.
14. Lloyd George’s Cabinet (has—has) decided to resign.
15. Mamie Brown, together with six other girls and five boys,
(have—has) appeared for examination.
16. Each of the sixteen companies of infantry and three compa-
nies of artillery (is—are) now on parade.
17. Several of the sixteen companies of infantry and three com-
panies of artillery (is—are) on parade.
18. Every one of the forty seventh-grade boys and the A division
of girls (was—were) promoted.
19. The President’s staff, including Major-General Wood, Colonel
Lansing, and Major Downing, (are—is) leading the procession.
20. The first essential in choosing your studies (is—are) definite
aims.
 answers to exercises S 193

21. Captain Jones, as well as the sailors, (has—have) been

wounded.
22. None of these fifty men (are—is) eligible.
23. Our class of ninety-five (has—have) just graduated.
24. The congregation of the Episcopal church (are—is) voting
for a pastor.
25. The United States (are—is) demanding reciprocity.
194 S answers to exercises

Answers to “Which is it?” (page 72)

The weather affects his nerve. The medicine effects ( produces) a

cure. (Lesson 1)
His impudence aggravates (adds to) the offense but do not say
“He aggravates (irritates) me.” (Lesson 1)
An historical (accent not on the first syllable) or a historical.
A hero, a history (accent on syllable containing h). (Lesson 1,
with note)
He lives at Libertyville (a small city). He lives in Chicago (a large
city) or in Pennsylvania (a state). (Lesson 2)
He is apt in his lessons, but not apt to hear at any time that he is
promoted. Say, “likely to hear.” (Lesson 2)
A performance is continuous when it has no break, but it
may rain continually even though it stops now and then.
(Lesson 4)
Only things that inspire awe should be called awful. It was
an awful thunderstorm but surely not an awfully sweet cake.
(Lesson 3)
She sits beside the bed (by the side of ) but there is no one there
besides (aside from) her. (Lesson 3)
We bring apples to this place. We carry the apples away to that
place. We fetch the apples by going after them and bringing
them. (Lesson 3)
The pie was divided between the two of them but among the
three or more of them. (Lesson 3)
We die of a disease not from it or with it. (Lesson 5)
There are divers (various) opinions in regards to war, but the
opinions of the Germans and of the allies are diverse (opposed
to each other). (Lesson 5)
When two are concerned we speak of each other, when several
one another. (Lesson 5)
It is best to use farther for distances, and further in a figurative
sense for anything additional, as, “We will go no further. Have
you anything further to say.” (Lesson 6)
 answers to exercises S 195

They advanced forward or forwards many miles (you may decide

for yourself which sounds better). (Lesson 7)
The English call a laborer a “man” and an aristocrat who is just
as boorish a “gentleman”; but Americans prefer to reserve the
word “gentleman” for the man who has natural instincts of high
breeding. (Lesson 7)
Americans are said to guess when they mean think, but “I
guess it is true” seems to be a pretty well accepted idiom.
(Lesson 7)
Hardly implies the negative, so “I can’t hardly make it out” is
tautological for “I can hardly make it out.” (Lesson 7)
Got is preferred to gotten as the past participle, but even so we
should not say “We have got a thing” when we mean simply
“We have it.” (Lesson 7)
It is a mere affectation to speak of a sales lady when saleswoman is
the simple and democratic word. (Lesson 8)
“Lit” is an obsolete form of lighted. (Lesson 9)
Ladies in society go to “luncheon” while common folk in a
hurry eat “lunch.” (Lesson 9)
Née, meaning born, is feminine, while né with but one e is
masculine. (Lesson 10)
“I had only two dollars in my pocket” is correct while “I only
had” would be wrong, since it makes only limit the act of having
instead of two.” (Lesson 11)
We should say “ten pair of shoes” but “several pairs”—pair for
the plural when preceded by a number, pairs when preceded by
other words. (Lesson 11)
“Gents” wear “pants” while “gentlemen” wear “trousers.” (Lesson
11)
We permit in a formal way, but allow by tacit consent. (Lesson
11)
. . . when we say “I met a party in the street who told me he
had just enlisted in the army”; we use party when person would
correctly convey the meaning, and it is contrary to the
(continued)
196 S answers to exercises

principles of language to admit a new word without some added

meaning. (Lesson 11)
Children are reared not raised, though we may raise chickens.
(Lesson 12)
Americans also have a bad habit of calling every proposal a
“proposition.” A proposal is something to do, while a proposition is
something to be discussed. (Lesson 13)
That which is usable, useful, or valuable in practice is practical,
but that which is workable is said to be practicable (capable of
being practiced). (Lesson 13)
In the United States, young people attending schools are called
pupils through the elementary and high school and students when
they get to college, on the theory that they are independently
interested in studying things out for themselves instead of merely
being taught. (Lesson 15)
Things seem to the inner mind, but appear to the outer senses.
(Lesson 15)
Standpoint and point of view are interchangeable, according to the
requirements of euphony. (Lesson 16)
We choose toward or towards purely according to the sound and
the same is true of afterward and afterwards, onward and onwards,
forward, backward, upward, etc. (Lesson 17)
“We all like to joyfully recall the days of youth” is an
unnecessary splitting of the infinitive, for “we all like joyfully
to recall” sounds just as natural. There are cases, however,
where splitting the infinitive seems necessary in expressing our
meaning, usually because of some special emphasis we require.
(Lesson 17)
Unbeknownst is merely a vulgar form of unbeknown. (Lesson 17)
Use entire in describing objects made up of several units, as “the
entire audience,” “the entire membership.” And whole of with
such a solid unit as an apple—“the whole of an apple” (Lesson 18).
 Sherwin Cody Timeline

1868 Born, Nov. 30, in Cody’s Mills, Michigan, the oldest

child of Aldus and Eliza Cody.
1879 Aldus Cody dies of tuberculosis on Jan. 12.
1880 Eliza Cody dies in July. Orphaned, Sherwin moves in
with relatives in Canterbury, New Hampshire.
1889 Sherwin Cody graduates from Amherst College.
1891 Thomas Foster begins The International
Correspondence School.
1893 Cody moves to New York to pursue a literary career;
publishes Life’s Philosophy, a book of poems.
1894 Publishes How to Write Fiction, and travels to London to
pursue a literary career.
1896 Publishes In the Heart of the Hills; marries Marian Teresa
Hurley (Sept. 5) and moves to Chicago, where he works
at the Chicago Record and then the Tribune.
1897 Founds the Old Greek Press.
1901 Marian and Sherwin have a son, Edward Morrill Cody.
1903 Cody publishes the four-volume The Art of Writing and
Speaking the English Language.
1906 Launches a humor magazine, The Touchstone.
198 S sherwin cody timeline
1907 Publishes the initial Nutshell Library.
1909 Charles Eliot first publishes The Harvard Classics.
1911 Cody travels to Europe for a year’s vacation with
Marian and Morrill.
1914 Works with National Cash Register Co., Burroughs
Adding Machine Co., National Cloak & Suit Co., and
Filene’s on employee testing.
1916 Founds the National Associated Schools of Scientific
Business.
1917 Works with William Wirt in the Gary, Indiana, school
system on testing and assessment.
1918 Approaches the Ruthrauff & Ryan agency,
meets Maxwell Sackheim, and launches The
Sherwin Cody 100% Self-correcting Course in English
Language.
1919 Publishes Commercial Tests and How to Use Them, drawing
on his Gary work.
1923 Publishes Sherwin Cody’s Business Ability Development
Course.
1926 Maxwell Sackheim and Harry Scherman launch The
Book-of-the-Month Club.
1928 Cody purchases a home site in Dobbs Ferry,
New York, which later becomes the Hilltop Park
community.
1933 Publishes The New Art of Writing and Speaking the
English Language.
1936 Dale Carnegie first publishes How to Win Friends and
Influence People.
Cody issues a revision of the 100% Self-correcting Course.
1943 Marian Cody dies of cancer on Feb. 8. Cody enters a
correspondence with C. K. Ogden about a new project
to teach English by pictures.
1944 Publishes Coaching Children in English.
1953 Closes the Rochester office. The U.S. School of
Music in Port Washington, New York, takes over the
management of the course until Cody’s death.
 sherwin cody timeline S 199
1957 Cody has a stroke and moves in with caretaker Nellie
Brink in Brooklyn, New York.
1959 Dies on April 6, in Brooklyn, at the age of 90. The
final New York Times “Do You Make These Mistakes in
English?” ad runs on Dec. 27.
 Works by Sherwin Cody

1893
Life’s Philosophy. Privately printed book of poems.

1894
How to Write Fiction, Especially the Art of Short Story Writing. New York: The
Riverside Literary Bureau, C. T. Dillingham & Co.
“Artist-authors,”Outlook 49(May 26), 910–11.

1895
How to Write Fiction, Especially the Art of Short Story Writing: A Practical Study of
Technique. London: Bellairs, 1895 [reprint of 1894].

1896
In the Heart of the Hills. London: J. M. Dent.

1897
Story Composition. Chicago: A. Flanagan.

1899
The Story of William Cullen Bryant for Young Readers. New York & Chicago:
Werner School Book Company. [The Young Readers books were part of
the Baldwin’s biographical booklets series.]
 works by sherwin cody S 201
The Story of Washington Irving for Young Readers. New York & Chicago: Werner
School Book Company.
The Story of Edgar Allan Poe for Young Readers. New York & Chicago: Werner
School Book Company.
The Story of John Greenleaf Whittier for Young Readers. New York & Chicago:
Werner School Book Company.
Four American Poets;William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John
Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes; A Book for Young Americans: New
York & Chicago: Werner School Book Company [reprinted in 1977 by
Folcroft Library Editions].
Four Famous American Writers:Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell
Lowell, Bayard Taylor; A Book for Young Americans: New York & Chicago:
Werner School Book Company.

1902
How to Build a Cheap House. [n.p.]
Selections from the World’s Greatest Short Stories; Illustrative of the History of Short
Story Writing; with Critical and Historical Comments by Sherwin Cody. Chicago:
A.C. McClurg & Company [published also as A Selection from the World’s
Greatest Short Stories and World’s Greatest Short Stories].

1903
A Selection from the Best English Essays Illustrative of the History of English Prose
Style; Chosen and Arranged with Historical & Critical Introductions by Sherwin
Cody. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company.
“Poe’s Contributions to American Literary history,” The Dial (Sept. 16), 161–62.
The Best Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Edited with an Introduction by Sherwin Cody.
Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company.
The Best Poems and Essays of Edgar Allan Poe Edited with a New Biographical
and Critical Study of the Author, by Sherwin Cody. Chicago: A.C. McClurg &
Company.
The Art of Writing & Speaking the English Language. Chicago: The Old Greek
Press [also revised and published in 1903 by Funk & Wagnalls; see note on
page 206].
Word-Study. Chicago: The Old Greek Press.

1904
A Selection from the World’s Great Orations Illustrative of the History of Oratory and
the Art of Public Speaking, Chosen and Edited with a Series of Introductions by
Sherwin Cody. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Company.
Good English Form Book in Business Letter Writing. Chicago: School of English.
202 S works by sherwin cody
1905
A Selection from the Great English Poets, with an Essay On the Reading of Poetry;
Chosen and Arranged, with a Series of Introductions, by Sherwin Cody. Chicago:
A.C. McClurg & Company.
How to Read and What to Read. Chicago & New York: The Old Greek Press.
Exercises in Word-Study to Accompany Sherwin Cody’s Word-Study. Chicago: School
of English.

1906
Success in Letter Writing: Business and Social. Chicago: A.C. McClurg [New rev.
ed. Rochester, N.Y.: Sherwin Cody School of English, 1921].
The Cody System. Chicago [privately printed cards].

1907
Word-Study and Business Speller, for High Schools and Business Colleges. Chicago:
School of English.
“How to Get a Step Higher in the Business World,” Agricultural Advertising
17(Sept.), 234–235.
An Evening with Shakespeare. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Lamb. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Dickens. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Thackeray. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Burns. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Lincoln. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Irving. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Tennyson. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Longfellow. Chicago: School of English.
An Evening with Scott. Chicago: School of English.

1908
How to Do Business by Letter, and Training Course in Business English Composition.
The Old Greek Press.

1909
“Poe as Critic,” Putnam’s Magazine vol. 5 ( Jan.), 438–40.

1911
How to Do Business by Letter, and Advertising; A Practical and Scientific Method
of Handling Customers by Written Salesmanship. London, Constable and
 works by sherwin cody S 203
Company, Ltd., [also published in an Advertising and Salesmanship edition
in 1912].

1912
Literary Composition; A Practicable Method of Learning to Write Effectively. Chicago:
School of English.
Problems and Principles of Correct English, Grammar, Punctuation, Rhetorical
Criticism. Chicago: School of English [a supplement to “Exercises in business
letter writing”].
Exercises on How to Do Business. Chicago: School of English.
“Scientific Principles in the Teaching of Composition,” English Journal 1,
161–72.

1913
How to Be a Private Secretary; Or, Business Practice Up to Date, with Commercial
Map of the United States. Chicago: School of English.

1914
“The Ideal Course in English for Vocational Students,” English Journal 3.5,
263–81, continued in 3.6, 371–80.
English for Business Uses and Commercial Correspondence. Chicago: School of
English.
The Voters Hand Book: Compiled Especially for the Use of American Women. Farkas
Co.

1915
How to Deal with Human Nature in Business; A Practical Book On Doing Business
by Correspondence, Advertising, and Salesmanship. New York & London: Funk
& Wagnalls Company, also Chicago: School of English.

1916
“Tests to Use When You Hire,” System (Aug.), 122–30.

1917
“A Scientific Method of Employing Office Help,” Proceedings of the Second
Pan American Scientific Congress (ed. by Glen Levin Swiggett). Washington:
Government Printing Office, Section IV, Part 2,Vol.V, 113–18.
Brief Fundamentals. Chicago: School of English [rev. eds. 1936 and 1949].
204 S works by sherwin cody
1918
The Sherwin Cody 100% Self-Correcting Course in English Language. Rochester,
N.Y.: The Sherwin Cody School of English [revised 1936].
How You Can Master Good English—in Just 15 Minutes a Day. [Rochester, N.Y.:
The Sherwin Cody School of English [earlier version of the advertising
booklet How to Speak and Write Masterly English].
Course in the New Business Efficiency, Or, How to Make Money in Business (Mind
Power in Business). New York: B.C. Forbes.

1919
Commercial Tests and How to Use Them.Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book
Company.

1920
Standard Test English. New York: Association Press.
Teachers’ Manual to Accompany Standard Test English. New York: Association Press.
“Enlarging the Scope of Mental Measurement,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods 17.21 (Oct. 7), 572–79.
“Pays to Test Your Stenographers,” Forbes (May 29), 137–38.
“How to Spot Defects in Business Brains,” Peoples Favorite Magazine 33.5
(Nov.), 26–31.
“An Exotic Temple for a Chicago Suburb,” New York Times (Aug. 1), 53.

1923
Business Practice Up to Date. Rochester, N.Y.: Business Ability Institute.
Correspondence Practice at Constable’s, Rochester, N.Y.: The Business Ability
Institute.
The Ideal Course in English for Vocational Students: Business Practice Up to Date, Or, How
to Be a Private Secretary. Rochester, N.Y.: Business Ability Institute (2nd ed.).
Fundamentals of Business, by William Marvin Jackson, edited with exercises by
Sherwin Cody. Rochester, N.Y.: Business Ability Institute.
Sherwin Cody’s Business Ability Development Course. Rochester, N.Y.: The
Business Ability Institute.

1924
Poe—Man, Poet, and Creative Thinker. New York: Boni and Liveright.

1927
An Evening with Twain. Rochester, N.Y.: Sherwin Cody School of English.
 works by sherwin cody S 205
1928
The Sherwin Cody 100% Self-Correcting Course in Pronunciation, Accompanied
by Sherwin Cody’s Actual Voice Lessons in Six Parts (phonograph records).
Rochester, N.Y.: The Sherwin Cody School of English.

1929
How to Speak and Write Masterly English. Rochester, N.Y.: The Sherwin Cody
School of English.

1930
Habit-forming Language Practice, by Sherwin Cody, E.A. Cross, F.H. Bair, and
Muriel Lanz. [Teachers’ edition] Rochester, N.Y.: The Sherwin Cody
School of English.

1933
The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language New York: Esser-
Frederick [in six separate volumes which were collected as one in 1938 by
the Sun Dial Press in New York].

1934
Interesting Letters, How to Write Them. New York & Chicago: The Gregg
Publishing Company.
Teaching Letter Writing as a Composition Art: A Teacher’s Manual for “Interesting
Letters.” New York & Chicago: The Gregg Publishing Company.

1937
Success in Letter Writing, Business and Social. Rochester, N.Y.: Sherwin Cody
School of English.

1940
Pocket Cyclopedia of Good English. Rochester, N.Y.: Sherwin Cody School of
English.

1944
Good English Quick Reference Book. New York: Good English Publishers.
Coaching Children in English. New York: Good English Publishers. [Includes
English in a Nutshell for Children and tests of the Good English Institute.]
206 S works by sherwin cody
1950
Greatest Stories, and How They Were Written; selected by W. E. Henley with a
series of introductions on the art of short story writing by Sherwin Cody.
New York: Sherwin Cody Associates. [A re-edited version of Cody’s 1902
Selections from the World’s Greatest Short Stories.]
Letters:Writing to Get People to Do Things. Rochester, N.Y.: Sherwin Cody
Course in English.

Bibliographic Note
This bibliography lists information for most but not all of Cody’s publications,
some of which are not recoverable: Touch Typing-Writing Instructor, Business Letter
Writing, Short Term Grammar Drill (all cited in the 1907 edition of Word-Study
and Business Speller), Marshall Brown, American Business Man (cited in How to
Deal with Human Nature in Business), Pitfalls in English (advertised in a March
29, 1925 New York Times ad), The Chinese Empire: Past and Present (cited in the
1922 edition of Story Writing and Journalism), and Language in a Nutshell for 100%
Mastery (cited in Interesting Letters: How to Write Them).
The Art of Writing & Speaking the English Language was first published in
1903 by Cody’s Old Greek Press, in a Literary Digest edition and a “Special
SYSTEM edition,” and the same year in a revised edition by Funk &
Wagnall’s. The original series consisted of four books, Word-study, Grammar and
Punctuation, Composition, and Constructive Rhetoric. The Art of Writing & Speaking
the English Language was available as a boxed set (for $2) or individually (for 75¢
each).
Constructive Rhetoric reprinted The Art of Short Story Writing and How to Write
Fiction and included some new material as well. Constructive Rhetoric was retitled
Story Writing and Journalism in the 1905 Literary Digest edition, and the initial
chapter on Business Letter Writing was removed to serve as the basis for “The
Cody System” correspondence course).
The Funk & Wagnall’s version was expanded to six volumes and included
a volume on The Dictionary of Errors and How to Read and What to Read, the
first volume of the Nutshell Library. G.P. Putnam’s published a revised edition
beginning in 1922 consisting of five books: World-study, Grammar & Punctuation,
Composition & Rhetoric, Constructive Rhetoric, and Dictionary of Errors.
The New Art of Writing and Speaking the English Language was published in
the 1930s, first by Esser, then by Sun Dial Press and Doubleday, and finally in
the 1940s by Cody himself (Sherwin Cody Associates). The New Art included
(as one volume) Grammar, Punctuation,Word Study, Composition, Story Writing and
Journalism, How to Do Business by Letter, and The Dictionary of Errors.
 Index

Adams, John Quincy, 119 “She said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t go out
Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 37 with you tonight,’ ” 100
ad headlines, 6, 20, 26, 37, 39, 41, “Speak French at Once!”, 102
43–44, 80, 83–85, 88, 99–104, 125, “The Insult that Made a Man out
138, 176 n, 182 n of Mac,” 100
“15 Minutes a Day Makes All the “There IS an aristocracy in
Difference,” 89 America! It is an Aristocracy of
“Again She Orders—A Chicken KNOWLEDGE,” 102
Salad Please,” 95 “They Grinned When the Waiter
“Both are Embarrassed—Yet Both Spoke to Me in French,” 97
Could Be at Ease,” 95 “They Laughed When I Sat down
“Consider the Case of Michael to Play the Piano,” 97
O’Neil,” 108 “You’re a Fine Fellow,” 84–85
“Do You Make These Mistakes in Adler, Mortimer J., 176 n
English?”, 4–6, 39–45 advertising, 4–11, 16–20, 25, 28, 36–45,
Harvard Classics, 88 79–104, 108, 112–117, 123–124,
“He thinks he is speaking correct 137, 143–144, 154–158, 160–164
English!”, 7 Advertising Age, 38, 156–157
“How to Speak and Write Alcott, Louisa May, 174 n
Masterly English,” 40 Alexander Hamilton Institute,
“How would you like to spend an 103, 154
hour with Cleopatra?”, 102 Alford, Henry, 181 n
“Maybe youse don’t talk like this,” Alger, Horatio, 17, 110–111
156–157 Allen, James, 180 n
208 S index
Amazing Stories, 6 Buck, Pearl, 77
American Association for Adult Buckminster, Joseph, 173 n
Education, 143 Burnham, William H., 167 n
American Association of Advertising Burns, Robert, 74
Agencies, 37 Bush, George H. W., 103
American Magazine, 6 business communication, 8, 19, 22–26,
Amherst College, 13–15, 78, 135, 152 114, 123–124, 135, 162
Anderson, Margaret, 34
Anderson, Sherwood, 77 Caldwell, Erskine, 77
Arthur Murray Dance Studios, 103 Caldwell, Mark, 177 n
Atlas, Charles (Angelo Siciliano), 8, Callahan, Raymond E., 167 n
11, 98–102, 154 Campbell, George, 184 n
Atlas, Herc and Diana, 99 Canby, Henry, 77, 174 n
audience, importance of, 25, 45–48, Caples, John, 43, 97
55, 75–76, 119, 120, 123 Captain America, 101
Austen, Jane, 174 n Carnegie Institute of Technology,
Ayres, Leonard P., 52, 122 3, 45
Carnegie, Andrew, 3, 110–111
Bagley, William, 27 Carnegie, Dale, 8, 11, 98, 105–116, 144,
Bair, Frederick H., 170 n 147, 154–155, 162
Bart, Peter, 188 n Carnegie, Dorothy, 77, 109, 155
Barton, Bruce, 37, 169 n, 176 n Carson, Johnny, 156
Barzun, Jacques, 156 Cather, Willa, 77
Basic English, 150–151 Cecil, George, 175 n
Beason, Larry, 172 n Chandler, William Eaton, 16
Beatty, Robert, 39, 43, 105, 155 Chapman, John Jay, 88
Beecher, Henry Ward, 110 character (vs. personality), 8, 17, 48,
Bendix, Reinhard, 179 n 54, 76, 81–89, 95–96, 109–116,
Berlin, James, 184 n 135, 147, 152, 167 n, 175 n, 179 n
Better Speech Week, 128, 182 n Chautauqua reading circles, 87
Binet, Alfred, 32 Chicago Record, 18
Black Mask, 6, 45, 93 Chicago Tribune, 18, 45
Blair, Hugh, 132–133, 136 Churchill, Winston, 187 n
Boni, Albert and Charles, 91 Civic Theatre of Dobbs Ferry, 186 n
Book of Etiquette, 3, 11, 95–96 Civilian Conversation Corps, 140
Book-of-the-Month Club, 19, 77, Clark, Ernest R., 170 n
91–93, 174 n, 177 n Cmiel, Kenneth, 119, 122
Boston Herald, 16 Cody, Aldus (father), 12
Brink, Nellie, 151 Cody, Aldus M. (cousin), 188
Brontë, Charlotte and Emily, 174 n Cody, Bill, 187
Browne, Charles F., 120 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 157, 165 n
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 174 n Cody, Edward Morrill, 152–155
Bryant, William Cullen, 18, 122 Cody, Eliza (mother), 12–13
 index S 209
Cody, Marian, 17, 34, 145, 152–155 Crumpton, Claudia E., 182 n
Cody, Peter Malcolm, 152 Cutex Nail Polish, 37, 80
Cody, Sherwin, 100% Self-correcting
Course, 117, 143–48, 154–59 Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., 109
business career, 10, 18–35, 160–164 Dalrymple, Helen, 175 n
comparison with Dale Carnegie, Daniel, Carter, 26, 152
109–116 democracy of goods, parable of,
contributions to advertising 3–7, 79–88, 101
38–47 Dewey, Evelyn and John, 30
early years, 12–18, 49 Dial (The Chicago Dial ), 17, 153
Genung’s influence on, 136–137 Dickens, Charles, 21, 55, 74
on language 28–32, 45–72, 117, Dickinson, Emily, 174 n
129–131, 134–138 dictionaries, 69, 119–120, 123, 181 n
on letter writing, 18–26, 32–33, Dilworth, W. H., 167 n
47–48, 114, 147–148, 161 Doane, Robert R., 168 n
on literature, 11, 16–18, 21, 46–48, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 145
73–78, 114, 135, 137, 173 n Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 77
philosophy of education and Dreiser, Theodore, 77
school reform 9, 27–33, 35–28, Drew, Celia Anne 167 n
136–138, 147–151 Duofold Health Underwear, 83
scientific approach, 8, 14, 27, 70, 82, Dynamic-Tension, 101, 154
153, 172 n
on writing 22–27, 48 education, 13–33, 46–48, 65–67,
Collier Publishing, 87, 176 n 77–78, 82, 86–88, 92, 119,
Collins, Peter, 179 n 127–136, 140–144, 148–149,
Columbia University, 77, 140, 156 158–159, 161–164. See also school
Compaine, Benjamin, 189 n reform; grammar teaching
Connors, Robert J., 66, 172 n, 184 n Eichler, Lillian, 95–96
Conwell, Russell H., 110, 178 n, Eliot, Charles W., 76, 86–92, 95, 133, 144
180 n Elliot, George, 174 n
Coolidge, Calvin, 37 Emerson, Harrington, 167 n
Cornell University Correspondence Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 75–76, 87
University, 137, 139 English Journal, 28, 66, 128–129, 135
correspondence education, 9–11, 20, English language, colloquial, 4, 8–9,
25, 79, 117, 137–143 22–26, 54–55, 63–65, 69, 78,
Cortina, Count (Rafael Diez de la 119–124, 130–131, 148, 156- 158,
Cortina), 102 161–163
Cotton, Edward H., 109 morphology, 53
Courtis Tests in Arithmetic, 32 pronoun none, 63
Covey, Stephen, 180 n pronunciation, 10, 31, 46–54, 60, 73,
Creative Man’s Corner, 156–157, 188 n 128, 131, 146
Creighton,Violet and Ted (fictional punctuation, 10, 24, 32–34, 47,
characters), 96 55–57, 60, 66, 70, 73, 134, 150
210 S index
English language, (continued) Gilbreth, Frank, 167 n
slang and dialect, 46, 57, 120–121, Gillette Company, 83
127–128 Glasgow, Ellen, 77
sound structure, 50–54 Glick, Carl, 186 n
spelling, 32–34, 47–48, 51–53, 64, Golden, Janet, 177 n, 178 n
73, 120, 134 Goodrich, Chauncey, 181 n
subjunctive forms, 62 Goodrum, Charles, 175 n
subordinate clauses, 55–56 Gould, Edward, 122
use of hopefully, 65 Graff, Gerald, 174 n
use of the generic masculine, 62 grammar teaching, 28–32, 50, 65–67,
Epstein, Joseph, 24 70, 117, 129–131, 134–135, 138,
Ernst, Robert, 178 n 183 n
Erskine, John, 77, 174 n grammatical correctness, 8–9, 24–25,
Esenwein, Joseph Berg, 106 45–46, 56–67, 95, 102, 106,
etiquette, 23, 80–81, 94–97, 103, 113, 116–117, 122, 127, 134, 143, 156,
143, 174 n 163. See also prescriptivism
grammatical insecurities, 117–125
Faulkner, William, 77 grammatical terminology, 51, 55–57,
Ferris, Woodbridge N., 31 65, 128
Finegan, Edward, 182 n Greeley, Horace, 120
first impressions, parable of 80, 101. Greenberg, Clement, 174 n
See also impression management Grimm, Jakob, 126
Flexner, Abraham, 140
Forbes, 145 Haas, Robert, 91
Forbes, B. C. (Bertie Charles), 106, Hagge, John 167 n
179 n Hairston, Maxine, 66
foreign words and names, 53, 146 Hall, Robert A. Jr., 131–132, 183 n
Foster, Thomas J., 141 Harper, William Rainey, 139
Fowler, Henry Watson, 63 Harris, George Washington, 120
Fowler, William Chauncey, 121 Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Franklin, Benjamin, 80, 87, 106, 109, Center at the University of
174 n, 175 n Texas, 187 n
Freud, Sigmund, 126 Harvard Classics, 3, 8, 11, 76,
86–94, 104, 116, 176 n. See also ad
Gandhi, Arun, 102 headlines
García e Iñiguez, Calixto, 111 Harvard University, 46, 86–88,
Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 169 n 133–134, 137
Gary Plan, 29–32 Hawkins, Hugh, 87
Gaskell, Elizabeth C., 174 n Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 74
Gates, Bill, 3 Hemingway, Ernest, 77
Gawthrop, Betty, 182 n high and low culture. See popular
Genung, John Franklin, 14, 135–137, culture
162, 172 n, 184 n, 185 n Hill, Adams Sherman, 184 n
 index S 211
Hilltop Park Community, 146 Lamb, Charles, 74
Hitler, Adolf, 148 language change, 64, 118, 126–127
Hodges, John, 185 n LaSalle Extension University,
Holmes, Oliver Wendell Sr., 16, 181 n 26, 103
Home Correspondence School, 137 Lennon, Charles S., 38, 154–155
Horn, Ernest, 186 n Levine, Lawrence, 124, 182 n
Horowitz, David, 179 n Lewis, Edwin H., 26
Hotchkiss, George Burton, 25, 167 n Lewis, Sinclair, 77, 116
Hubbard, Elbert, 111 liberal arts and liberal education, 9, 15,
Hubbart, James, 76 87–89, 141, 144, 161
Huber, Richard, 116, 178 n, 179 n Liedermann, Earle E., 99
Hussein, Saddam, 102 Lightner, C. Michael, 183 n
Lincoln, Abraham, 12, 74, 123, 148,
impression management, 60, 80, 79–84, 173 n
88–90, 96, 101–102, 144, 162 Lindsey,Vachel, 34
inferiority complexes, 88, 99, 107–108, linguistics, 65–66, 81, 126–137, 162
149. See also self-consciousness Lions Clubs International, 111
International Correspondence literature and reading guides, 46,
Schools, 11, 83–85, 93, 102, 105, 73–77, 86–93, 127, 133, 139.
141–142, 154 See also Cody, Sherwin, on
Irving, Washington, 18, 74 literature
Little Leather Library, 91–92
Jackson, Andrew, 119 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 18,
James, Henry, 123, 127 21, 74
James, William, 112, 116, 126 Lounsbury, Thomas, 127, 129
Jefferson, Thomas, 118 Lowell, James Russell, 18
Jespersen, Otto, 130 Lowth, Robert, 118, 126–127
John Greenleaf Whittier, 18 Lunsford, Andrea, 66
Jones, Sir William, 126 Lynes, Russell, 174 n
Josephson, Matthew, 179 n
Joyce, James, 77 Macdonald, Dwight, 174 n
Macfadden, Bernarr, 99
Kaplan Test Prep, 189 n Mad magazine, 155
Kasson, John F., 175 n Mahn, C. A. F., 181 n
Kemp, George, 154, 156 Mamet, David, 102
Kemp, Giles, 178 n Mann, Thomas, 77
Kirsch, Adam, 176 n Marchand, Roland, 38, 79–83
Kitzhaber, Albert R., 184 n Marden, Orison Swett, 112
Kiwanis International, 111 Marsh, George Perkins, 121
Knopf, Alfred, 151 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Kramer, Rita, 149 86
Krapp, George Philip, 127–131 Masters, Edgar Lee, 34
Krashen, Stephen D., 171 n Mather, Cotton, 109
212 S index
Matthews, William, 122, 127 Newton, Sarah E., 175 n
Maugham, Somerset, 77 Noffsinger, John, 142
McCarthy, A. E., 170 n Noguchi, Rei, 66
McCleery, Albert, 186 n Norris, James D., 174 n
McGee, Micki, 180 n Nutshell Library, 21, 47, 73–77, 87, 91
McGuffey, William H., 110
McMaster University, 187 n Odell, Rev. Joseph H., 141
Mencken, H. L., 130, 151 Ogden, C. K., 150–151, 187 n
meritocracy, 32–34, 162 Old Greek Press, 20, 206
Merriam, George and Charles, 181 n oratory, 133, 182 n
Metcalf, Allan, 119 Osmun, Thomas Embly (Alfred
Mills, C. Wright, 113 Ayres), 122
mind power. See New Thought Overstreet, Harry, 112, 116
religion; positive thinking Oxford English Dictionary, 63, 129
Momand, Arthur (Pop), 82
Montessori, Maria, 149 patent medicine, 27, 36–38, 92, 102,
Moody, Eleazar, 80 107
Moon, George Washington, 181 n Paterson, Walter R., 38, 154–155
Moore, Charles, 175 n Peacham, Henry, 80
Morton, Herbert C., 189 n Peirce, Charles S., 126
Müller, Max, 127 Penn Foster Career College, 185 n
Murray, Lindley, 119, 126–127 personality. See character (vs.
Muscular Christianity, 99 personality)
musical ability, 97 Peterson, Theodore, 189 n
Physical Culture, 45, 99
Nation,The, 154 physical culture movement, 94
National Ability Tests, 31–34, 145 Poe, Edgar Allan, 18, 20–21, 145
National Council of Teachers of Point Scale of Intelligence, 32
English, 28, 128–129, 131 Pope, Ella Heaton, 128–129
National Education Association, 27 popular culture, 76–78, 101, 115, 120,
National Home Study Council, 123–125, 155, 174 n, 177 n
142, 158 Porter, Noah, 75, 87, 181 n
negative option, 19, 91, 161 positive thinking, 112, 115
Neilson, William Allan, 176 n Post, Emily, 95, 177 n
Nelson Doubleday, Inc., 95, 102 Presbrey, Frank, 165 n
New Thought religion, 112–115 prescriptivism, 9, 24–25, 56–57, 61–66,
New York Evening Post, 122 78, 117–132, 156–158. See also
New York Times, 6, 21, 30, 41, 93, 101, grammatical correctness
120, 121, 140, 146, 151, 154, 158 Priestly, Joseph, 118
New York Tribune, 120 Princeton Review, 189 n
New York University, 23, 25 Prudential Insurance Company, 83
newspaper circulation, 189 n psychology, 19, 26, 75, 82, 88, 105,
Newfield, Christopher, 77 112–114, 126, 136–137, 160–162
 index S 213
public speaking, 24, 106–107, 114–116, Scott, Fred Newton, 127–128
180 n Scott, Sir Walter, 74
Pure Food and Drug Act, 37 Scott, Walter Dill, 32, 112
Putney, Clifford, 177 n, 179 n Seelye, Julius H., 14
self-consciousness, 48, 107–108, 116,
Radway, Janice, 92, 177 n 147. See also inferiority complex
Ramage, John, 169, 179 n self-improvement and self-study,
reading guides. See literature and 8–11, 75, 79–105, 109–116, 144,
reading guides 160–164, 189 n
Repplier, Agnes, 174 n Shakespeare, William, 74, 87, 91, 122,
rhetoric, 11, 14, 23–27, 131–137, 147, 124, 176 n, 182 n
172 n. See also success rhetoric Sheldon, Arthur Frederick, 168 n
Riis, Jacob, 121 Sherman, Stuart P., 77, 174 n
Rittenhouse Press, 102 Simon, Théodore, 32
Rockefeller, John D. Sr., 107, 110–111 Simpson, David, 181 n
Roman, Charles, 99, 100, 188 n Skinner, Cornelia Otis, 151
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 148 Smith, Erin, 175 n
Rose, Sylvia N., 185 n Smith, William D., 189 n
Rotary International, 111 Society to Encourage Studies at
Rowsome, Frank Jr., 165 n, 175 n, Home, 139
177 n, 178 n Stanford-Binet tests, 32
Rubicam, Raymond, 175 n stewardship of wealth, 36, 76,
Rubin, Joan Shelley, 173 n 109–111, 145,
Ruthrauff, Wilbur, 38 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 174 n
Ruthrauff & Ryan Advertising Strongfort, Lionel, 99
Agency, 38, 95, 97 Success magazine, 112
success rhetoric, 79–81, 109–115
Sackheim, Maxwell, 8, 10, 38–39, 43, Susman, Warren, 112, 179 n
91–92, 169 n Swift and Company, 31
salesmanship, 20, 37–39, 74–76, Swoboda, Alois, 99
104–109, 112–113, 135–136 System (The System magazine), 18
Sandow, Eugene, 99
Sapir, Edward, 183 n Tarkington, Booth, 77, 130
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 127 Taylor, Bayard, 18
Saw Mill River Parkway, 145 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 27
Scherman, Harry, 39, 91–92 Taylor, Robert Lewis, 177 n
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Sr., 80–81 Taylorism, 27–28
school reform, 4, 27–33. See also Temple University, 175 n
education Tennyson, Alfred, 74
Schwab & Beatty Agency, 39, 105, 155 Thackeray, William Makepeace,
Schwab, Charles, 106 16, 74
Schwab,Victor, 6, 8–10, 39–43, 105, Thomas, Lowell, 108
107, 155, 169 n, 188 n Thompson, Frank, 32
214 S index
Thorndike, Edward L., 32 Webster, Noah, 13, 50, 118, 120–121,
Thorp, Margaret Farrand, 176 n 181 n, 189 n
Thurnau, Edward, 18 Weeks, Francis, 166 n
Time magazine, 156 Wendell, Barrett, 184 n
Toon, Elizabeth, 177 n, 178 n Werner School Book Company, 18
Touchstone,The, 21, 151 Westlake, J. Willis, 25
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 151 Wharton School, 23
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 140 Wharton, Edith, 174 n
Twain, Mark, 120 Whately, Richard, 184 n
White, Richard Grant, 122, 127
U.S. Armed Forces Institute (Foxhole White, William Allen, 130
University), 140 Whitman Candy Company, 91
U.S. Bureau of Education, 31 Whitney, William Dwight, 127, 182 n
U.S. School of Music, 11, 97, Whyte, William H. Jr., 113
154, 156 Widdemer, Margaret, 174 n
University of Chicago, 18, 26, 122, Wilder, Thornton, 77
139–140 Williams, Joseph, 24
University of Wisconsin, 140 Wilson, Woodrow, 106, 148, 173 n
Wirt, William, 29–32, 168 n
Veblen, Thorstein, 140, 173 n, 185 n Woodyard, Ella, 142–143
Verner, Karl, 126 Woolf,Virginia, 174 n
Vizetelly, Frank H., 172 n Worcester, Joseph, 120, 181 n
vocabulary building, 68–73 work-study-play, 29–30
World Almanac and Book of Facts, 6, 103
Warfel, Harry R., 181 n
Washington, George, 99, 120, 174 n, Yerkes, Robert, 32
181 n you-viewpoint, 39
Watkins, Julian Lewis, 165 n
Weaver, Constance, 66 Zinsser, William, 24