4 The Conquest of Vocabulary
reached a level of familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of the language which eliminates these as obstacles for progress. They may even enjoy looking at things in another way than that of their neighbors who do not possess such insights. Language has been studied for itself, both in relation to statements of fact and concerning a kind of abstract knowledge related to structure, to what is permissible and what would sound incorrect. With the Book of Stories we started considering another dimension of the written language — style. It can now be found that natives often use their written and spoken languages in different ways, that the majority write as they speak, but some speak as if they were writing, while the rest have one style for literary writing and one for daily use including conversation. Some languages are dominated by the spoken and others by the written, language. There is clearly a fascinating field of enquiry here from which education could draw some advantages. For our purpose, it is enough to start our learners off. We propose to do so first by focusing on styles of writing, then on writing and individuality, and finally on style and art. Our First Anthology is made of a succession of short texts (about 500 words) taken from authors who have passed hurdles and have become literary figures of their time. At the first glance one can say that there are writers who use short sentences and others who use longer ones, but that simple statement is replaced by a much more shaded one when we look more closely into the writing of a number of authors whose texts are included in the anthology. Reading these authors one after the other will
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