Dale Carnegie - Improve your diction

We have only four contacts with the world, you and I. We are evaluated and classified by four things: by what we do, by how we look, by what we say, and how we say it.

Yet many a person blunders through a long lifetime, after he leaves school, without any conscious effort to enrich his stock of words. to master their shades of meanings, to speak with precision and distinction.

He comes habitually to use the overworked and exhausted phrases of the office and street.

Small wonder that his talk lacks distinction and individuality.

Small wonder that he often violates the accepted traditions of pronounciation, and that he sometimes transgresses the very cannon of English grammar itself.

(Dale Carnegie's pocket book edition on Public Speaking. p 200.

Selected & condensed by Dorothy Carnegie in 1956 from his original book published in 1926)

Other suggested books from this text:

How to live on 24 hrs a day - Arnold Bennett

The human machine - Arnold Bennett

The Octopus & The pit (two novels written by Frank Norris). The Octopus deals with human tragedies occurring in wheat fields on California. The Pit deals with battles of bulls and bears in Chicago Board of Trade.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy.

A man's value to society - Newell Dwight Hillis

Talks to teachers - Prof. William James

Ariel, a life of Shelley - Andre' Maurois

Childe Harold'spilgrimage - Byron

Travel with a donkey - Robert Louis Stevenson

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays

A copy of Shakespeare

Roget's Treasury of Words is a abridged edition of Roget's Thesaurus.