ABSTRACT
Manifestos detailing vernacular education from the time of Locke set the stage for nineteenth-century textbooks used to teach reading, writing, speaking, and criticism. Disciplined by the grammar treatises, rhetorical education reflected deep-seated norms of correctness in diction and pronunciation beginning with the grade-school genres of primer-speller, simplified grammar, reader, and copybook. In academy and college, the Latin handbooks and omnibuses gave way to rhetorical readers, treatise-abridgements, and synthetic advanced rhetorics.
