Any reading of worth while books will increase your fund of words and familiarize you, particularly if you read aloud, with the sound of cultured English; but the informal essay and the modern drama are especially helpful to the person who wishes to improve his conversational English.
Many of us lack frequent opportunities to hear good conversation. In the personal essay, the most brilliant, the most thoughtful, the most charming and cultured men and women talk to us informally and intimately about their likes and dislikes, their interests and thoughts and hopes.
Those dramas that avoid dialect and present groups of educated persons give their readers an opportunity to observe the conversational art at its best, free from stiffness or self-consciousness, unpretentious, and yet varied, rich, and gracious.
Since grammar is the basis of correct speech, the first books you will want to study are those that will help you to understand the principles governing our language. A person can read the books in a short time; but, if he is anxious to improve his English, he should study them thoughtfully. If he will keep in mind the goal toward which he is working, he will find the task easier and more interesting than he had anticipated. And the results will be gratifying.
People sometimes fear that older students may be offended if they are offered books written for school-room use. That is nonsense. Grown people interested in learning do not want books that are so simple as to be inadequate, and they would naturally be impatient with the lack of discrimination that offered them such books; but intelligent adults are ready to use the best book at hand for their purpose, regardless of its origin.
Determine your own rate of progress by the degree of familiarity of the matter presented. It is easy to follow the authors in their exposition, because they develop each idea logically, and bring much skill to the presentation of the essential facts you want to know. Get a good book on English grammar, which is logical, direct, and thorough, and when once you have mastered it, you will know the essential grammatical backgrounds of English speech.
