14. This apt language, illustrating how highly reporters of large experience appreciate the value of good phrases'as speed-promoters, is the testimony of a man conservative almost to the point of timidity in availing himself of the

help which good phrasing affords, and who could but poorly conceive the wonderful possibilities of the phrasing art, that advanced system of phrasing - the American system, as it may justly be called - which the present book undertakes to exhibit. In this country, reporting has been cultivated to a remarkable and admirable extent; and phrasing as applied to court reporting has been especially developed. The system of phrasing here presented is pre-eminently adapted to the reporting of colloquial matter, such as extemporaneous speech or legal testimony. When the student whose practice has been confined entirely or mainly to book-matter or to ornate compositions of a rhetorical character, undertakes to report matter expressed in colloquial or informal style, he encounters unexpected difficulty, because required to write commonplace phrases or expressions - the homely language of every-day life, which rarely occurs in books. For these every-day expressions and colloquial word-groups, which, because so familiar, are rapidly spoken, there should be a correspondingly rapid means of expression. This medium of expression has been found in the American system of court reporting, which, so far as it involves the art of phrasing, it is one aim of this book to exhibit. This volume is especially designed to make colloquial or commonplace expressions easy of execution, and thus to prepare the student for reporting court proceedings and other forms of familiar discourse.