As to the exercises which should accompany the work in argument my experience with classes of five to six hundred freshmen leads me to think that their value to the student can hardly be overestimated.  I will speak here of a few of them.

The exercises in the use of reference books is something that every student ought to be put through.  I found it simple and not too extravagant of time to take my sections to the library in squads of ten or a dozen, and show them and let them handle the principal books on the list.  Then on the spot I gave each of them a sheet of theme paper on which I had written some sort of fact drawn from one of these books, and told them to look up that fact and report on it.  My object was to convince them that most ordinary facts can be looked up in less than five minutes.  The material for this exercise I got by turning over the reference books and jotting down almost anything that caught my eye.  One can in this way get a great variety of facts in a very short time.  In some libraries it might be possible to get members of the library staff to share in this instruction; in all libraries one will find active cooperation.

For the preliminary work on the argument we found that it was often practicable and advisable to let the students pair off on the two sides of the question, and work together through all the preliminaries.  Two men thus working together often discuss themselves into the liveliest kind of interest in their question; and almost always they come closer to the important issues involved by sharpening their wits against each other.  Their arguments, too, are better, especially in the refutation, from their knowing just what points can be made on the other side.

It is excellent practice, not only for the brief and the argument, but also for all other college work, to set the students to making briefs of parts or wholes of the arguments printed here as examples, or of other arguments found outside.  Not only lawyers, but other men of affairs, constantly have to digest and summarize papers; and skill in picking out essential facts and the thread of thought from a document is a highly valuable asset for practical life.  The exercise is sometimes irksome to students, for it is hard work at first and calls for concentration of mind:  but it can be sweetened and made livelier by the competition of classroom discussion.

All through the work on the argument students may well be set to watching the daily papers and the magazines for examples of arguments, and of good and bad reasoning.  Very often an instructor can get, at the cost of a cent or two apiece, a set of arguments printed in a newspaper for his class to analyze.  Senators and representatives in Congress are notably willing to send copies of speeches, and these sometimes furnish good examples of both sound and unsound reasoning.