This study is both interesting and attractive, for, as Plato observes, letters themselves have a clear significance. The letter _r_ is expressive of motion, the letters _d_ and _t_ of binding and rest, the letter _l_ of smoothness, _n_ of inwardness, the letter _e_ of length and the letter _o_ of roundness.[2] Letters run in families, and each family has its own characteristic significance of sound. Some letters belong to the lips, others to the throat, others employ the whole mouth. Vowels and final consonants are the letters which demand most care and support in good reading. For the most part, vowels should be rich and full, and the final consonant well sustained.
If letters in themselves are expressive and significant, collocations of letters in syllables and words are clearly more significant still. "By various degrees of strength or weakness, emphasis or pitch, length or shortness, they become the natural expressions both of the stronger and the finer parts of human feeling and thought." To read well, therefore, it is necessary to give intelligent and ready heed to the relative weight of words, to notice whether consonants are massed together to increase their density, or vowels are freely interspersed to leaven and make them light. True enunciation largely depends on a careful study of the natural formation of words and a right appreciation of the proportionate value of their several syllables.
Reading, however, is frequently spoiled by pedantry and exaggerated minuteness. In seeking to avoid slovenliness readers often fall into foppery. Good reading goes at an easy pace, it is neither too fast nor too slow; it neither counts the letters nor omits them, neither jumbles syllables together nor anatomises words. The good reader reads so that intelligent listeners can spell his words, but he does not read as if spelling them himself. He avoids the extremes both of negligence and nicety, and constantly remembers that whatever is overdone is badly done. Avoid ostentation. No rule in reading is more fundamental than this.
Near akin to ostentation is the taint of false and histrionic emphasis. Colourless reading, bad though it be, is better than tawdry reading. Especially in all reading of a religious or sacred character should affectation and dramatic artifices be reverently avoided.