Readings & Exercises in Latin Prose Composition

Readings and Exercises in Latin Prose Composition provides a refreshing approach for the standard Latin composition course offered at the college level. This text encourages the student to think in Latin through the process of reading unedited Latin selections and then composing in Latin, as opposed to the process of translating back and forth into English. The book offers a number of highly structured composition exercises that introduce students to a deeper understanding of Latin grammar and prose as well as to greater facility in reading and understanding it.

Customer Reviews:

A well-designed introduction

By Peter P. Parisi - November 27, 2005

This book is remarkably thorough and user-friendly. If you look at the sample pages Amazon provides (which are from the first chapter of the text) you will see that the book takes the student gradually through exercises designed to improve his understanding of Latin grammatical usage, one point at a time. The readings at the head of each chapter are interestingly varied. The ancillary texts--"Bradley's Arnold" and "Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar," are available through Focus Press (the website is [...]). Starting with this text book is much to be preferred over jumping in with the Prose Comp books produced in the last century. There is an answer key available for autodidacts.

do not buy

By J. Been "Classics_book_guy" - December 1, 2005

I used this book for a Latin Composition independent study in the Fall of '05. I was very disappointed. The excercises vary from rediculously tedious to extremely confusing. The professor was always at a loss as to the intentions of the authors, and we were only able to thoroughly cover the first 9 chapters of the book in one semester.

It slowly become clear that to properly complete the lessons, we were expected to obtain all three of the suggested grammars (all of which are published by Focus). Furthermore, my edition of the book began coming unglued from the binding no less than 3 weeks into the semester.

I would not reccomend it for any class except one taught by Mr. Tunberg and Ms. Minkova themselves. The book is obviously the product of their own very subjective teaching style (or a cheap attempt to bolster their list of published works and make a few bucks at the same time).