Mary Augusta Jordan

Mary Augusta Jordan (July 5, 1855 – April 14, 1941) was an American college professor of English literature and rhetoric. She was a member of the faculty at Smith College from 1884 to 1921.

Mary Augusta Jordan in 1916

Quotes

Correct Writing and Speaking (1906)

Mary Augusta Jordan, Correct Writing and Speaking (A. S. Barnes 1906)

• The stupid and the children of genius alike emancipate themselves from conventions.
  • p. 8

• There are so many ways that persons of intelligence have of expressing themselves. Some of these ways have little in common, many of them are contradictory in method, most of them differ in the effect aimed at, or the impression made.
  • P. 9

• There certainly is at present, then, no standard English, either in writing or in speaking, that is easily and cheaply available. There is no one correct way of writing or of speaking English. Within certain limits there are many ways of attaining correctness.
  • p. 36

• Letters of friendship, of love, of hate, of business, of state, have come into new value within the last twenty-five years. Reading them has come to be one of the most alluring pleasures of a large class of persons.
  • p. 61

• The letter writer who spends his individuality in faddish paper, colored ink, and enigmatic paging, who 'crosses' his manuscript or insists upon paper so thin that it is hard to know which side one is reading, will need large revenues of talent to keep him from living behind his means in his claims on his reader's attention.
  • p. 63

"Spacious Days at Vassar" (1916)

Mary Augusta Jordan, "Spacious Days at Vassar", in The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Opening of Vassar College, October 10 to 13, 1915;: A Record (Vassar College, 1916)

• Going to college was a thing quite by itself, an experience to be reckoned with--something like Platonic love, or getting religion.
  • p. 48

• By 1870... Vassar did not stand, even in the funny papers, any longer for prigs, freaks, social rebels, or eloquent and earnest fanatics. What did it stand for? Freedom from any obligation upon the students to concern themselves with that question was one of the factors of the spaciousness that prevailed for ten years.
  • p. 49

• A young generation felt a strange call from the future and so turned a perfectly courteous back upon the past with its failures; and with a resolute morning face fronted the new order of things where everybody should have a fair chance, where it should never be too late to make a fresh start, and where friendship should be the leading business of individuals and of nations.
  • p. 53

Quotes about Mary Augusta Jordan

• As an instructor in English literature, Miss Jordan's success has been marked. The magnetism, thoroughness, and sympathy of her work have been alike conspicuous. Broad-minded and scholarly, she has exacted from her pupils what she has given: fidelity in the study of English, and constant attention to its best models.
  • Margaret E. Sangster, "Editor's Introduction", Correct Writing and Speaking (A. S. Barnes, 1906): 3-4.