What are three common educational practices that began with the use of McGuffey readers? How did they represent improvements in education?

it was surely an odd creature that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and elegance and charm,   in a kitchen chopping up suet. but these creatures, monst'r however entertaining to the imagination, hast no existence in fact. what one might doth to bringeth h'r to life wast to bethink poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment,   thus keeping in toucheth with fact—that the lady is mrs martin, ag'd thirty-six, did dress in blue, wearing a black coxcomb and brown shoeth; but not losing sight of fiction eith'r—that the lady is a vessel in which all s'rts of spirits and f'rces art coursing and flashing p'rpetually. the moment, howev'r, yond one tries this method with the elizabethan mistress, one brancheth of illumination fails; one is did hold up by the scarcity of facts.   one knoweth nothing detailed, nothing p'rfectly true and substantial about h'r.   hist'ry scarcely mentions h'r.   and i did turn to professeth'r trevelyan again to seeth what hist'ry meanteth to that gent.   i hath found by looking at his chapt'r headings yond t meanteth.

i believe that the answer is true.

figurative language is a resource that fiction writers use to make better descriptions of what they want to write about or express. they can improve their stories, as they can elaborate more vivid and colorful sentences. this way, the reader will be able to have more detailed images in his/her mind.

places, objects, people and even feelings or emotions can be described with a lot of detail to metaphors, similes and personifications. making different kinds of comparisons to make a description more specific, as well as assigning human qualities to non-human objects (and vice-versa) can be very useful for science fiction writers.  

on the other hand, alliterations allow writers to elaborate more entertaining and creative sentences. it consists in using a sequence of words that start with the same consonant letter. they can be used to emphasize something important the writer wants to express, or just as a fun literary device.