|I AM GLAD to know Cornell University is to I establish a department of
journalism next September. I have always claimed that journalism could
be taught in universities and colleges just as successfully as any other
athletic exercise. Of course you cannot teach a boy how to jerk a giant
journal from the clutches of decay and make of it a robust and rip
snorting shaper and trimmer of public opinion, in whose counting-room
people will walk all over each other in their mad efforts to insert
advertisements. You cannot teach this in a school any more than you can
teach a boy how to discover the open Polar Sea, but you can teach
him the rudiments and save him a good deal of time experimenting with
himself.
Boys spend small fortunes and the best years of their lives learning the
simplest truths in relation to journalism. We grope on blindly, learning
this year perhaps how to distinguish an italic shooting-stick when we
see it, or how to eradicate type lice from a standing galley, learning
next year how to sustain life on an annual pass and a sample
early-rose potato weighing four pounds and measuring eleven inches in
circumference. This is a slow and tedious way to obtain journalistic
training. If this can be avoided or abbreviated it will be a great boon.
As I understand it, the department in Cornell University will not deal
so much with actual newspaper experience as it will with construction
and style in writing. This is certainly a good move, for we must
admit that we can improve very greatly our style and the purity of
our English. For instance, I select an exchange at random, and on the
telegraphic page I find the details of a horrible crime. It seems that
an old lady, who lived by herself almost, and who had amassed between
$16 and $17, was awakened by an assassin, dragged from her bed and
cruelly murdered. The large telegraph headline reads: "Drug from her bed
and murdered!" This is incorrect in orthography, syntax and prosody, bad
in form and inelegant in style. Carefully parsing the word drug as it
appears here, I find that it does not agree with anything in number,
gender or person. I do not like to criticise the style of others when I
know that my own is so faulty, but I am sure that the word drug should
not be used in this way.
Take the following, also, from the Kansas correspondence of the
Statesville (N.C.) _Landmark_:
"There were several bad accidents in and around Clear Water during
my absence from home. The saddest one was the shooting of one Peter
Peterson by his father. They were out rabbit-hunting in the snow. A
rabbit got up and started to run. The son was in a swag of a place and
the father was taking aim at the rabbit. The son at the same time
was trying to get a shot at it and, not knowing that his father was
shooting, ran between the rabbit and his father and was killed dead,
falling on the snow with his gun grasped in his hands and never moved.
He still carried that pleasant smile which he had on, in expectation of
shooting that jack rabbit, when put in the grave. Wheat is selling at
about 60 cents; corn, 40 to 50 cents; fat hogs, gross, 44 to 41; fat
steers, 41; butcher's stock, 2 cents."
It is hard to say just exactly wherein this is faulty, but something is
the matter with it. I would like to get an expression of opinion from
those who take an interest in such things, as to whether the fault is in
orthoepy, orthography, anatomy, obituary or price current, or whether it
consists in writing several features too closely in the same paragraph.
It would also be a good idea to establish a chair for advertisers in
some practical college, in order that they might run in for a few hours
and learn how to write an advertisement so that it would express in the
most direct way what they desired to state. Here is an advertisement,
for instance, which is given exactly as written and punctuated:
Mrs. Dr. Edwards,