Communication.

To the Editors of the Crimson:

A communication in your issue of the 20th inst., assails an instructor or instructors of English C., because of the "severity" and "unfairness" in the marking of the preliminary briefs. Your contributor, however, shows a sad lack of just the training the very course he criticises aims to give. With splendid self-assurance, addressing himself to us anonymously, he adduces as his evidence "several cases" in which "practically" similar briefs received widely different marks. But what does he mean by the indefinite word "several"? Two "cases," or four, or six? And what by his adverb "practically"? Surely he is aware that very slight changes in brief-structure oftentimes mean great alterations in the sense and effectiveness of the argument. Again, does he not know that accidents often happen in any system and at any place? And that strict accuracy in marking is an utter impossibility? Instructors are not gods, but men; that is, beings susceptible to over-work, weariness, haste. Injustice must occasionally be done by them; a thousand stern supervisors could not prevent that. Hence, even admitting Junior's "several cases" to be valid (I, for one, do not admit it), he has yet to show that they are more than the merely unavoidable ones. Finally, Junior, is in error to anticipate the careful students will at all believe him. An anonymous contribution carries with it no higher authority than its logic and Junior's logic is not above the E stamp.

Junior should, in any event, have been manly enough to sign his real name to his article. In such a case, one should either dare to own one's criticisms or abstain from them.

Other men, forced to take English C, object to the course with heart and soul. But, unlike Junior, they do not, under a mask, attack the honesty of the instructors or their system of marking, but rather some aspects of the course itself. Ought English C to be prescribed, and is it not too artificially analytic? are the real questions to be asked and solved.

PHILIP GENTNER.