"A--B--C"

A professor at Cornell in a recent address suggested that the trouble with both professional and college journalism is that its practitioners have not yet mastered their "A-B-C", --Accuracy, Brevity, and Clearness. In practically the same breath he expressed the opinion that the most rapid road to a higher plane of newspaper standards lay in a combination of journalistic training with the academic atmosphere of the universities of the country, for by such contact it would be elected and developed much as Law and Medicine had been in an earlier period.

Many institutions in the country, notably Columbia and the large state universities in the middle we, have established as one of their graduate schools as one of their graduate schools a course of training in journalism. Here men learn what instructors in an art, still in its period of elementary development, can toach--proper business and news gathering methods, administration and organization, editorial composition, and kindered subjects. Harvard has not followed suit, probably because such training is still primitive and of doubtful value. At the same time, a considerable number of the men, having been graduated from the University, are going into newspaper work. While a schools of journalism is not under consideration, there is a step toward developing a definite preparation for such a life work, that could be readily taken by the College authorities.

Elementary courses in English composite have, with few exceptions, been fitted more for the man who is planning to follow a literary career, than for one whose writing must be done rapidly and at the same time clearly. Their usual requirement has been long compositions, due bi-weekly. The field is open for a course based almost entirely on the daily theme idea, with rigid disciplinary requirements and a closer contact with affairs of the outside world. Perhaps one of the present courses, English 6 for instance, could be so reorganized as to fill these requirements. In no way involving the idea of a school for journalism. It would serve as a method of teaching prospective newspaper men, and others who could well benefit by the instruction, their "A-B-C".