thod and
textbooks were launched thirty years ago, has recanted all his early
work in teaching composition and pronounced it valueless or worse. The
college graduate, after courses in English composition (at least one
in the freshman year and often two or three more), in many instances
found himself unable to write a business letter, describe a plan
projected in business affairs, compose advertisements, or narrate a
current event. This was not invariably the case, but it occurred often
enough to be noted. Books, pamphlets, and papers multiplied on this
lack of training for practical writing in college composition courses.
The world of education discovered, what the newspapers had found by
experience, that the style of expression successful in literature did
not bring results in man's daily task of reaching his fellow man on
the homely and direct issues of daily life. In literature, genius is
seeking to express itself. In the newspaper and in business, the
writer is trying--and only trying--to express and interpret his
subject so as to reach the other and contemporary man. If he does
this, he wins. If not, he fails. Genius can, should be, careless of
the immediate audience, and wait for the final and ultimate response.
No newspaper article and no advertisement can. For them, style is only
a means. In letters, form is final. The verdict of posterity and not
of the yearly subscriber or daily purchaser is decisive.

=Journalistic writing demands a distinctive style and calls for immediate
response=

In the high school and college, from 1910 on, there came courses in
English which turned to the newspaper for methods and means of
expression, and were called "courses in journalism." They were really
courses in the English of the newspaper, besprinkled with lectures on
the diction of the newspaper and the use of words--futile efforts,
through lists of words that must not be used, to give a sound rule of
the selection of language by the writer, and, above all, attempts to
secure simple, direct, incisive narrative and discussion. These are
all useful in their place and work. They prepare a man for some of the
first steps of the newspaper office, particularly in the swift,
mechanical routine and technique of "copy," indispensable where what
is copy now is on the street for sale within an hour.

Where an instructor has himself the gift of style and the capacity to
impart it, where he is himself a man who sells his stuff and know