eking, and the unballasted student.

=The average college student lacks expressional power: Reasons=

The very best law and medical schools get the better of this, and only
the best. They are greatly aided by a state examination which tests
and tries all their work, braces their teaching, stimulates their men,
and directs their studies. This will inevitably come in journalism,
though most practicing newspaper men do not believe this. Neither did
doctors before 1870 expect this. As the newspaper comes closer and
closer into daily life, inflicts wounds without healing and does
damage for which no remedy exists, the public will require of the
writer on a daily at least as much proof of competency as it does of a
plumber. This competency sharply divides between training in the
technical work of the newspaper and in those studies that knowledge
which newspaper work requires. Capacity to write with accuracy, with
effect, with interest, and with style is the first and most difficult
task among the technical requirements of the public journal. As has
already been said, a gift for expression is needed, but even this
cannot be exercised or developed unless a man has acquired diction and
come in contact with style, for all the arts rest on the imitation of
accepted models. Many students in all schools of journalism come from
immigrant families and are both inconceivably ignorant of English and
inconceivably satisfied with their acquirement of English, as we all
are with a strange tongue we have learned to speak. Even in families
with two or more generations of American life, the vocabulary is
limited, construction careless, and the daily contact with any
literature, now that family prayers and Bible reading are gone; almost
nil. Of the spoken English of teachers in our public schools,
considered as the basis of training for the writer, it is not seemly
to speak. Everybody knows college teachers who have never shaken off
the slovenly phrases and careless syntax of their homes. The thesis on
which advanced degrees are conferred is a fair and just measure of the
capacity to write conferred by eleven years of education above the
"grammar grades." The old drill in accurate and exact rendering of
Greek and Latin was once the best training for the writer; but
slovenly sight reading has reduced its value, and a large part of its
true effect was because the youth who studied the classics fifty years
ago came in a far larger share than tod