ay from families whose elders
had themselves had their expression and vocabulary trained and
developed by liberal studies. The capacity for good writing apparent
at Oxford and Cambridge rests in no small measure on the classical
family horizon in teacher and taught.

=Kind of training in composition to be given students of journalism=

Those who turn to journalism naturally care for writing, but in an art
to "care" is little and most have never had the personal environment,
the training, or the personal command of English to enable them to do
more than write a stiff prose with a narrow vocabulary and no sense
of style. Even those who have some such capacity are hampered by the
family heritage already outlined. College writing is in the same
condition; but the average college man is not expecting to earn his
living by his typewriter. In order to receive a minimum capacity in
writing enough to pass, every year of study for journalism must have a
writing course and the technical work must run to constant writing.
From start to finish there must be patient, individual correction. The
use of the typewriter must be made obligatory. Rigid discipline must
deal with errors in spelling, grammar, the choice of words and
phrases. Previous college training in composition must in general be
revised and made over to secure directness and simplicity. At the end,
the utmost that can be gained for nineteen out of twenty is some
facility, a little sense of style and diction, and copy that will be
above the average of the newspaper and not much above that. Examine
the writing in the newspapers issued by some schools and the work in
schools that do not, and a distressingly large portion is either dull
or "smart," the last, worst fault of the two.

=Effective training in reporting must be given in large urban centers=

Reporting is the first use to which writing is put and through which
the writer is trained. For this, abundant material is indispensable,
as much as clinical material for a medical school. As the medical
schools gravitate to cities, and the rural institutions flicker out
one by one, so in the end the effectively trained reporter will
gravitate to a large city. Towns of under 20,000 population furnish a
very tame sort of reporting, and those who get this training in them
find reporting is under new conditions in a great metropolis. In such
a place the peril is that routine news will take too much of the
precious time for tr