Professor Pays Tribute to Newspaper English

1915

High Standard of Writing

"I well remember the pleasure with which, as a young man, I heard my venerable and practiced professor of rhetoric say that he supposed there was no work known to man more difficult than writing," said Prof. George H. Palmer, formerly of Harvard University. "Up to that time I had supposed its severities peculiar to myself." He goes on to recount the advantages which children of today enjoy over those of his own generation, and hopes that some of them will find the language he has used about the difficulty of writing extravagant. Then he says:

"Let me say, too, that since frequency has more to do with ease of writing than anything else, I count the newspaper men lucky because they are writing all the time, and I do not think so meanly of their product as the present popular disparagement would seem to require. It is hasty work, undoubtedly, and bears the marks of haste. But in my judgment in no period of the English language has there been so high an average of sensible, vivacious and informing sentences written as appears in our daily press.

"With both good and evil results, the distinction between book literature and speech literature is breaking down. Everybody is writing, apparently in verse and prose; and if the higher graces of style do not often appear, neither on the other hand do the ruder awkwardness and obscurities. A certain straightforward English is becoming established. A whole nation is learning the use of its mother tongue. Under such circumstances it is doubly necessary that anyone who is conscious of feebleness in his command of English should promptly and earnestly begin the cultivation of it."


Man and His Age

After a man reaches the age of fifty he begins to see insults in the newspapers to the effect that he is an old man. — Topeka Capital.