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The Magazine Rack
The press is the last bulwark of the English language. As, more and more, communication and education become oral and visual, the printed word disintegrates and is corrupted by indifference and vocal abuse. Language structure is undermined and verbal precision is blunted. Were this merely a vernacular manifestation it might be easier to accept, although just as difficult to combat. The matter is more serious. The fact is, teachers and educators on the college level are not only unconcerned but are negligently guilty of abetting this corrosive process.
The educators are entitled to their argot, their patois, their jargon as are any other specialists. It is the lingo of the group, the club, exclusively understood and possessively used. It does not stop there, however. They bend words to new uses which they think they have invented, blithely turning their backs upon excellent, sharp-edged words whose purpose is implicit.
Obseurantism in the arts has been with us a long time; we are growing accustomed to it and at length a fairly broad public has joined in the hide-and-seek game which creative artists are playing among the trees of a forest as savage and obscure as that which Dante so distractedly entered in the first canto of the Divine Comedy. ...
English departments are concerned with what they doubtless call substantive values. The primary techniques of grammar and spelling are not only unworthy of notice but there is positive concern for a syntax that is impressive rather than communicative. Students are criticized for using words, reasonable sentences and frequent paragraph divisions. These things are supposed to smack of puerility. The college sound is to be achieved by interlarding Macaulayan periods with such words as essentially, primarily, substantially, in the last analysis, largely for rhythmic reasons or the long-leaping cadence, square-peg locations in the round holes of meaning.
The plain fact is, no discipline has during recent decades devoted such earnest study and research to the writing of communicative English as the newspapers of the United States and the journalism schools. This perpetual problem has been the subject of countless seminars such as those at the American Press Institute, in journalism schools throughout the country and in national and regional meetings of editors.
It is still not difficult to find bad writing in newspapers, and it never will be as long as they must be produced with dispatch. But, by and large, newspapers today are using the printed word in its most understandable form and are thus nearly the sole defenders of literacy. Books and magazines must of course be recognized but the literacy of these publications depends upon the writer's integrity and communicative purpose. The book and magazine industry has sponsored no united front against corrosive influences and there are, as well, obscurantists among novelists and poets.
The journalism schools are fighting hard against the inroads of illiteracy among the intellectuals. In many universities, other schools regard journalism departments as reactionary curiosities because they are concerned with correct and meaningful writing. The elements of spelling and grammar journalism departments cannot teach; there isn't time. Yet they cannot permit their graduates to look for jobs when they lack these elementary requirements of the city room.
Friday, June 16. 1961 Summer Session Kansan
Any teacher in any class from the fifth grade of public school through the graduate college can raise derisive laughter at any time by a snide reference to newspaper errors and newspaper prose. This accusation against newspapers is just another one of those things that everybody knows that just isn't so...
I know of no discipline except journalism that is making a continuing study of communicable writing. All others are concerned with substance, and undoubtedly they should be, but there is great danger in neglecting the means. For if the medium is lacking in clarity and precision the substance will decay. It is the beauty and essence of good writing that it presupposes clear thinking and without clear thinking there can be no teaching worthy of the name, whatever the subject...
Over the entire country copy readers who know English grammar and who wear out more dictionaries than students in all the non-journalism branches are daily bending their backs over news copy. They may miss some of the blemishes but their professional objective is decent English. Managing editors are taking time to write and to circulate continuous staff memoranda concerned with improved literate performance. Conventions of editors are preoccupied with writing as writing. Who else is doing anything like this? Direct, understandable communication is the substance of journalism and the workman who is worthy of the best tools is canny enough to keep them clean.
(Excerpted from an article "The Bulwark of Sound Writing" by Carl E. Lindstrom in the Quill Magazine.)
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Racialism Divides Christians
By LOUIS CASSELS
United Press International Freedom rides, sit-ins and other protests against racial barriers are forcing American Christians toward a showdown on a question which deeply divides them.
The question is what role the church should play in this traumatic social adjustment.
Within most of the big denominations which are national in membership, there are four sharply different viewpoints on this question.
One view, held by a good many white laymen and some ministers in the South, is that the church should defend the institution of segregation.
Its exponents assert that the educational and cultural gap between the races is so great that integration would be harmful, perhaps to both groups, certainly to whites. Some go further and contend that God ordained separation of the races.
A second view, widely held in the South and by no means unknown in the North, is that the church should stay out of the growing conflict over segregation.
Its advocates declare that segregation is not a moral issue, but a legal and political issue in which legal status has no business getting involved.
Most of them acknowledge that it is un-Christian for members of one race to hate, exploit or discriminate against members of another. But they say that no injustice is done where facilities are "separate but equal."
The third view is espoused by many churchmen, South and North, who consider themselves "moderates."
They accept the basic theological position on segregation which has been spelled out in the official
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pronouncements of virtually every national church body. It holds that enforced segregation is morally wrong because it imposes upon Negroes a stigma of inferiority which is incompatible with Christ's teaching that all men are brothers; and it has worked grave injustices against Negroes, in actual practice, by denying them equal opportunities in education, employment, housing and other areas.
DOUGLAS COUNTY STATE BANK 900 Mass.
Proceeding from these premises, "moderates" agree that Christians of both races have a clear duty to work for the elimination of racial barriers in American life as rapidly as possible. But they quickly add that it won't be possible to do it very rapidly.
The fourth viewpoint might be labeled Christian militancy. It is held by a large number of Negro Christians in all sections, by a substantial number of white ministers and laymen in the North, and by a small but evidently growing body of white Christians in the South.
temperorized too long with racial attitudes which deny the oneness of all men in Christ.
They hold that the Church has
They believe it is time for Christians to act boldly, radically, and even dangerously, to batter down racial barriers in American society. They assert that American society
These Christian militants recognize that the church will suffer losses in membership and financial support if it takes an unequivocal stand on this emotionally-charged issue. But they ask whether an institution which values its own security too highly may not become unworthy to claim the cross as its symbol.
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