The Press: Style, Newspaper Version

In a sense, every newspaperman is bilingual. He speaks one language and often writes a quite different one. The dialect he writes is dictated by his paper’s “style-book.” As papers, like people, are crusty with peculiarities, the regional variations of this newspaper lingo have to be learned by the men who write it. Except on chains, no two papers’ rules are ever quite the same.

Last week students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism got a look at a new stylebook that attempted to standardize U.S. newspaper usage. A valiant effort to combine common usage with common sense, it would soon be required reading in many a newsroom, as well as in classrooms.

In compiling it, Assistant Professor Jacob Scher, helped by three Chicago Tribune staffers, took a firm stand against hackneyed journalese. Sample warning: “Regardless of the gravity of an accident, don’t ‘rush’ an ambulance to the scene. Don’t ‘dispatch’ one, either. Just ‘send’ one. Don’t ‘rush’ the victims to a hospital. Just ‘take’ them.”

They also inveighed against nicenellyisms. For example, the Medill stylists urged: “Do not use the words ‘criminal assault’ as a euphemism for the word ‘rape.’ ” But most newsmen may find it hard to drop this traditional euphemism or its twin “statutory offense.” Once the Houston Post tried to. The copy went to the composing room, with a sentence that told how a woman ran down the street screaming “He’s trying to rape me! Help!” The Post’s prim proofreaders, to whom a rule was a rule, split an infinitive as the lesser of two evils, and changed the