News of grammar

* Note to Readers: I wrote this in news style because the professor I interviewed is a newspaper journalist, and I thought it would be an appropriate and interesting change. There are several punctuation differences between news style and MLA writing, see if you can find them.

It's slipping. Their grammar is slipping, he said.

John Doe is the managing editor of a Willamette Valley newspaper, and teaches the only two news writing classes remaining from OSU's defunct journalism department.

In the many years he's worked as a teacher he has noticed a steady decline of basic grammar skills.

"The best today don't match the best of yesterday," he said "And the worst of today don't match the worst of tomorrow. Performance continues to slide across the board."

Some of the most common errors Doe comes across are homonym mix-ups, such as "site," "cite" and "sight," and pronoun-number disagreement.

"A singular entity like a group or team takes the singular pronouns "it" and "its," but I get "their" and "theirs" all the time," he said. "Pronoun-number disagreements really grate on my ears."

Wrong uses of "that," "who," "whom" and "which" show up quite often as well.

What Doe expects of students has "fallen way, way behind my desires in recent years."

So low, he said, even a small acquaintance with "basic grammar and usage starts looking like a plus."

News writing is a different style, which Doe said his students sometimes struggle with.

"In newspaper work, we stress short words, in short sentences, in short paragraphs, in short stories," Doe said. "The emphasis is on clarity and readability for a mass mixed-age audience.

"I think it's a good approach in general, but seems to run counter to what gets rewarded in academic circles. A lot of profs seem to put a premium on long convoluted sentences full of stiff, stilted, bureaucratic language and insider jargon. When sociologists talk to sociologists, that may work. But heaven help us when they try to communicate with lay people."

For writing tips, Doe directs his students to the old stand by, Strunk & White: "Omit needless words, stress clarity and economy."

Crisp, clear quality are what Doe expects of himself and his newsroom, "and I demand them of my students. I'm very hard on incomprehensible gobbledygook."