Harvard: An Ivy Degree At A State School Price

<p>I have absolutely no reason to think that the Crimson is edited by seniors. More likely, the senior editors are sophomores or juniors. Furthermore, based on the bylines, there are more and more students whose native language is not English writing for it in recent years. I do not think that the Crimson is less well-written than many major newspapers where I've seen errant apostrophes, as well as the very common confusion between "may" and "can."</p>

<p>Finally, the Crimson is a sideline for these student writers, most of whom will not end up in journalism. They are not doing it as part of their job; it is on top of their studies and other activities. </p>

<p>Cut the poor non-English student some slack, will ya? When I came to this country, I could not speak or write English very well. It is only recently that people have stopped telling me that I write English as if it were French. And I've been in this country for 40 years. There's hope still for that 18-year old student from China whose language is even more removed from English than is French.</p>

<p>Those are largely amazingly pointless grammar quibbles, and when a reporter exactly quotes the speech of a person interviewed, you don't blame the reporter for what someone else said. I don't accept grammar flames about daily newspapers from onlookers who haven't worked at daily newspapers. (I've worked at monthly magazines and weekly magazines: the higher the publication frequency, the more difficult the editing.)</p>