PROFESSIONAL TOUCH IS APPARENT IN ADVOCATE

The following review of the current issue of the Advocate was written for the Crimson by W. D. Edmonds '26, president of the Advocate last year.

A college publication is one of those things which the average reader somewhat inevitably views with a certain amount of suspicion the chances are against his being interested in the outpourings of undergraduates or the freshness of "young thought." He feels, perhaps, that he is getting into something a little aesthetic or sophomoric or otherwise disconcerting when he opens its pages, and that if he is going to read something it would perhaps be better to lose himself in the standard graces of "The Saturday Evening Post." The reviewer, as a matter of fact, approached the flaming, covers of the Advocate in much that frame of mind. In days gone by he, too, had been an editor of the Advocate.

He was, however, surprised, gratefully surprised. Since he graduated, he had rather lost touch with the University; he had forgotten the old virtues of his paper and was unacquainted with the new ones. The contents of the Advocate interested him considerably; the stories, he thought, would not have looked incongruous in the professional magazines of his acquaintance, there was an article on a subject much favored by the editors of the "quality group" of magazines for the moment, education to wit; the poetry would have been creditable to any of the reviews. There were, of course, weaknesses in the sheet, rough places, passages that betrayed the undergraduate writer--but on the other hand there were no traces of that distressfully professional journalism which one finds so often in a magazine that cost thirty-five cents or half a dollar. The supplementary departments, too, he found creditable, the editorials, book reviews and theatre notes. But what interested him most was a sort of indefinable spirit in the magazine of gentlemanly youngsters interested in letters learning to write more than passably well.

The Advocate, he had always thought, should be a place where undergraduates concerned with books and writing should be able to learn the simpler fundamentals that are necessarily neglected in a composition course--a place where a student could discover the way of putting a story together, the method of "doing" an editorial, and of seeing his results in print. This mission the reviewer felt, the Advocate was fulfilling. Here was a medium, he felt as he read the paper, through which students were learning the art of saying something in a readable way, were exploring the intricacies of essay writing, discovering the methods of story writing and the subtleties of poetry--and doing it, on the whole, very well