A study of attitudes toward language usae of high school and college newspaper advisers along with secondary newspaper editors

This thesis has studied the attitudes of high school and college newspaper advisers and high school newspaper editors concerning their approach to language usage that would be appropriate in a student newspaper. In order to discover these attitudes, a questionnaire on language usage was sent to 225 school journalists (75 to each group) with an enclosed stamped self-addressed envelope which allowed the form to be returned. The returns netted 149 questionnaires (49 from each of the adviser groups and 51 from the editors). It was found that the school journalists were much more conservative toward acceptance of language usage than published linguistic data had suggested likely. Also it was found that the student editors were much less liberal than the two groups of advisers had suspected they would be. The three groups contradicted themselves to a certain degree in their negative reactions to certain rules of usage and their positive reactions to certain specific grammatical examples illustrating the rules of usage.