George Arnold, Ph.D., returns to Marshall University

The author and a retired Marshall University professor said Tuesday he wants students to recognize simple grammatical errors in their speech and writing.
George Arnold, Ph.D., said he encourages journalism students to have fun with language and to develop their own style, but to also respect language by using it correctly. He was invited to visit Marshall University’s news writing class by professor Burnis Morris.
He said that because he has taught and practiced editing throughout his life, he has become what he calls a ‘grammerholic.’
“I bother everybody, I really do. I correct everything,” he said laughing.
He said when he was a professor at Marshall he would correct the flyers put up by students and faculty with a felt tip pen.
“I go to restaurants and I visit museums, they have things that are wrong and I sometimes write notes — just give it to the head person on the way out,” he said.
Students often have trouble with grammar which causes trouble in the long run, he said.
“We were loosing so many students who enrolled as freshmen but didn’t graduate from our program because they had poor language skills,” he said.
JMC 100 was created at Marshall to help these students, he said, and he created a book based on the teaching materials for that class called the “Media Writer’s Handbook.”
He has written five editions of the “Media Writer’s Handbook” which is used in journalism classes at Marshall University and even internationally. The book focuses on aspects of grammar such as punctuation and word differentiation. He said he is currently working on the sixth edition.
“What I have put in here is everything I have learned over the past 40 years and everything I have learned from other teachers, mass communicators and students,” he said about the content of the handbook.
Pretentious language, unnecessary words, clichés, jargon, slang and euphemisms will all be discussed in a chapter of the sixth edition. He said these categories are to be avoided when writing, but a few exceptions are included. The cliché, ‘Chip off the old block,’ would not usually be appropriate in a story, he said, but in one case it worked.
“I had a student who did a feature story and referred to a baseball player on Marshall’s team as a ‘chip off the old block.’ I let it go because in the story his nickname is Chip and his father was Jack Cook who was the longest serving baseball coach in Marshall University’s history. After Chip’s baseball playing days he wanted to be a coach like his father, I thought it worked,” Arnold said.
Arnold retired in 2004 and now lives in South Carolina with his siblings.