Excerpt from The Newspaper Worker, 1906: Designed for All Who Write, but Especially Addressed to the Reporter Who May Have Only a Vague Notion of the Aims, Scope and Requirements of His Profession Ramsay in his Life of Washington notes the remarkable fact that men on the patriotic side in the American Revolution, who could scarcely write their names when the struggle with the mother country began, were capable at its close of producing letters that practiced, educated writers need not be ashamed to acknowledge. This is a striking, historic instance of what perseverence, intelligently directed, may accomplish. These men had to write so their language would be understood and admit of none save an exact interpretation. They wrote with care, and with strict attention to accuracy. They wasted no time on frills or cheap attempts at ornament. They learned almost intuitively to call things by their right names, and they avoided ambiguity because they knew that a misinterpretation of their meaning might lead to disaster and ruin. There can be no manner of doubt that these almost unlettered patriots carefully read over and freely criticized what they wrote, and that they became exact and explicit in expressing themselves, through sheer necessity of occasions. Washington was himself in the strictest sense of the 'word a self educated man. He lost his father at an early age and his days in school were so few that he began life without so much as a rudimentary knowl edge oi English grammar. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.