Be defenders of the written word.

Journalists have a special interest in maintaining the quality of writing. It's not just because a certain pool of skilled practitioners must be sustained to perpetuate our craft. No less essential is a renewable audience of people who have sufficient command of the language to make sense of the information we put before them.

We are, or ought to be, foremost among the defenders of the written word.

By some yards-sticks, the defense hasn't gone well. The working vocabulary of Americans has by several measures shrunk dramatically in the past 50 years. That shrinkage, as Oberlin College's David Orr has pointed out, has come hand in hand with a decline in the ability to think. (To illustrate this point, compare today's political dialogue with the far more articulate oratory of an Adlai Stevenson or a Nelson Rockefellor.)

Some people, when they write at all, neglect capitalization and punctuate their sentences with happy faces. Or they adopt chat-room spelling and abbreviations. And all too often, this happens in a vacuum. It isn't hard to see some of the cause. A study sponsored this year by the College Board found a shockingly low level of writing instruction in the public schools.

All this explains how Bob Kerrey, a politician-turned-university-president, comes to be writing about writing in this issue of The Masthead. The College Board study so disturbed its sponsors that they established a committee to do something about the problem over the next five years. They asked Kerrey to head the committee, and he assented, as he did when The Masthead asked him to set down his thoughts at the outset.

I hope NCEW members will monitor the committee's progress. If the result is a halt to the decline of language skills in the public square, we all benefit, both as journalists and as citizens of a democracy.

While we're on the subject of good writing, let me call attention to J.R. Labbe's article in these pages. It contains one of those gems that good writers seem to produce effortlessly and run-of-the-mill ones can't fake.

Labbe looks at the preparation necessary to write about subjects in which the writer has no first-hand experience. Referring to non-veterans, she writes, "It isn't just the women in today's newsrooms who lack DD214s.

Defense Department Form 214 is the document that converts a military person into a civilian. Ordinarily, the rule is to avoid vague references and technical jargon. Labbe breaks the rule to especially good effect.

She almost pointedly neglects to provide that explanation. She writes with the apparent confidence that the reference will be widely recognized by those who have served. For those who haven't, the definition isn't important. The reference stands as a reminder that there is much to be learned before sitting down to write.

The Masthead Symposium looks at various aspects of the military/media relationship. It reminds us that, with proportionately fewer veterans in the population and fewer families touched by military service, our responsibility to be accurate and informative may never have been heavier.