“My heart is turned to stone; I strike it and it hurts my hand.”—Shakespeare, from Othello.

MarquetteT h e telephone has received short shrift in many newswriting courses, perhaps because of its inferiority as an information-gathering tool when stacked against face-to-face interviewing. Professorial admonitions against overuse notwithstanding, the telephone is still a primary newsgathering medium for many reporters and will continue to be such.That the tflephpne merited more attention in the Marquette University journalism program became evident in the early 1970s when recent graduates in reporting jobs were queried informally about voids in their technical preparation. Cited most frequently were inexperience in (1) impromptu story dictation over the telephone and (2) taking dictation from reporters and stringers in the field.Reporting texts, we found, provided a sparsity of discussion on the telephone as a reportorial tool. Even in interview texts, dictation generally went untreated.' The scant treatments dealt with telephone interviewing rather than story dictation. The telephone interview didn't concern us much because we were confident our students were adequately skilled in telephone interviewing. By trial and error, they came to master the telephone interview on their own. Our concern was taking and giving dictation.

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