Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1886 — Teaching: the Young Idea. [ARTICLE]

Teaching: the Young Idea.

The Madrid (Iowa) Register gives the following pertinent advice to a correspondent who started out to write an account of an exhibition, and forgot to say anything about it, devoting all his energies to the preamble: “First. All well-regulated editors require to know the names of their correspondents. Suppose there should happen to be concealed about the person of your article a deadly weapon, in the shape of a sugar-coated slam on some sensitive-minded but hard-mus-cled individual in your neighborhood. Not being familiar down there, the editor couldn’t catch on that it was loaded. Then in a few days the sensitive fellow would come in, run the editor behind the press, and want to know ‘whowrote that blasted thing from Hopkins Grove.’ The editor would have to put his finger in the corner of his mouth, look foolish and say he didn’t know. It would be a painful scene, and when the editor came to he would swear he’d never print another- communication the author of which was too bashful to share the responsibility by informing the editor of his or her name. “Second. Don’t use ten-cent adjectives, at least any more than you can help. Don’t you see, if you were describing a dogfight and use such words as ‘splendid,’ ‘glorious,’ ‘perfectly enchanting,’ and ‘magnificent,’ and then a circus should come to town and you wanted to write that up too, why, you wouldn’t have anything left to distinguish between the dog fight and the circus. No doubt the Chinese lanterns in the trees about the school house gave a very pretty effect, and the boys with the canary whistles added to it; but honestly now, you don’t believe they resembled ‘Fairyland.’ The lanterns couldn’t have been any more ‘truly magnificent’ than any others of the same kind, could they ? “Third. You started out to write up the exhibition, and you went off into rhapsodies over the crowd, the ‘coaches’ that brought them, the trees and the lanterns, and you never even got inside of the school house at all. How about the exhibition ? Was that good? We heard from other sources that it was exceptionally so. Now, don’t be discouraged, but try again. Stick to your text. Try to get as much in little, consistently, as possible. And be frank with the editor—give him your nume next time.”