Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 October 1880 — Slovenly Manuscript. [ARTICLE]

Slovenly Manuscript.

I have the misfortune to nave a manuscript before me at this moment, says John Morley, in the Fortnightly Review. that would fill thirty of these pages, ana yet from beginning to end there is no indication that it is not tb be read in a single breath. The paragraph ought to be, and in all good writers it is, as real and as sensible a division as the sentence. It is an organic member in prose composition with a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as a stanza is an organic and definite member in the composition ode. “I fear my manuscript is rather disorderly,” says another, “but I will correct carefully in print.” Just so. Because he is too heedless to do his work in a workmanlike way, he first inflicts fatigue and vexation on the editor whom he expects to read his paper; second, he inflicts considerable and quite needless.expense on the publisher; and thirdly, he inflicts a great deaPof tedious and thankless kbor en. the printers, who ai% for the most part far mors meritorious persons than fifth-rate authors. It is true that Burke returned such disordered proofs that the printer usually found it the least troublesome to set the whole afresh, and Mias Martinean tells a story of a Scotch compositor who fled from Edinburgh to avoid a great living author’s manuscript, and, to nis horror, was presently confronted with a piece of copy which made him cry, ‘Xord have mercy ? Have you got that man to Mint for I” But most editors will cheerJblly forgive such transgressions to all contributors who will guarantee that they will write aa well as Burke and Carlyle. Alaa, it is usually the case that those who have least excuse are the worst offenders. Hie slovenliest manuscripts come from persons to whom the difference between an hoar and a minute is of the very smallest importance. This digsstion is to be excused, partly by the natural desire to say i> word against one’s persecutors, ana partly by a hope that some persons of sensitive conscience may be led to ponder whether there may not be, after all, some moral obligations even towards editors anti printers.