GIVE IT ALL AT ONCE

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 6, 1877

GIVE IT ALL AT ONCE.

The following paragraph is so much to the point in reference to brief, sharp, and expressive articles, that we will act upon the suggestion and give it to the reader at once, without any unnecessary introduction. It is from The Christian at Work, but is just as well calculated for the readers of the REVIEW:—

“Abbreviate. Cut short. Eliminate. Expurge. Condense. Weed out. Cauterize. Trim. Deplete. Reduce. It must be done. Pack in the smallest space. Don’t send us introduction and preface. Don’t tell us what you ‘purpose doing.’ Simply do it. You cannot get space in The Christian at Work without it, and you could not get an audience if you did. Greville, in his Memoirs, tells us about a bishop who rose to speak in the House of Lords, and announced that he should divide what he had to say into twelve parts, when the Duke of Wharton interrupted him and begged indulgence for a few minutes as he had a story to tell which he could only introduce at that moment. A drunken fellow was passing by St. Paul’s at night, and heard the clock slowly chime twelve. He counted the strokes, and then looked up to the clock, and said, ‘Why couldn’t you give us all that at once?’ The story put an end to the bishop’s speech. When we get long articles with ‘premise,’ ‘prefatory remarks,’ or in ‘three parts,’ or ‘conclusion next week,’ we sigh as we sadly consign them to a very spacious waste-paper basket, and exclaim, ‘Why couldn’t you give us all that at once?’”