Articles, Long or Short?
By Editor
The following from the Religious Telescope we commend to our contributors: "Lengthy contributions are troublesome things for the editors to handle. Of them the Lutheran Observer well remarks: 'An article of six or eight hundred words is quite generally read, while an article of three or four columns is almost never read. We can not give to one article an amount of space which is sufficient for several articles. We hope all our contributors will bear this in mind, so as to save us and themselves the embarrassment of returning long articles.' Of course contributors often generously say, 'If my article is too lengthy, you are at liberty to condense it.' But condensing another man's production is a delicate, embarrassing task, for in doing so you run the risk of cutting out what he may regard as the most important part of the production. How much better that the author condense his own article. Surely he has as much time to devote to it as a busy editor has. He who writes briefly and to the point, and discusses live, practical subjects, has but few articles rejected. The world and live editors all hunger for such productions."