the shriek of the locomotive, it sounded terrible too.

I heard what kind of chauffeur he was. A former employer of his told me. He was a chauffeur who speeded in reckless fashion because he was fond of having all the excitement possible.

4. Condense the following into telegrams of ten words or less:

Arrived here in Toledo yesterday morning talked with the directors found them not hostile to us but friendly.

Detectives report they think evidence now points to innocence of man arrested and to former employee as the burglar.

5. The following telegrams are ambiguous. Clarify them.

Jane escaped illness I feared Charley better.

Buy oil if market falls sell cotton.

6. Base a telegraphic night letter of not more than fifty words upon these circumstances:

(a) You have been sent to buy, if possible and as cheaply as possible, a majority of the stock in a given company. You find that many of the stockholders distrust or dislike the president and are willing to sell. Some of these ask only $50 a share for their holdings; the owners of 100 shares want as much as $92; the average price asked is $76. By buying out all the president's enemies, which you can now do beyond question, you would secure a bare majority of the stock. But $92 a share seems to you excessive; that is, you think that by working quietly among the president's friends you can get 100 shares at $77 or thereabouts and thus save approximately $1500. On the other hand, should your dealings with the friends of the president give him premature warning, he might stop the sales by these friends and himself begin buying from his enemies, and thus make your purchase of a majority of the stock impossible. Is the $1500 you would save worth the risk you would be obliged to take? You call for instructions.

(b) You are telegraphing a metropolitan paper the results of a Congressional election. Philput, the Republican candidate, leads in the cities, from which returns are now complete. Wilkins, the Democratic candidate, leads in the country, from only certain districts of which— those nearest the cities—returns have been heard. If the present proportionate division of the rural vote is maintained for the total, Philput will be elected by a plurality of three hundred votes. Philput asserts that the proportions will hold. Wilkins points out, however, that he is relatively stronger in the more remote districts and predicts that he will have a plurality of seven hundred votes. Smallbridge, an independent candidate, is apparently making a better race in the country than in the city, but he is so weak in both places that the ballots cast for him can scarcely affect the outcome unless the margin of victory is infinitesimal.

7. Compress 6a and 6b each into a telegram of not more than ten words.

8. (Do not read this assignment until you have composed the night letters and telegrams called for in 6 and 7.) Compare your first night letter in 6 and your first telegram in 7 with the versions given below. Decide where you have surpassed these versions, where you have fallen short of them.

Night letter: Two factions in company I can buy from enemies president bare majority stock at average seventy-six but hundred of these shares held at ninety-two I could probably get hundred quietly from friends president about seventy-seven but president might detect move and buy majority stock himself wire instructions. (Fifty words.)

Telegram: Wire whether buy safe or risk control saving fifteen hundred. (Ten words.)

A final device for escaping wordiness you will have discovered for yourself while composing telegrams and telegraphic night letters. It is to pass over details not vital to your purpose. Of course you must have due regard for circumstances; details needed for one purpose may be superfluous for another. But all of us are familiar with the person who loses her ideas in a rigmarole of prosaic and irrelevant facts. Such a person is Shakespeare's scatter-brained Dame Quickly. On one occasion this voluble woman is shrilly reproaching Sir John Falstaff for his indebtedness to her. "What is the gross sum that I owe thee?" he inquires. She might answer simply: "If thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. Thou didst promise to marry me. Deny it if thou canst." Instead, she plunges into a prolix recital of the circumstances of the engagement, so that the all-important fact that the engagement exists has no special emphasis in her welter of words. "If thou wert an honest man," she cries, "thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it if thou canst."

EXERCISE - Wordiness III

1. Study the following paragraph, decide which ideas are important, and strike out the details that merely clog the thought:

As I stepped into the room, I heard the clock ticking and that caused me to look at it. It sits on the mantelpiece with some layers of paper under one corner where the mantel is warped. When the papers slip out or we move the clock a little as we're dusting, the ticking stops right away. Of course the clock's not a new one at all, but it's an old one. It has been in the family for many a long year, yes, from even before my father's time. Let me see, it was bought by my grandfather. No, it couldn't have been grandfather that bought it; it was his brother. Oh, yes, I remember now; my mother told me all about it, and I'd forgotten what she said till this minute. But really my grandfather's brother didn't exactly buy it. He just traded for it. He gave two pigs and a saddle, that's what my mother said. You see, he was afraid his hogs might take cholera and so he wanted to get rid of them; and as for the saddle, he had sold his riding-horse and he didn't have any more use for that. Well, it isn't a valuable clock, like a grandfather clock or anything of that sort, though it is antique. As I was saying, when I glanced at it, it read seven minutes to six. I remember the time very well, for just then the factory whistle blew and I remember saying to myself: "It's seven minutes slow today." You see, it's old and we don't keep it oiled, and so it's always losing time. Hardly a day passes but I set it up—sometimes twice a day, as for the matter of that—and I usually go by the factory whistle too, though now and then I go by Dwight's gold watch. Well, anyhow, that tells me what time it was. I'm certain I can't be wrong.

2. Study, on the other hand, The Castaway (Appendix 5) for its judicious use of details. Defoe in his stories is a supreme master of verisimilitude (likeness to truth). As we read him, we cannot help believing that these things actually happened. More than in anything else the secret of his lifelikeness lies in his constant faithfulness to reality. He puts in the little mishaps that would have befallen a man so situated, the things he would have done, the difficulties he might have avoided had he exercised forethought. Though Defoe had