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."