When writing letters, prioritize facts, signal opinion clearly |
As much as talking about kindness the past couple of weeks has cheered me, it's time to get back into more serious matters.
We've spent several months with no shortage of letters, thanks largely to the craziness going on in the world, but that somewhat steady stream has now slowed to a trickle. While we still get a lot of letters, so many of them are from people who send multiple letters a week and/or people for whom their 30 days have yet to expire, or people who don't live in Arkansas. We also get letters that are far beyond our 300-word limit (the average number of words that fit in about 7 inches of column space).
As a reminder, the Voices page is meant for Arkansas voices, so letter-writers must be current residents, while guest column-writers can be current or former residents. Whether letter or guest column, writers can only appear on the page once in a 30-day period, which is a longtime rule meant to keep the page from featuring the same three or four writers every week who aren't on our payroll.
Over the past couple of decades, the pool of letter-writers has shrunk, due to deaths (there are some whose absence is keenly felt, such as Karl Kimball and David Sixbey), moves out of state, and a shortage of people willing to sign their names to their missives in an increasingly toxic political environment.
So does that mean we'll lighten up on some rules, such as on statements of fact? On........