Steve Ellis, of Hackett, has written in with a list of requests for 2000 including one asking: “”Can the letters to the editor page be declared an R. S. Gilbert-free zone for a little while?
“”You presumably receive many more letters than you can publish, so why not give someone else a go?”
They are fair enough questions. I would love to give someone else a go. But by and large the rejected letters are self-rejecting. They get rejected on the usual grounds: too long; illegible; illogical; illiterate; irrelevant; obscene; a similar letter has already run; or no address.
Letters from regulars — like R. S. Gilbert, John Cleland, Bob Steege, Mike O’Shaughnessy — are the only ones rejected on the grounds of objection against the person who wrote them. Some letters written by R. S. Gilbert are indeed rejected purely on the ground that they are written by R. S. Gilbert, because he has others approved still in the system. Otherwise they would be eminently publishable.
Letter selection is usually done by me, Editor Jack Waterford or Associated Editor Penelope Layland. We tend to read the content and mentally accept or reject before we see who has written the letter. Most people sign at the bottom of the letter.
By and large we will always publish a well-written, pertinent (or better still, impertinent) letter under 250 words. But there are ebbs and flows of letters. The number will drop over school holidays and public holidays. The number will rise if there is a hot issue running.
During Christmas-New Year, things get a bit desperate. Advertisements drop off at that time so the letters page is bigger. People are away so there are fewer letters. There is no post.
In those circumstances, some longer letters will run in full, whereas they would usually be cut or rejected. Further, some similar letters would get a run which would usually be rejected. This Christmas-New Year, for example, we reluctantly allowed the millennium arguments to run well beyond what was warranted.
(Incidentally, Mr Ellis also quite rightly pleaded that no more millennium nonsense be run.)
The 250-word rule poses some difficulty. It is more a plea for good, tight writing than an absolute limit. But as soon as we publish a letter longer than 250 words people point to that and say, “”Why can’t I have more?””
It is because some people take a lot of words to say a very little.
Others can say a lot in a few words.
The upshot, unfortunately, is that some well-written letters of more than 250-words have to be cut lest they become a poor example.
Short letters get preference.
ACT and region letters get preference.
E-mail letters get preference because they are more timely. Letters delayed by the post can become too old to run.
E-mail saved our bacon over Christmas-New Year. Faxed letters tend to come from businesses, which are mostly closed. The e-mail, however, continued. Some were sent in on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, including one from you know who.
E-mail has blossomed. A quick trawl of letters in the past few weeks shows that about two-thirds of approved letters come in by e-mail. About two-thirds of e-mail letters get approved, whereas only a third of faxed and posted letters get approved.
The bias towards e-mail, aside from timeliness, is possibly because these letters are more likely to have been composed on a word-processor, worked on and spell-checked. It may also be because e-mail is more prevalent in families with higher incomes and higher education levels — people who are more likely to express themselves well and get published. Sorry, it’s a fact of life. But it will not preclude well-written, hand-written, posted letters.
Sometimes, I wish there were more letters to choose from, especially, tightly written ones — in the words of Mr Ellis, that more people would have a go.
If only there were more R. S. Gilberts out there. Then there would be less of R. S. Gilbert in the letters column.