Editorial writing teacher learned the hard way.

* Guidelines and encouragement may be as effective as blood on the page,

I've found two ways to teach editorial writing: the intellectual way and the bloodied way.

I've been trying to teach the intellectual way for 20 years, but I have more than 30 years of experience with the bloodied way.

I did not take the editorial writing course at the University of Nebraska, but I wrote a lot of editorials for the Daily Nebraskan, thinking that I was pretty good at writing editorials.

When I was offered an editorial writing job on The Des Moines Register and Tribune 10 years or so later, I found that I had a lot to learn.

Lauren Soth, the editorial page editor, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials, largely for proposing an exchange of farm delegations with the Soviet Union. (Nikita Khrushchev subsequently came to Iowa as part of the exchange and ended up throwing corncobs at offending newsmen on the Roswell Garst farm.) Lauren was chair of NCEW in 1961.

Now Lauren is a kind person. I suspect he has never intentionally offended anyone. I'm certain he never intended to inflict any lacerations on my psychic body, but wound he did.

Editorials that I thought were beauties either showed up in print much mutilated or became the subject of a one-on-one editorial conference.

But the wounds healed and, little by little, more and more of what I had written appeared in print.

After five years under Lauren's demanding editing, I had the chance to go back to the newspaper that I had come from, The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash. At first I was a one-person staff, but eventually we added a second, then a third editorial writer. Then it was my turn to bloody up the feeble efforts of those who were working for me. What pure pleasure!

Sharing the pain

I have carried that pleasure into correcting the work of students in my editorial writing classes. Here blood flows out onto their editorials through the tips of pens filled with red ink. (All Lauren had was a pencil.)

I'm not at all certain that the bloodied way works all that well with students. If they ignore my criticisms and suggestions (as many of them do) they know they won't be flunked; they'll get some kind of passing grade. The editorial writer working for a paycheck, however, has more reason to pay attention to suggestions.

Now, as to the intellectual approach:

Editorial writing can be taught through formal instruction, mostly through providing a few guidelines and encouraging students to think about the best way to persuade readers, given different subjects, audiences, and circumstances.

I see three primary benefits from an editorial writing class. Students get practice in improving their writing through the bloodied method. They become acquainted with the opinion function of the mass media. They are forced to become aware of local, state, national, and international issues, and maybe figure out what they think about these issues.

NCEW life member Ken Rystrom retired from the department of communication studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. His textbook The Why, Who and How of the Editorial Page is currently in its second edition. A third edition is due in fall 1998.