To wit or not to wit; now THAT IS a question.

Editorials drone.

WHETHer this matter deSERVES consideration reMAINS to be SEEN.

Is that English or Latin? The rhythm is reassuring and even convincing, though of what, the reader has no idea.

What editorials need, besides caffeine, is wit. Not humor, necessarily. "To be or not to be" is wit, though it doesn't crack me up. Wit snaps and pops.

Its components are the components of all good writing: clarity, compression, originality, and rhythm, kaboom bang.

Wit is the offspring of a mind at play.

Therein lies a problem for us editorial writers. Our minds ponder, opine, and persuade, but rarely do they play. How can they? Shaping the world to our satisfaction is serious business. Our therefores and whereases are life rafts for a society sinking in a sea of illogic.

And yet, wit never drones. Seldom is it unwelcome. It gets a message across.

Case in point. The Virginian-Pilot had an editorial about a suburb of 353 square miles but fewer than 200,000 people. Incredibly, the sprawling city had run out of large accessible tracts for commercial development. Any regular reader of the Pilot's editorial page knew that our editorial would whine about past poor planning. At least we whined with wit: "Apparently there is no natural advantage that bad planning cannot overcome."

Wit's third greatest enemy, after self-importance and solemnity, is conscientiousness. My earlier sentence on what our minds do - "ponder, opine, and persuade" - originally read, "lament, cajole, opine, persuade, and more." I was conscientious in my attempt to catalog our duties, but my sentence limped.

So I jerked lament and cajole from the sentence. "Nice audition," I told them. "Maybe next time I'll need an 'm' or 'j' sound." The word ponder arrived late for tryouts. "You're beautiful, baby," I said. The next day, the word punish applied to be in my sentence. "Too late," I said. "Four words would be one too many for wit."

"Lament, cajole, opine, persuade, and more" is a list. "Ponder, opine, and persuade" is wit, by my standards. (Never let your standards exceed your ability. Your fingers will freeze.)

Conscientiousness is what causes writers to qualify everything they write. "This matter, of more importance than much of what the council considers, though certainly of less consequence than its three zoning decisions last month, perhaps rating a six or seven, but certainly not an eight, on a significance scale of 10. . . ." At that point, the reader concludes that the writer dreads getting to the verb. In fact, the writer believes he is being precise.

My first drafts of editorials are ponderous, because I'm a conscientious guy. As I type those first drafts, my thin shoulders sag under the heavy weight of editorial responsibility.

Before beginning to revise, I ask myself, "Who are you kidding? Would you read this crap?" Then I attempt to lighten up. If I cannot entertain myself as I revise, my readers will never slog to the editorial's close.

Public journalists undertook a noble experiment to prove that readers could be bored into greater participation in public life. They failed miserably. I know my first drafts would fail as well.

I deny that I dumb down my first drafts. Confident that I couldn't possibly make them worse, I clarify and freshen them. Leastways I try.

Now a couple of caveats.

Wit is not a license to libel or otherwise be irresponsible and cruel.

Wit can be overused. An editorial with three memorable lines would be a burden on the reader. Songs don't have that many memorable lines.

Still, by striving for wit in every editorial, even the obituaries, we can improve our prose. Nothing's worse than droning.

NCEW member Patrick K. Lackey has been an editorial writer at the Virginian-Pilot for four years. His email address is [e-mail]