webshells.com/nwuco Forum
webshells.com/nwuco Forum
| Author | Carrol Cox |
| Date | 00/09/10/10:46 |
| Hit Count | 724 |
| Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky wrote: > Good leaflets are very connected with essays. If an essay (at least > an essay in the tradition of the creator of the species, the French > Montaigne) is an attempt to pose the adequate questions that arise > from a concrete issue in everyday life, a leaflet is an attempt to > expose the most abstract relations and concepts that underlie a > concrete issue in everyday life, and, what's more, in a very limited > space. > > Leaflet writing is in fact a literary specialty in its own right, > strongly linked with journalism and editorializing. Good leaflets can > be excellent editorials in a newspaper, and good editorials in a > newspaper can be transformed into a leaflet. I would like to underline a distinction implicit in that last sentence. It is true, I think, that a good leaflet could *be* a good editorial. I don't think, however, that an editorial could *be* a good leaflet, though as Nestor says it might often be *transformed* into a good leaflet. In my own experience editorials or columns for newsletters (I have no experience with full-fledged newspapers) are much easier to write than leaflets. The writer of an editorial has two advantages which make the task easier. First of all, he/she can merely assume a readership -- it is the newspaper as a whole, issue after issue, that attracts the reader, who has purchased the newspaper presumably with intention to read. Secondly, the editorial need not introduce (announce the existence of) its subject matter but can assume knowledge of it. The leaflet is nearly unique among literary genres in that it must virtually create its audience -- and do so with its headline and the first line or two of text. One possible way to image this difference is to suggest that if someone producing a newspaper or newsletter in Baltimore or even Lyons or Manila were to ask me to write an editorial on some particular topic, I might be able to do so. Were someone from those locations ask me (or anyone at a distance) to write a leaflet for them, one would hardly know where to begin. I was just beginning to get the hang of leaflet writing in the late '60s and early '70s when the occasions for writing them began to fade away. |