Accordingly, if you wish to keep the readers of your argument awake and
attentive, use terms that touch their everyday experience. If you are
arguing for the establishment of a commission form of government, give
in dollars and cents the sum that it cost under the old system to pave
the three hundred yards of A Street, between 12th and 13th streets. The
late Mr. Godkin of the New York _Evening Post_, in his lifelong campaign
against corrupt government, to bring home to his readers the actual
state of their city government and the character of the men who ran it,
used their nicknames; "Long John" Corrigan, for example (if there had
been such a personage); and "Bath-house John Somebody" has been a
feature of campaigns in Chicago. The value of such names when skillfully
used is that by their associations and connotation they do stir feeling.
Likewise if you are arguing before an audience of graduates for a change
from a group system to a free elective system in your college, you would
use the names of courses with which they would be familiar and the names
of professors under whom they had studied. If you were arguing for the
introduction of manual training into a school, you would make taxpayers
take an interest in the matter if you gave them the exact numbers of
pupils from that school who have gone directly into mills or other work
of the kind, and if you describe vividly just what is meant by manual
training.
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