Put News in Your Letters

by Ivan Allbutt

The letters you write for wide distribution at home are essentially prayer letters, even if they do take on a different form from those you send to the inner circle of prayer helpers. In another sense, they are newsletters, giving information as a stimulus and a guide to prayer. A newsy letter is a good letter.

I kept six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
-Kipling, The Elephant’s Child

The letters you write for wide distribution at home are essentially prayer letters, even if they do take on a different form from those you send to the inner circle of prayer helpers. In another sense, they are newsletters, giving information as a stimulus and a guide to prayer. A newsy letter is a good letter.

You are probably familiar with the newsman’s formula, the five W’s of journalism–who, what, when, where, why?–to which some add how. When all these questions are answered, though not necessarily in that order, your reader has formed a clear mental picture. Your news `story" has prepared him for the heart of your message.

We have put the word "story" in quotes because it is being used in its special journalistic sense, and not the way a storyteller would use it. To a newsman, a story is merely the factual reporting of a situation or an event. As soon as you begin to comment on the facts, or make an application from them, you are not reporting but editorializing.

The use of this formula will not dampen the essential friendliness or spiritual tone of your letters. Some missionaries keep their letters personal and warm by writing as if they were talking to only one person instead of hundreds.

Before writing your next letter, why not check over the previous one to find out why it brought such encouraging responses from the people on your mailing list as, "I love to hear from you" and "Your letters tell me just the things I need to know when I pray!" By improving the news content of your letters you may be able to quicken their spiritual impact.

THE WHO QUESTION
First of all, let’s take the who question. Identifying people in your letters, revealing them as individuals, will bring them to life. It is something like playing the game of Twenty Questions, in which the shrewd guesser splits the possibilities in two with every question he asks. So with each fact you give, the person (or situation, or event) becomes twice as clear as it was before.

Who? (Yourself.) Put your name on the envelope; your reader likes to know who the letter is from before he opens it. Your surname should also appear on the letter itself, preferably your signature. It makes a form letter seem more personal if your signature is reproduced rather than typed. Don’t be afraid to write "I" if that is who you are; it is not now considered to be immodest.

Married people sometimes have difficulty reconciling their joint signature with "I" paragraphs. Here is one nice way out of this: "Russell (writer) and Barbara Reed."

Who? (Your fellow-worker.) By obvious reference, if not by name, it will be known whether this is a man or woman. If you can work in one or more facts, so much the better (an Australian; my senior by three terms; just back from furlough; etc. ).

Who? (Nationals.) If the name, such as Koko-san, leaves any doubt, use personal pronouns (he, him, she, her, his, hers) to call up a mental picture of either a man or a woman. An indication of his general age group is good (learning to walk; squints through his bifocals); figure facts are even more definite (ten-year-old; over eighty). Sometimes it is helpful to connect the name of the person with a place or an event (Lawrence of Arabia; the deacon from Dumdum). General facts also give life to your characters (mother of six children; peanut vendor; first Muslim convert in this province).

Underlining names when several appear on one page makes visual points of attention to which the reader can easily refer, backtracking for a retake if he wants to. He makes a fresh mental approach every time he sees a name in underscored typing, italics, or boldface type.

THE WHAT QUESTION
What? Check each object and circumstance for phrases that will separate them from similar things with the same general name. For instance, is the conference to which you refer a gathering of missionaries, or a meeting of tribal church leaders? And is the "school" one where missionaries’ children are taught, a government school where you have one class a week, a DVBS, or a seminary?

An occasional non-English word will lend local national flavor to your writing. Such words do not need to be dictionary-defined, if the context shows the reader what they mean. (Isn’t that how most of us learned wha a safari is?) To use the word "mat" close to "Tatami" might help, or an expression such as "all straw but not quite a yard wide" (if that is true). For readers who might not know what a Kalesa is (0 ye Filipinos), reference to the skinny critter that pulls it, or to the wooden spokes or solid rubber tires may be enough to suggest a horse-drawn wheeled conveyance. This is something like an artist depicting a scene with only two or three deft strokes of pen or brush, leaving our imagination to fill in the details. But the strokes or the words have to be just right, or the imagination will conjure up the wrong picture.

THE WHEN QUESTION
When? For the sake of those dear friends who file your letters, include the year in the date at the head. Give preference always to month names and figures, rather than to poetic but wooly expressions like "tomorrow fortnight" or "the ensuing week." Be definite. "The Perikomo Campaign will begin March 19" is more certain than "The dates of the campaign have been advanced a week."

By now the dry season and the rainy season are part of your life, but those in the homeland need to be told almost every time how to relate these seasons to their calendar.

Even in places where exactness is not necessary, the use of some time word will keep your reader from slipping back into ambiguity, even if it is the newsman’s jargon, "recently." There is something in us Westerners that shies away from yesterday’s newspaper. Even the uncertain "recent" brings an event into current thought, and makes it more important than one to which no time reference is made.

THE WHERE QUESTION
Where? Standing without qualification, "here" could mean anywhere on the face of the earth (Here we have no continuing city). Identify localities with place names if you can, and be consistent in names and spelling for the sake of continuity. Fence in the area, specialize the location, and bring your reader to a specific spot (here from the Far East; across the straits of Aomori; on the roof of our new house; three hours walk from where we live). Check the mailing address at the head of your letter-you will have to be on your own mailing list to do this!

If the scene changes from one paragraph to another, be sure your reader isn’t left behind. That doesn’t mean you have to say, "Now come with me…" but it could mean a time and sequence phrase is needed (Six weeks later I met the man again, this time on the market at Paw Pie). just so we are with you all the way.

THE WHY QUESTION
Why? Put yourself in your reader’s place and anticipate the questions still to be answered in his mind. Why were you so happy to see Miss Chawn at last Tuesday’s Bible class? (Because last week she had said, "This is my last time; my parents forbid me to attend any more.") Your furlough is due in May, but you will not be seeing friends until December. Why? (Because you are traveling the other way around the world, or are taking a short Islamics course in Beirut). Yards of interesting narrative and gobs of local color are not enough in themselves; there must be significance to the other things you write about if your reader is to realize instinctively that you have not been telling him these things for entertainment but for prayer. You might add to the five W’s and how the question, So what? You have been on the field two years; you have moved across the street; the roads are dusty; fifteen people came to church Sunday -So what? Why are these things important?

THE HOW QUESTION
The How of things should be expressed rather than intimated When you go from one place to another, tell us how you went: train, bus, plane, cart, outrigger, steamer, mudsled, or did you walk or climb? Tie in with your reader’s own familiar background (Train travel at any time of day or night out of Tokyo is like the New York subway at five o’clock, except … ). Comparisons and contrasts will give the feeling of your experiences. Physical, bodily terms are particularly useful to transmit feeling.

There were fifty-nine missionaries at your last conference, we’ll say, "and it was a problem to feed so many." How did you meet the problem? Call in a caterer? Everybody bring his own tin plate? Serve rice with what-have-you?

If you repaired your portable phonograph with a bobby pin, tell us how you first unscrewed the cover plate with your fingernail file. You distributed a thousand tracts in an hour but what did you say as you passed them out? You led a soul to Christ–tell us what you said to him, and what he said to you, and quote the words of his first prayer.

RATE YOURSELF
Now look at your old letter. Rate yourself up to ten points on the clarity of each question in the news formula: who? what? when? where? why? how? Award yourself twenty five points for writing at all–after all, the biggest problem about writing a letter is just to do it–and split the remaining fifteen points on having said what you wanted to say, the readability of short sentences and short paragraphs, and the way one paragraph leads to the next.

But the real score can be measured better by the number of replies your letter brought. It should be more next time.

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Copyright © 1967 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

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