st almost entirely
of incidents. Dialogue and description are very frequently employed in
relating incidents, even when the greater part of the incident is told
in the writer's own words. The incidents given as examples of narrative
beginnings on pages 135-37 are sufficient to illustrate the various
methods of developing incidents as units.

STATISTICS. To make statistical facts comprehensible and interesting is
usually a difficult problem for the inexperienced writer. Masses of
figures generally mean very little to the average reader. Unless the
significance of statistics can be quickly grasped, they are almost
valueless as a means of explanation. One method of simplifying them is
to translate them into terms with which the average reader is familiar.
This may often be done by reducing large figures to smaller ones.
Instead of saying, for example, that a press prints 36,000 newspapers an
hour, we may say that it prints 10 papers a second, or 600 a minute. To
most persons 36,000 papers an hour means little more than a large
number, but 10 papers and one second are figures sufficiently small to
be understood at a glance. Statistics sometimes appear less formidable
if they are incorporated in an interview or in a conversation.

In undertaking to explain the advantages of a cooeperative community
store, a writer was confronted with the problem of handling a
considerable number of figures. The first excerpt below shows how he
managed to distribute them through several paragraphs, thus avoiding any
awkward massing of figures. In order to present a number of comparative
prices, he used the concrete case, given below, of an investigator
making a series of purchases at the store.

(1)

Here's the way the manager of the community store started. He
demonstrated to his neighbors by actual figures that they were
paying anywhere from $2 to $8 a week more for their groceries and
supplies than they needed to. This represented the middlemen's
profits.

He then proposed that if a hundred families would pay him regularly
50 cents a week, he would undertake to supply them with garden
truck, provisions and meats at wholesale prices. To clinch the
demonstration he showed that an average family would save this
50-cent weekly fee in a few days' purchases.

* * * * *

There is no difference in appearance between the community store and
any other provisi