I was dubious of him in that first encounter. He was crisp and quick in manner, clear-skinned, very spruce, and clear-eyed; his eyes appraised you in a glance.
"Take that and see how short you can make it."
He handed me a column from one of the "exchanges," as the copies of other papers are called. I spent half an hour at it, striking out repetitions and superfluous adjectives and knitting long sentences into brief ones. Condensation is a fine thing, as Charles Reade once said, and to know how to condense judiciously, to get all the juice, without any of the rind or pulp, is as important to the journalist as a knowledge of anatomy to the figure painter.
I went over it a second time before I handed it back to him as the best I could do. I had plucked the fatted column to a lean quarter of that length, yet I trembled and sweated.
"Bah!" he cried, scoring it with a pencil, which sped as dexterously as a surgeon's knife. "Read it now. Have I omitted anything essential?"
He had not; only the verbiage had gone. All that was worthy of preservation remained in what the printer calls a "stickful." That was my first lesson in journalism.