Still learning. Hence my latest Theory.

The Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper has a circulation of over a third of a million and a potential audience of up to 3.8 Million people in Melbourne alone. It actually boasts 1.5 million readers a day! Thus if you want a wide audience, it is the paper to go to.

As mentioned in an earlier article, after long thinking on it, I finally got around to writing to the letter’s page to express my opinion, to mixed success. So far, in getting my letters published, I have had one success to two failures.

After my first failure I analyzed what I had written and decided that it must have been too wordy and adjusted my second attempt accordingly, which was published. With my success, I decided to continue on those lines. Yet despite this I was disappointed to find my next effort didn’t get accepted, despite being a reasoned reply to an earlier letter.

Then, upon reflection I realized that my two reject letters were “Reply letters”, in that I was responding to what someone else had earlier written in the Letters Page, whereas my success was in response to an article in the paper itself, as apposed to in their letter column. So my new theory is that if I want something printed in the Sun, my best chance is to reply to something new and not something in the “Letters Column”.

However this new theory of mine then produces a tiny moral problem for me. What do I do? Write to be Published in the letters page? Or write to correct what I consider to be a one-sided or unfair view, whenever and wherever I see one?

Do you have a similar situation in life, where you have to choose between what you believe to be right and what people want from you? So how do you respond?

I can’t speak for you, only myself. Hence, I will continue to write in response to what I feel strongly about, irregardless of publication or not. However, having said that, I will also strive to present it in a way that will hopefully make it more printable, but without watering down my response. What say you? Walter