Dotty wrote: |
One of the most common questions I am asked by my readers is, “Dotty, you must get so many letters, how do you decide which ones to answer?” It is true that I receive many thousands of letters every week from troubled readers all across our great nation. I do wish I could answer each and every one, but of course I have only a few column inches (and the editor refuses to make this an All-Dotty paper, ha ha). There is a process by which my wonderful staff and I winnow the letters down to the select few, and today I’d like to share a bit of our thought process with you.
I’m always looking for questions about real problems that will resonate with a wide swath of citizens. Questions about relationships, love, betrayal, loss, family, duty, ethics, etc. The questions that really grab me have a timeless quality as well: I often ask myself, “would this question be as meaningful a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now?” Often, letters focus on very specific or parochial concerns (complaints about garbage removal, for example) or on settled matters of fact, doctrine, or procedure (if you find a forbidden artifact from the Old Times, your local clergyman is much better positioned than I to tell you when your town’s Burning Days are). As important as these issues are to the writer (and believe me, I know that they are), I fear that I cannot in good faith use my national column to address what, sadly, amount to minutiae and will be of little help to my readership at large. |
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