(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld. Only letters under 400 words can be printed because of space limitations.)

To the Editor of the Harvard Crimson:

My house-guest for the Christmas Holidays was a Harvard Junior who was required to submit, early in January, a forty-page paper in a course which I believe he referred to as "Ren. and Ref." Before his arrival he wrote to ask that I hire for him a typewriter with type of the standard size, for, as he pointed out, both the machines in my Study have the smaller elite type. His letter implied that he believed he could fill his assigned forty pages if the larger type-face was used, but not otherwise.

When my guest arrived and saw the piles of books I had assembled for him by use of the bibliography he had sent me in advance, he was quite content to use the smaller type, for the heaped-up authorities in my Study at once made it apparent that there would be no difficulty, more serious than a back-ache, in filling the assigned space.

From this episode, I learned that it is customary, in this course, to measure written assignments by quarto pages of the common 8 1-2 by 11 inch size. The impression seems to prevail that a page is a page for a' that; and the student may use single, double, or even triple space at will and leave margins of a width not prescribed. This permits the number of words to a page to be doubled or to be halved. Having spent all my business life in close contact with authors, editors, literary agents, printers and printers' link, I told my guest that the universal practice in the literary shop is to measure MSS by the number of words and not by the sheet or page. I even proposed that he ask his instructors in this course to follow the common practice. He received my suggestion with manifest horror and told me he could not think of doing such a thing.

For the convenience of all concerned, I make the proposal on my own account without his knowledge. Frederick Southgate Bigelow.

(Ed. Note: Mr. Bigelow was associate editor of the "Saturday Evening Post" for thirty years.)