sion story,
which did not give the author's own experiences but appeared as
"Transcribed by Walter E. Weyl." This article was obviously written with
the purpose, skillfully concealed, of calling attention to the hard lot
of the underpaid professor.

Constructive criticism of existing conditions may be successfully
embodied in the form of a confession article that describes the evils as
they have been experienced by one individual. If the article is to be
entirely effective and just, the experience of the one person described
must be fairly typical of that of others in the same situation. In order
to show that these experiences are characteristic, the writer may find
it advantageous to introduce facts and figures tending to prove that his
own case is not an isolated example. In the confession article mentioned
above, "The Pressure on the Professor," the assistant professor who
makes the confession, in order to demonstrate that his own case is
typical, cites statistics collected by a colleague at Stanford
University giving the financial status of 112 assistant professors in
various American universities.

Confessions that show how faults and personal difficulties have been
overcome prove helpful to readers laboring under similar troubles. Here
again, what is related should be typical rather than exceptional.

EXAMPLES OF THE CONFESSION STORY. That an intimate account of the
financial difficulties of a young couple as told by the wife, may not
only make an interesting story but may serve as a warning to others, is
shown in the confession story below. Signed "F.B.," and illustrated with
a pen and ink sketch of the couple at work over their accounts, it was
printed in _Every Week_, a popular illustrated periodical formerly
published by the Crowell Publishing Company, New York.

THE THINGS WE LEARNED TO DO WITHOUT

We were married within a month of our commencement, after three
years of courtship at a big Middle West university. Looking back, it
seems to me that rich, tumultuous college life of ours was wholly
pagan. All about us was the free-handed atmosphere of "easy money,"
and in our "crowd" a tacit implication that a good time was one of
the primary necessities of life. Such were our ideas when we married
on a salary of one hundred dollars a month. We took letters of
introduction to some of the "smart" people in a suburb near Chicago,
and they proved so delightfully cordial th