Word: skimmings
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...approached in a confident frame of mind. It has never been a TIME rule that the magazine must be read from front to back, though most people do. Those who skip ahead to their favorite section-whether it be People, Medicine or Art-or take a preliminary skim of the magazine, just looking at the pictures and reading what catches their eye, have our affection too. We have a first page but not a Front Page, and the writers and editors in what we call our back of the book like to think that theirs too is the Front Page...
...insist and insist again, by Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.'s, we skim right past them, we start wondering what kind of a C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up, we decide: C--. (Harvard being Harvard, one does not give D's. Consider C--a failure.) Why? Not because they are a sign the student doesn't know the material, or hasn't thought carefully, or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. "Locke is a transitional figure." The whole thing boils down to human rights...
...FACTS. Any kind, but do get them in. They are what we look for, as we skim our lynx-eyes over every other page--a name, a place, an allusion, an object, a brand of deodorant, the titles of six poems in a row, even an occasional date. This, son, makes for interesting (if effortless) reading: and that is what gets A's. Underline them, capitalize them, inset them in outline form: be sure we don't miss them. Why do you think all exams insist at the top, "Illustrate;" "Be Specific;" etc? They mean it. The illustrations needn...
...chore which falls on trained college and graduate students--proceeds horizontally from one trench to the other, one thin layer at a time. The digger usually pokes his way along with a large screw driver bent into a right angle. Occasionally he uses a spatula-like tool to skim off the dirt. As the work proceeds boards are placed down to prevent damage to the underlying stratum...
...railroads suffer, too, from memories of the bad and fat old days when many of them arrogantly set their rates according to "what the traffic would bear"-a practice that not only opened the way for trucks to slip in and skim off the cream of the freight, but that also inspired the steady expansion of federal regulation of railroads. Nowadays, a railroad cannot raise or lower its fares, expand or contract its lines, merge or diversify its business without express approval of the slow-rolling Interstate Commerce Commission. Overworked and understaffed, the ICC itself harbors no illusions about...