Wyatt imparted to his outgunned team three guidelines: One was to try to politely reason with a man, because he was not as dangerous when in the middle of a conversation. The second was if a deputy had to shoot, do it deliberately and accurately, because often the quickest man was off the mark. Third, don’t shoot to kill, because wounding a man usu­ally disabled him enough and he would be worth more money that way.

—From the book Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West, by Tom Clavin.

“My grandmother bought me a typewriter,” he told The Post in 1984. “It sat on the kitchen table. I would take the paper every day, put a piece of paper in and start copying the newspaper story word for word. One day, I started trying to improve on it. I thought, ‘This guy’s an idiot. I can do better than this.’ It hasn’t stopped since.”

—From the Washington Post obit on Dan Jenkins by Matt Schudel.

In 1983 I read Frames of Mind, a book about multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner. He was mostly interested in how a better understanding of intelligence could improve schools but for me, an editor, it opened up new ways to see the strengths and weaknesses of writers. Gardner listed seven intelligences; the one schools focused on and rewarded was logical-analytical. But Gardner felt the other intelligences also were important to success.

In recent years, headline writers have been lucky: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama.

Write often enough to remind yourself that it’s hard to do really well.

It’s much easier to edit than to write.

I once overheard one of our young editors hang up on a writer and say to herself “Dumb beast.” We helped her find another job.

At a meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors, we were invited to talk about tricks of the trade and what we’d learned. John Mack Carter, editor of Good Housekeeping, told us: “Go out to lunch.”

He was making the point that one of the things an editor shouldn’t do is to stay in the office too much, talking to the same people day after day. Go out to lunch with people not connected to your publication, often people not in journalism. Find out what they’d like to know more about, what they see happening in their field, how they see the future, what they’d do if they had your job.

A February 25 tweet from Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi:

Random thought: What’s the president’s relationship with his youngest son? He almost never speaks of him, is very irregularly photographed with him. A private matter, to a large extent, yes, but all modern presidents have played up their “family man” status. Not him.

President Trump’s youngest son, Barron, is 12-years-old, lives at the White House, and attends St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, about 12 miles north of the White House in Potomac, Maryland. St. Andrew’s is known for having a more nurturing environment than some of the top DC private schools such as Sidwell Friends, where the Obama children were educated. St. Andrew’s is a good school for kids with learning disabilities, the kind of kids who don’t need journalists probing into their lives.