Good evening, children. It's Granny Madduff, ready with a story. So make yourselves comfy, and I'll begin.

Once upon a time, there lived a man, Alfred, who had a job which required good penmanship.

While he did his other tasks quite well, his penmanship was quite awful, and he was unable to improve it.

So, he put an ad in the paper for someone with very good penmanship.

He received so many applications that they filled an entire bucket.

But he only needed one, and so he diligently went through each application.

All had terrible writing.

Then he came to the last one.

It was filled with a script that was so beautiful.

A writing machine could have done no better.

Alfred was a wonderful writer,

and when his writing appeared in the new, perfect handwriting,

everyone told him, that is so beautifully written.

That is my work! exclaimed Oscar, the man whose script was so beautiful. But though he could write beautiful

words, he could not think them up to save himself. After having been praised for an entire

week, Oscar wanted to be the one in the office. He wanted to outright all the other writers.

He wanted to be the best.

So he wrote about paintings and sculptures and ancient Rome and ancient Greece, about composers

and theatre.

And, well, it was all an awful load of nonsense.

And it was so dreadful that he was forced to write the following day that it had been a misprint.

It was sad because his handwriting, not his writing, was the only asset he possessed.

...