What we in reality do ourselves, in addition to what we observe other people do, may be turned to good use in writing articles. Individual experiences not only yield good topics and plenty of material but are more easily managed than most other topics, because, being very real and critical to the writer, they can be more promptly be made real and critical to the audience. Many apprentice writers neglect the possibilities of what they themselves have done and are doing.

To acquire experience and opinions for their articles, special writers on newspapers even take on temporarily the roles of individuals whose lives and experiences they want to depict. One Chicago newspaper featured every Sunday for several weeks articles by a reporter who, in order to acquire material, did a assortment of things just for one day, from performing in a strolling street band to impersonating a inmate in the state pen.

Thirty years ago, when women first entered the newspaper field as special feature writers, they were occasionally sent on "freak" assignments for special features, such as pretending injury or insanity in order to acquire entry to hospitals in the pretense of patients. Recently one woman writer posed as an applicant for a position as motion picture actress; another applied for a place as a maid; a third put on overalls and separated scrap-iron all day in the yard of a manufacturing plant; and still another accompanied a store detective on his rounds in order to reveal the techniques of shop-lifting with which department stores have to contend.

It is not essential, however, to go so far afield to get individual experiences, as is shown by the following paper and publication articles based on what the writers observed in the course of their day-to-day pursuits.

The results received from cultivating a quarter-acre lot in the residence district of a metropolis of 100,000 population were stated by a writer in the _country gentleman_.

A woman's experience with bees was referred in _good housekeeping_ under the title, "what I did with bees."

Experience in screening a large porch on his home supplied a writer with the essential information for a applicable story in _popular mechanics_.

Some tests that he made on the power of autos gave a young engineer the suggestion for an article on the term "horse power" as applied to autos; the article was published in the _Illustrated World_.

The journal of an car trip from Chicago to Buffalo was embodied in an article by a woman writer, which she sold to the _Woman's Home Companion_.

Countless articles of the "how-to-do-something" type are accepted annually from inexperienced writers by publications that print such valuable information. Results of experimentation's in resolution assorted problems of home management are so perpetually sought after by woman's magazines and woman's departments in papers, that homemakers who like to write find a ready marketplace for articles grounded on their own experience.