Readers who write

A letter in Monday's paper from a woman in Lumberton noted how happy she was to see letters by four liberals (and women, at that) in last Wednesday's paper. A letter that came in the mail today from another reader took the opposite view; we'll get that in this week sometime.

The Readers Write section is one of the best-read in the paper, and we'd like to keep it that way.

We print all letters we get with only a few qualifiers -- one letter per month, no personal or business disputes, and we have to use your name and city. Basically, we get them into print as soon as possible, usually within a few days of receiving them. We may try to run a group of letters on one topic on a single day, but otherwise we keep the pipeline moving.

If we can balance liberal and conservative viewpoints within a group of letters, that's great. Last Wednesday, however, we basically had four good letters ready to go, and all of them were from liberals. So that's what ran last Wednesday. On other times, we've had batches of letters that leaned to the right.

So if you see a letter with an opinion you don't like, don't worry, the next day's paper might well have a rebuttal. If you want to make sure the other side gets equal time, please write it yourself.