It's that happy time of year when Scrooge yields in this space to Santa Claus and says something nice about the men and women who write for American newspapers and magazines. We make our share of boners, as I know at first hand, but a wonderful lot of good writing is out there on the newsstands.

A bouquet goes once again to Rick O'Reilly in Sports Illustrated and Gail Collins of The New York Times. Their touch can ignite a paragraph or a page. When Maureen Dowd of the Times doesn't try too hard, she writes gorgeous stuff. Out there in the hinterlands are many writers whose everyday prose, like Thomas Gray's flower, "wastes its sweetness on the desert air." I wish readers would send me more examples of their work.

Back in February, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, appearing in the Greenville (S.C.) News, covered an appearance by Hillary Clinton at Allen University in Columbia. She wrote:

"Finally, Hillary swept in and moved down a line of huggers toward a raised platform centered in the room. Her positioning meant that she had to keep turning in order to hug back. Around and around and around she turned, 360 degrees, like a jewel-box ballerina whose battery has run low."

Why did that paragraph work so beautifully? First, Parker looked intently at the visiting celebrity. Then she used active verbs: Hillary swept, moved, turned, hugged. The reporter's perfect simile relied, as all perfect similes must rely, upon familiar elements - a jewel box, a ballerina, a battery run low. There wasn't a surplus syllable in the sentence.

Familiar elements! I have preached this doctrine for the past 60 years. It works. Rob Oller of The Columbus Dispatch followed the rule of familiar elements in a throw-away lead in February: "Brady Quinn will take being compared with NFL quarterback Matt Leinart any day of the week - unless that day is Saturday, April 29, 2006, when Leinart slid into the draft like a bald tire on black ice."

Sportswriters have opportunities not given to most reporters. Writers such as Corky Simpson of the Tucson Citizen make the most of them. In May he turned out a routine column on the return of basketball coach Kevin O'Neill to the University of Arizona: "Talk about intense! O'Neill at work is like a bush buzzing with bees. On the sidelines during a game he's about as calm as a puppy's tail at suppertime."

Editorial writers for The New York Times turn out reams of astoundingly pedestrian stuff - cranky, tiresome, self-conscious - but now and then all that talent produces a gem. On May 2, readers could delight in a lovely little piece on the closing of the Claremont Riding Academy on West 89th Street. The last sentence was perfect: The loss of the old stable "makes us wonder whether the city wasn't more human still when we shared so much of it with horses."

In September another Times editorial merited a kind word. The piece was one more whine about the war in Iraq, but midway in his petulance the writer properly skewered the administration's claim of a troop "reduction." The president's figures were "the rough equivalent of dropping an object and taking credit for gravity." Bingo!

I ought to write more often about the good stuff in American newspapers and magazines. Every day some of their writers produce work, as Alexander Woollcott once lamented, "as lovingly as any Addison or Steele, and do so in full regard that by tomorrow it will have been burned or used, if at all, to line a shelf." Carry on, my brothers and sisters, carry on!

Questions can be sent to James J. Kilpatrick at kilpatjj@aol.com.