SOME USEFUL TIPS

Writing style

All writers develop their own particular style. Vive la différence! If all authors expressed themselves in exactly the same way, reading would be a pretty boring occupation. What you need to develop is a style which will be found acceptable by the editors of magazines in your field. It’s very much a matter of ‘horses for courses’. An article written in the style of the late Barbara Cartland might be welcomed by Woman’s World, but the same style used for an article in Engineering Today would go down like the proverbial concrete fish.

Try to develop a style that is attractive and easy to read (concentration spans are short these days), and informative (to maintain your readers’ interest). How? You can learn a lot from others in the writing business. Start reading the articles in your target press critically, as if you had to award them marks out of ten – not for their content but for their readability factor. Ask yourself, did I enjoy reading it? If so, why? Did I dislike anything about it, and if so, what? We’ve all read newspaper and magazine articles which, for one reason or another, we’ve found to be a turn-off. Learn from them; don’t make the same mistakes.

Here are a few basic style pointers which might help.

Avoid Waffle Syndrome. If you are falling noticeably short of the wordage target, it’s much better to finish at a hundred or two less and offer the editor a couple of good pics to fill the gap rather than trying to pad it out with lots of unnecessary words. The satirical magazine Private Eye sometimes features items by an imaginary journalist called ‘Phil Space’, who writes totally irrelevant waffly copy just to fill up the space his editor has allotted him. Don’t spoil a good piece with waffle just to make the wordage target – it’s an all-too-common practice, even among some journalists.

Another potential pitfall is the Ego Trip Trap. Even the most experienced commercial writer can sometimes lose sight of the needs of his readership in a pink-tinted haze of wonder at the cleverness, wit and sophistication of his immortal prose. The Ego Trip Trap victim is under the delusion that his readers don’t want boring old facts and figures; they just want his wonderful words. The first person singular features large on the pages. The results of falling into an ETT are usually similar to those of the Waffle Syndrome; an article that turns the reader off after the first few paragraphs.

As with press releases, try to use fairly short, easy-to-read words assembled into crisp sentences of not more than about 20 words. Don’t be afraid to make paragraph breaks frequently; certainly, bringing in a new factor or changing the course of your argument calls for a new paragraph. Cross-heads (paragraph headings) can also be very useful to lead the reader on from one section or line of thought to another but, of course, only if the magazine you are writing for uses them.

The ultimate test of writing style is an editor’s ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But before putting an article to that test, be your own sternest critic. Read through what you have written and then ask yourself, with total honesty – would anyone really want to read this stuff? Then ask a friend or colleague to read it and give you an honest opinion. Don’t argue with them, and be truly prepared to make changes if necessary.

Many writers find it very difficult to accept that their words of wisdom do not come down from Mount Sinai, indelibly inscribed on tablets of stone. Reaching that acceptance is a humbling, but very important, step forward in a writer’s career.

‘Generic’ articles

Sometimes an editor will ask you to write what’s called a generic article, which means that you are not supposed to give pride of place to your own products or services. You will probably be allowed to by-line the piece with name, title and company of the author, but product or corporate puffs in the body copy are not acceptable. This frustrating limitation is often imposed by, for example, house journals of professional associations (or, dare we say it, publications with a lively sense of their own importance in their field!).

One way round the generic straightjacket that we have discovered over the years is to use you or your products as examples to illustrate what you are talking about. With luck and a following wind, the editor will overlook the fact that you haven’t mentioned anyone else as examples. In our hydraulic engineering flood control article, for instance, we might have talked about the need for computer-based modelling systems in river management, and dropped in something like ‘engineering consultants such as Watertech have developed software systems that will...’ and so on.

It’s probably best to use these ‘examples’ later rather than earlier in the piece – it may help to lull the editor into a false sense of security...

Wordage limits

The wordage figure that the editor gives you as part of your briefing is based on the space he has available for your article. Hence, when a magazine editor tells you he wants ‘about 1,500 words with a couple of pics please’ he has probably handed you about two pages of his magazine to fill – no more, no less. Send him 2,000 words and he’s got to cut the article down to size; 1,000 give him a big hole to fill. Either way, he will not be a happy bunny – you’ve let him down, given him a problem which he shouldn’t have to deal with. If you have noticeably over-or under-run, it’s up to you to adjust this before you submit the article. And do give the editor the final word count when you send it in.

Having said this, most editors would turn a blind eye to, say, four or five per cent over or under wordage. Hence, if the target is 1,500 and you’ve written about 1,550 or 1,430, you could probably submit it with a clear conscience.

Check the word count regularly against your plan as the article progresses; it’s not a good idea to leave it until the conclusion to discover that you have to cut or add several hundred words! In the old days making regular word counts was a bit of a pain, but the ‘word count’ gizmo in today’s word-processing software makes it a five-second job.