Most articles have a fairly rigid structure, which may or may not be spelled out by the journal or magazine. If they don’t, read what they already publish and dissect it. The cool thing about periodical writing is you can see what sells by looking at what gets published. Just analyze it and use that as a roadmap. If you don’t have those available, consider this as a blueprint.
You start with an introduction, which you might consider a backgrounder. The idea here is to make your reader care about what you have to say. If you’re writing about chronic pain, give some pain statistics and talk about why this can be such a devastating and frustrating medical condition. Some periodicals want you to use a hook here. A hook is just something to draw the reader in. The goal in the intro is to frame the article so that it is of maximum interest.
At the en of the article, you need a conclusion, not to summarize the content, but to provide your reader with a nice, concise “take-away” message. You can also conclude with some sort of rallying cry. If you were writing about chronic pain, you could conclude that more people should demand adequate pain relief and speak frankly with doctors. Or you could conclude that scientists need to do more research on what causes chronic pain. It doesn’t matter where you go, it’s just that your article has to have led the reader from the opening (introduction) to this point.
When writing an article, you should know the beginning and the end first, because you are taking the reader on an intellectual journey from the opening (here’s why you should care) to the logical conclusion (here’s what you should do or think).
The middle part of the article is where you build your case. This will vary a lot depending on the body of information you’re working with, but there are some basic tactics to remember:
- Build logically; resist the urge to say the most important thing first but take your reader by the hand and walk him or her through the steps
- Use quotes, illustrations, interviews, charts, or other “special effects” only if they support your writing. You may have the coolest quote or most outrageous statistic in the world, but only use it if it builds the case you’re making.
- As you construct your article, think of the steps you’re taking and then go back and fill them in. Only really experienced writers can write a good article from beginning to end in that order. Most of us build the structure and backfill.
- It’s good writing style to introduce some variety in your article. As you make your points, use what you have–statistics, quotations, reports, documentation, photographs, charts, and so on. This kind of variety makes your reading interesting.
When you write an article, you have to write it as if your reader is reading it in order, word for word. Not everyone will do that, but people tend not to bounce around in articles the way they do on websites or in brochures. Redundancy should be avoided unless there is a reason for it. For example, if you show a table in your article and its caption and data are somewhat redundant (not word-for-word, of course) with the body copy of the article, that’s fine. Just don’t make the same point twice in the body copy.
Periodicals may have rules about article length. You can solve this problem a bit by figuring out how many words you would have for each section. For instance, if your limit is 2000 words and you need to make about four main points, you have an intro, four points, and a conclusion. That’s six sections. They don’t have to be equal length (in fact, it’s better if they’re not) but if they were you have 333 words per section. I would sketch out something like this: Intro 200 words, Conclusion 150 words, and then that gives me about 400 words per point. If I go long on one point, I know I have to make up for it by shortening another point. It’s a lot easier to map out length requirements in advance than to write as if wordcount did not matter and then have to cut the article. That does not always work because the cuts may negatively impact the structure. For instance, let’s say your word limit is 2000 words and you write a 5000 word article. You have to lose 3000 words. That may remove entire points from the article, which can make it collapse. Or you may try to gut your 16 points and find out you’re writing just a lot of short sentences without really fleshing out the concepts.
The good thing about article writing is that if you write regularly for a certain type of periodical, you get a pretty good feel for the writing style. You know how to begin, how to end, and how many points you can reasonably make.
