Essay Online

Op-ed articles, also known as opinion/editorial articles, are a great way for aspiring writers to publicize their work and, in exchange, receive an amazing amount of publicity for free. You can write an op-ed piece and get it publicized provided you follow these simple rules.

Before you begin to write, you need to target which newspaper you would like your article to appear in. You stand a greater chance of getting into your local paper than in a national publication like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or USA Today. Still, if one of the national publications appeals to you, then give it a try.

1. Follow the rules. Every newspaper has guidelines on what their specific requirements are. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines and stringently hold yourself to their requirements. Failure to do so will mean you will be rejected.

2. Write with precision. Newspapers do not like verbose writers, unless it is for a feature piece and it is for a high end publication, such as The Washington Post. Short, crisp, and to-the-point sentences are the order of the day.

3. Write with persuasion. Whatever your point of view, write persuasively. Do not muddy the waters by giving vague answers. If you are discussing a problem, count on offering the solution. Expect that your article may occupy one half of the op-ed page; the other half may feature a rebuttal or an opposite point of view.

4. Double space. As with any submitted writing, you must double space your text. Expect the editors to work their magic on your piece, including removing entire paragraphs to make everything fit.

5. Submit a cover letter. Yes, you more than likely will have to snail mail your letter, so send it off with a cover letter to the appropriate contact person.

6. Your contact information. Your name, address, city, state, country, zip, contact numbers, and email address are all needed. More than likely none of this will be included in the piece, but they do need a way to get back to you.

7. Resource box. Unlike ezine sites where you can write a lengthy discourse on who you are and have links to your site, it is likely that only a one or two word sentence about “who you are” will be included. So, consider writing your own resource box and hope that they like it. [You can count on it being changed if they do not.] It could be written something like this:

John Doe is a Detroit based freelance writer affiliated with Writer’s Write.

Yes, that may be about all the information they want to share about you with their readers.

More than likely you will know within two weeks time if your piece will get published. Some papers will contact you to let you know if you have been approved/rejected, while others will simply publish your article. Do not hound them as you may want to become a regular contributor.

What is the next step?

1. If you are approved, you can expect letters to the editor — from readers — in response to your piece to begin appearing in subsequent editions of the newspaper. Do not be surprised if letters begin arriving in your home or place of business too. Expect phone calls from people who may want to discuss your point of view further, or invite you to speak in front of their group, etc.

2. If you are rejected, consider modifying and resubmitting your piece or forwarding it to another publication. Accept criticism about your writing style, if offered.

3. Op ed pieces are sometimes picked up by syndicators such as Reuters or Google News; your piece can have a life well beyond the local newspaper. If you hit the national press, you can count on your article having widespread coverage. Do a search on Google a few days after publication and you may discover how wide a net your piece has cast. If that is the case, good for you!

Above all, op-ed article can help shape local or national opinion, so think of the greater good you can do as well as the publicity you just may receive when crafting your article. Although newspaper circulation continues to drop, online versions of these same newspapers continue to grow, thereby giving you exposure far beyond the intended market.

Whether you’re an author publishing through traditional means or delving into self-publishing, you are going to want the feedback of a good editor or perhaps more than one. The difficulty for authors, especially those choosing self-publishing is when do you take an editor’s advice and make changes and when do you determine you’ve gotten enough feedback? This can be a tough call, and it often comes down to the author finding a happy medium.

The first thing writers need to consider is how many editors are too many? In writing and researching Shades of Darkness, Shades of Grace, over the duration of the project seven editors reviewed the manuscript. Some of them were extremely helpful, taking an objective approach and offering suggestions that made for a better book. Others seemed to check objectivity at the door, letting their personal likes and dislikes influence how they felt the story should develop. By the time the book was completed, I felt as though I had let too many cooks into the kitchen, all fussing over the same pot, either adding spices or removing them.

What I learned from the editors I consulted were two simple things. One, you cannot make everyone happy. It’s just not possible, so you write the best work you can, one that as many reader’s as possible can relate to. Number two, as an author you ultimately have to decide if the suggestions editors make are enhancing your work, or turning it into the work of someone else. Again, it goes back to the idea of authors finding a happy medium that improves the work, but is still your own.

The first editor I contacted was probably the most beneficial. Prudy loved the book, but thought it should begin with the wedding because she believed this was where the story truly started. She also suggested plotting the story on a calendar over the specific number of years the novel took place. In this way, real life events could be woven throughout the narrative, giving the reader not only a sense of place and time, but information that might arouse their interest in other areas related to the story.

Another editor’s feedback was more helpful regarding ways to improve my writing, rather than this particular story. She pointed out little tics in my style &ndash for example using the same word too often, advice which I didn’t just apply to the novel, but every other piece I’ve written. Her observation helped me expand my vocabulary and fine-tune my work. Two suggestions I took issue with was the fact that in the novel Kay and Tim don’t have any children, and that as a minister’s wife, this editor felt Kay should be shown in church more. I thought both points had nothing to do with the story and verged on stereotyping. I made this decision from my own experience of knowing childless couples where a spouse works in ministry.

One positive aspect of consulting multiple editors is that enough voices may convince an author to make a significant change. Out of seven editors, six wanted to see the ending beefed up providing the reader with an enhanced sense of satisfaction and closure. The one holdout was a good friend and her argument was that by expanding the ending, the author was taking the reader by the hand, when she felt their imagination could do the rest. Of all the decisions I made regarding Shades of Darkness, this was by far the toughest. Eventually I relented and significantly revised the ending.

Authors may also find themselves confronted with one editor who changes something, only to encounter another who changed it back. This was particularly true when dealing with the grammatical aspects of the book. The second editor was an old-school English major, so her placement of commas was more extensive. The fifth editor removed what she believed were too many commas and thus we had a full-scale “Comma War.” When the last editor reviewed the manuscript, edited commas were being replaced. What I strongly recommend is authors select a specific grammatical style (such as the Chicago Manual of Style or Modern Language Association) and stick to it.

Ultimately, regardless of what an editor suggests, as the author you need to remember this is a subjective process. The final editor made a suggestion that would have entailed rewriting the entire manuscript in a way that I felt was not beneficial to the story. But because I thought the suggestion had some merit, I compromised and trimmed the scene to a point where I felt comfortable, thereby finding a happy medium.

Overview

Your editor should be an integral part of your writing team. Do not think of him/her as a judge, but rather as a resource to help you in all phases of the writing project. This article will help you overcome any fear of your editor, and how to effectively use your editor during the writing process.

Beware of Your Editor

Some of the changes that an editor might suggest could make the User Document more difficult for your Reader to understand.

Improving Your Writing

Once your editor has gotten past the basic mechanical editing tasks of:

* grammar

* punctuation

* spelling

* editing to a Style Sheet,

he/she may work on “improving your writing.”

Your editor may believe that one way to make the writing more interesting is to use synonyms when you refer back to something. Thus you might call something a “chip bin” in one part of your text, and your editor might suggest using a different term, such as “waste trap,” later in the document. This should make your writing “more interesting.”

You do not want interesting writing in your User Documents! You want clear, simple, very easy to understand writing. If you make your writing more interesting by using the synonym (”waste trap”) then you force your reader to have to think about whether or not these are the same thing. I recommend that you use the exact same wording every place in your User Document where you are referring to the same thing. No synonyms here!

If your Reader wanted to be entertained or have his/her thoughts provoked, then he/she would be reading a novel.

Don’t let your editor make your writing more interesting or more clever if those efforts makes the material harder for your Reader to understand.

Erudition

Another place to beware of your editor is “erudition.” That is, when an editor that tries to make your User Documentation sound more formal. Other than disclaimer, legal, and safety information, the User Document should sound friendly, with a conversational tone.

For example, an editor might suggest changing contractions (such as “don’t”) into their more formal form (”do not”). Don’t do it! Contractions are conversational and they should not be avoided.

If you think about it, most people reading the User Documentation for any product are under some form of stress:

* they either want to get on with using the product, or

* something has gone wrong.

A formal document will put the User off. The document should not be silly or flippant; however, it should provide the information that the User needs in a conversational, easily understood style. The needed information should be easy to find.

Although most word processor grammar checkers are woefully inadequate, many of these checkers can be made to provide a readability score (you may have to set an option to enable this feature). Editing should help increase the readability (indicated by a decrease in the reading grade level) of the document. If editing increases the reading grade level, ask your editor why that score has changed.

What to Do

Provide your editor with the information that will enable him/her to do the best job. Here are some things to tell your editor:

* The intended audience for the User Document

* Tell your editor that you want an informal style of User Document

* What style manual or guide to be used in editing

* Scheduling and progress of the project

* Format for sharing and editing the text (make sure the editor can read your electronic documents — do this when you hire the editor)

(Whenever you are dealing with someone outside your organization, you must have a signed non-disclosure agreement. This is in addition to any other contractual items between the outsider and your organization.)

Get to Know Your Editor

Your editor is NOT your school teacher. In your school days, your teacher-as-editor was a judge. Your goal was to impress your teacher with your writing. You were working for a grade. Thus you may have come to fear your editor.

Change your thinking! Now, your editor is on your side. Your editor will work with you to produce the best possible writing. You will not have to worry excessively about grammar. You goal is to get the information “on paper” as clearly and completely as you can. Your editor will suggest changes to polish the text.

So don’t fear your editor. Make your editor part of your writing team.

Love Your Editor

Hire Your Editor Early in the Project

Hire your editor early in the life of the project. There are at least two benefits to hiring the editor early:

* First, your editor will be prepared for the editing task. He/she will have had time to get to know the product, target audience, and your organization’s style guide.

* Second, your editor can help you with your writing, as I describe below…

Let Your Editor Help You

If you run into problems about how to write something, call on your editor. Most likely your editor can provide an effective wording to get you around your block. That’s one reason why you got the editor on the project early. Here’s another…

A Recommendation

I recommend that you work on small pieces of the User Document, and circulate these small pieces (rough drafts) to the development team for comments. Then use their comments to improve the writing, and re-circulate the improved material. Continue this for a few cycles. I call this “Iterative, Interactive Writing.” This is an effective method for writing quickly and accurately.

If you feel uncomfortable about circulating rough drafts to the product development team for review, here’s a solution. Have your editor perform a quick edit of the rough draft before you circulate it for comments. Your “drafts” will look quite good, and the development team will concentrate on the content, not the wording or grammar (and comments about content are you want from the team).

The Bottom Line

Don’t think of your editor as an enemy lurking at the end of your document production path. Instead, realize that your editor can be a valuable member of your writing team, and is on your side. He/she should:

* Be brought onto the writing project early

* Be kept aware of the status of the writing project

* Be used as a writing, as well as an editing, resource

TIP: It is much more enjoyable for the writer (you) to work with “marked-up” electronic documents, rather than marked-up printed documents. Investigate your word processor’s “multiple reviewers” capability. To employ this capability requires that you and your editor use the same or compatible word processing software.

NOTE: I am not an editor, nor do I represent any editors. But as a writer, I value editing.

There is a stigma associated with writers turning to editors for assistance with their work. Some people see outside editing as an unfair advantage, a form of literary cheating. Writers are expected to be able to objectively evaluate their own work. Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what one finds in other professions. Witness the famous phrase, ” A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.” Let’s not forget, ” A lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client.” Writers are treated differently from these other professionals, though. Writers are somehow expected to turn in perfect drafts of novels, articles, work reports, and term papers. Their work must be edited before it is turned in. Anything less is considered unprofessional and unacceptable.

Here’s the twist in this story. Best-selling authors, magazine writers, and newspaper columnists all have editors! That’s right, perfection is only required ahead of time from students, business people, and unknown writers. Those who have “arrived” suddenly benefit from editorial guidance and second opinions on their work before it reaches its final audience.

What’s wrong with this picture? What’s a writer who is still in school or hasn’t yet been published to do? One option is to ignore the naysayers. Go right ahead and get help on writing projects before they are submitted. Ask a friend or a relative who has a firm grasp of grammar and writes well if he or she will edit or at least proofread your work. If nobody in your immediate social circle qualifies, there are many people and companies offering proofreading and editing services. If time and budget allow, take advantage of them.

What about when circumstances force a writer to tough it out alone before turning in the work? If you’re forced to take written matters into your own hands, here are the things to look for while acting as your own editor.

• Spelling &ndash Run spell check, but don’t rely on it exclusively. Look up words if you are unsure about them, even if the software approves them. Never think, “That’s close enough,” or “They won’t notice,” or “A few spelling mistakes are acceptable.” If you’ve been the victim of an educational class or system that told you that spelling doesn’t count, then whoever told you that has done you a disservice. Spelling counts!

• Grammar &ndash Many people advise that you make sure what you write matches the way you speak. That will work if you speak correctly all the time. If not, you can easily review grammar lessons online at no cost if you need a refresher.

• Punctuation &ndash Make sure you put in all the apostrophes and quotes necessary. Double check to make sure you ended interrogative questions with question marks. It’s easy to just type a period at the end of all the sentences out of habit.

• Typos &ndash Blame the gremlin that hides in your keyboard if you want to, but fix them anyway. Even though people will probably know what you meant to type, don’t make them guess.

• Clarity &ndash When a writer knows what he is saying, he sometimes overlooks other possible interpretations. “The mother checked on the baby while she was crying.” Who was crying in that sentence? It could be either one of them. “All the tabloids had to say that the Hollywood couple filed for divorce.” Does that mean that there were multiple tabloids and each and every one reported the same story or does that mean that there were no other details available and the tabloids simply had only that one fact to report?

• Consistency &ndash Verify that whenever there are two or more acceptable forms of the same word, the same form should be used every time throughout the piece. Examples to watch for are TV/television and USA/U.S.A/US of A.

• Organization &ndash Make sure your thoughts flow logically and each idea builds upon the one before it. You can’t make your point if nobody can find it!

• Word usage &ndash All forms of communication should fit their audiences. The way a person expresses herself at a Super Bowl party should be different than in a formal written report to her boss.

Scanning your work projects or term papers for these different areas will not only improve the particular assignment on which you’re working, the process sets your brain on the right path for future writing projects as well. Maybe your readers will be saying, “A writer who has himself for an editor just may be on to something.”

Have you ever found yourself stuck in your writing like a child on a rocking horse? Rocking back and forth, writing and editing, and wondering why your story doesn’t take you anywhere?

As a writer for a local weekly newspaper, I couldn’t afford the luxury of writing and editing. I just had to write and worry about editing later; there’s something about a deadline that moves you along.

So how do you learn to move beyond the wooden horse, to the real horse, that story or article that will take you across vistas where the sun sets in marmalade skies and where the grass ripples like a green sea?

As a painter, I’ve learned the value of painting from the right side of your brain. The right brain paints what it sees, whereas the left paints what it thinks it should be. I wondered to myself if there were something for writers along these same lines. I discovered there was.

Our brains are divided into two hemispheres right and left and are joined by a strange piece of gray matter called the corpus collusum. The corpus collusum acts like a switching station. In right-brain driven individuals it tends to be larger. The right brain could be referred to as the feminine or creative side (the writer) whereas the left-brain (the editor) could be referred to as the male or logical side.

The left brain provides us with language, syntax, denotation, analytical thought, logic, math, etc. In the right brain, we discover creativity, patterns of sound, metaphor, ambiguities, and paradox.

In right-brain painting classes the teacher gets you to let go of the image of what you think you see, to seeing only what is there and consequently drawing it. This is done by taking a picture, placing it upside down, and covering up all but a little portion of the picture. You begin to draw only what you see on the page. As you move along, you uncover a little more of the picture as you draw. Practice this sometime to learn to free up your right brain.

You may be wondering - do you write upside down? No - you don’t. According to Gabrielle Lusser Rico, author of the book Writing The Natural Way, “if you can speak, form letters on the page, know the rudiments of sentence structure, take a telephone message, or write a thank-you note, you have sufficient language skills to learn to write the natural way.”

In her first chapter, “Releasing Your Inner Writer,” Rico describes the two different hemispheres of the brain as “Sign and Design” Mind. She describes the interplay between the two hemispheres and lets us know that any good solid writing is collaboration between these two talents of the two hemispheres.

In her second chapter lay the real gems. Here’s where we learn to “cluster” or “map” our creative thinking process. She calls clustering the “doorway to your design mind.” The method she utilizes begins with a “nucleus word” or short phrase that “acts as the stimulus for recording all the associations that spring to mind in a very brief period of time.”

You take your nucleus word or phrase and write it in the middle of a page, drawing a circle around it. Then you let yourself free associate. Every thought, feeling, or idea that comes from that word you write down in little bubbles away from that “nucleus word” but attached by a line. You keep going until you feel the shift in your mind to quit. You may have to do this several times before you recognize the feeling. It’s ok - tell yourself it’s just play.

She tells us that this methodology is not “merely the spilling of words and phrases at random, but something much more complex: for the Design mind, each association leads inexorably to the next with a logic of its own even though the Sign mind does not perceive the connection.” This is learning to write from the creative side of your brain.

This methodology of clustering is like throwing a rock into a pond, it unfolds from the center, each ripple, or thought moving outward. After the completion of the clustering, (and you will learn to know when this occurs), you write a vignette, a poem, whatever strikes you, using the words from your clustering spider web and whatever else comes out of you.

What you’ll find is an interesting piece, almost like poetry, with an undiscovered beauty emanating from within you. It’s a very rewarding experience.

With enough practice, you won’t even need to do the “clustering” approach, as you’ll be able to feel the shift internally into that hemisphere of the brain, not unlike shifting into high gear.

Peter Elbow, the author of “Writing with Power” says, “When we were little we had no difficulty sounding the way we felt; thus most little children speak and write with real voice.”

Read your writing aloud. Words are meant to be spoken aloud. When you hear it, you’ll hear those places where it doesn’t flow and you’ll feel it. They’ll stick out of your sentences and paragraphs like stickers in your socks.

As a writer - it’s also important that you allow yourself time. Time to practice, time to play, time to perfect. With time, you’ll discover yourself as a writer. You’ll find your voice. You’ll lift it to sing.

Try different things. Write poetry. Write a movie critique. Write a story. Try writing a newspaper article, a how-to. Try describing the indescribable. Challenge yourself. There’s nothing that says you have to show it to anybody. Most professional writers (and best-selling authors) have scads of journals they wouldn’t even show their best friends.

Writing doesn’t necessarily mean sculpting every word from your mind with a chisel. Your head is not a rock. Be gentle with yourself. Enjoy, kick back, let loose, try this clustering method, learn to relax that muscle between your ears, and who knows, one day, all of sudden, you just might find yourself writing.

Naturally.