Feb 11 2010
7 Writing Tips Every Successful Journalist Follows
Every successful journalist has to follow certain rules of writing. This is a good part of what distinguishes professional writing from just anyone writing a story. A truly successful journalist always uses these 7 tips to make their writing the best it can be.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is always the first step. You want to know how you are writing for so you will know how technical to make your writing and just how to gear it toward that audience. Your tone and every aspect of your writing should be tailored to your audience.
Think Before You Write
Before you write, you want to know what you want to say. Otherwise your writing could be a meandering mess. You want to know what information you want to get across to your audience. Knowing what you want to say will help you say it.
Write With Purpose And Panache
You want your writing to be purposeful and engaging. You do not want excess words that stray from your main reason for writing the article but you also do not want your presentation of the facts to be dry and boring. You need to balance a fact-driven style of writing with one that will keep your reader hooked.
Brevity Is Best
The tips on how successful journalists write will seem to contradict each other but it is all about balance. As much as you will want to tell the whole story and explain it, you also want to keep the story brief. Readers often do not wish to read long articles and many times will opt out of doing so.
Tell Your Audience More Than The Facts
You do not just want to relay the facts but also why these facts are important and what they mean. Help your readers to understand the implications of the story. Basically, tell them why they should care.
Offer Small Bites
Readers find it easier to read and follow articles that are broken down into smaller chunks of text. It is not just what you write but how you present what you write. Readers can choose to read your articles or they can choose not to read it. You want to make reading your writing appealing in every way so offer small bites.
Lead With The Important Details
You want to lead with the important details to give a reader the enticing part of the story to get the reader hooked. If you bury the lead partway into your articles then many readers will not bother to search for it. There are many options these days for reading news articles so you want to make your articles attractive to readers. Have the big details at the beginning of your story and explain them further as you go along. Make the title enticing too.
These 7 writing tips are some of the ones that every successful journalist follows. Always keep your audience in mind and maintain the delicate balance between an appealing article and an informative one. This is how journalists become successful.
Tom Rheinecker writes about how to get an online journalism degree.