How much work goes into a contributed op-ed? Here’s my experience. Conception and pitching: 2 hours. Planning and conducting research interviews: 5 hours Web research: 2 hours Review of material in books: 4 hours Planning the draft: 3 hours Writing: 2 hours Revisions: 3 hours Total time: 21 hours. I’ve done contributed articles for other…
Writing an opinion piece is rarely the end of the process. The editors of your target publication are likely to request revisions. An effective writer budgets time for those revisions and maintains effort and creativity through the revision cycle. Responding to edits In the last three posts, I explained how I pitched, researched, and wrote…
This is the draft of the op-ed I first sent to the Boston Sunday Globe for publication in its Ideas section. It was never published in this form. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But that was before social media. Now, thanks to…
If you’re contributing a piece to a major publication, they will want something new. If it’s new, it probably requires research. Today I’ll share how I do research — and specifically, what I did for the piece I published last week in the Ideas section of the Boston Sunday Globe. As I described yesterday, I…
Five weeks ago, I hatched the idea to place a prominent contributed opinion piece, or “op-ed,” in the Ideas section of the Boston Sunday Globe, a major daily newspaper. Yesterday, the piece appeared, and I started to hear from people in positions of power. If you are a writer or thought leader, this is the…
I just posted another op-ed about Facebook. It’s here (subscription may be required). My next opinion piece can cover anything about technology, business, or marketing and how they are failing us, could be different, aren’t viewed properly, or whatever. If you had this megaphone, what would you shout about?
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defended himself in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He says you can trust him to be impartial. Did he undo the damage he did during his hearing last week? Just a reminder: the purpose of this blog is to reveal what’s really going on with written communications. I’m…
The New York Times posted an op-ed from an unnamed “senior official” who is managing the chaos in the Trump Administration. To truly understand what’s going on here, you need to look at the writer’s motivation. ROAM is the perfect way to do that — but in this case, it only deepens the mystery. The…