Becoming An Industry Guru – Articles
‘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.