Getting Your Copy Published
Writing for the press is a discipline of its own and, before you put pen to paper, you need to know that there are styles of writing which are acceptable to editors and styles that are not. You may have to use a slightly different approach when writing for a trade or industry magazine than, say, for local newspapers but, by and large, different editors’ stylistic likes and dislikes don’t vary by that much.So here are some tips from professionals who have been writing copy that editors have been finding acceptable for nearly a quarter of a century.
Give Them Facts
Journalists are hungry for facts and figures. If you are the industry expert you want them to believe you are, you will have facts and figures at your fingertips. Quantify wherever possible. Rather than writing vaguely about market surveys predicting a considerable increase in medium-term demand, much better to say (for example): ‘A Dataquest survey carried out earlier this year indicated a 47 per cent growth in demand over the next two years’.
Don’t dress up your guesses as facts, and don’t pick percentages out of the air. To you, saying ‘90 per cent of consumers’ may be shorthand for ‘almost all consumers’. To an editor. 90 per cent means just what it says: nine out of ten, and where did you get this figure from?
Don’t Sell’ – They’re Not Buying
The new-product press release that’s written in the second person, as if the editor is a prospective customer (‘You and your family will appreciate the SuperCleaner’s smooth, silent operation...’) is doomed. He doesn’t buy products, he buys
stories. And if he printed this story exactly as written, his magazine would appear to be directly endorsing the product, which he certainly will not do – that’s the job of advertisements. Will he spare the time to go through it and amend it for you? Almost certainly not. The bin awaits.
Make It Short And Sweet
Forget what they taught you at evening classes about writing sophisticated and stylistic prose. Try for short, crisp sentences of no more than 25 words, written in good English, and paragraphs of no more than 10 lines. Focus on getting factual information over to the editor. Assume
he has no sense of humour, so don’t put in touches of satire or try to make it amusing.
Anticipate Questions
Don’t leave loose ends which raise questions. Example: You are launching a new product which works faster than its rivals. Your press release says that ‘Harrison’s new MaxiGizmo produces more widgets per hour than any other machine of its type’. This instantly raises the question, ‘Wonderful, but
how many per hour?’ The editor thinks that his readers will want to know this. Wouldn’t you, if you were reading it? And he may well wonder, why aren’t you telling him? The only way to sort it out is to pick up the phone and ask you. Or, if he’s busy, maybe he won’t bother to use your story this time...
Weed Out The Superlatives
Industrial editors in particular detest superlatives. Sprinkling your editorial copy with adjectives like ‘incredible’, ‘fantastic’, ‘exciting’, ‘wonderful’, ‘earth-shattering’ will ensure that it hits the editorial bin almost without a second thought. ‘Unique’, ‘new’, ‘user-friendly’, ‘flexible’, ‘cost-effective’ and the like are generally OK, especially if backed by convincing facts and figures.
Avoid Initial Caps
Editors generally do not use initial capital letters in job titles and names of departments. Thus, Sales Managers are sales managers, Marketing Departments are marketing departments. Even the sacred person of the Chairman will be demoted to chairman, and the Managing Director may be cut down to ‘the md’. You don’t want to give
editors a job to do amending your copy, so adopt the same practice yourself. If any of your Very Important People check one of your draft releases and raise objections, show them a few magazine pages to prove your point.