Doing so will sharpen your own case and earn the respect of your reader.ĩ) Sweat the small stuff. Always offer the other side’s strongest case, not the straw man. Delete useless or weasel words such as “apparently,” “understandable” or “indeed.” Project a tone of confidence, which is the middle course between diffidence and bombast.Ĩ) Be proleptic, a word that comes from the Greek for “anticipation.” That is, get the better of the major objection to your argument by raising and answering it in advance. An op-ed contributor is a specialist who seeks only to inform them.ħ) Avoid the passive voice. A columnist is a generalist, often with an idiosyncratic style, who performs for his readers. Opinion editors are often keen on writers who can provide standing-with-surprise: the well-known environmentalist who supports nuclear power the right-wing politician who favors transgender rights the African-American scholar who opposes affirmative action.ĥ) Younger writers with no particular expertise or name recognition are likelier to get published by following an 80-20 rule: 80 percent new information 20 percent opinion.Ħ) An op-ed should never be written in the style of a newspaper column. If you can offer neither on a given topic you should not write about it, however passionate your views may be. Readers will look to authors who have standing, either because they have expertise in their field or unique experience of a subject. you aim to flatter with an oleaginous adjective.Ĥ) Authority matters.

It is for a broad community of people that you must write, not the handful of fellow experts you seek to impress with high-flown jargon, the intellectual rival you want to put down with a devastating aside or the V.I.P. Get to the point: Why does your topic matter? Why should it matter today? And why should the reader care what you, of all people, have to say about it?Ģ) The ideal reader of an op-ed is the ordinary subscriber - a person of normal intelligence who will be happy to learn something from you, provided he can readily understand what you’re saying. This means that every sentence has to count in grabbing the reader’s attention, starting with the first. As a summertime service for readers of the editorial pages who may wish someday to write for them, here’s a list of things I’ve learned over the years as an editor, op-ed writer and columnist.ġ) A wise editor once observed that the easiest decision a reader can make is to stop reading.

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