“I’ve written you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one,” Oscar Wilde once quipped. The notorious author and playwright struck right to the heart of the difference between good writing and simply the laying down of consonants and vowels in succession separated by spaces and dots.
Good writing communicates efficiently. Pick up any quality newspaper and you should find that the first paragraph of every news story tells you five things: who, what, where, why and when something happened. Your articles should do the same.
‘Who’ refers to the main protagonist – perhaps yourself or your company. ‘What’ means just that, what of significance has happened to whom? ‘Where’ should put ‘Who’ and ‘What’ into context. You might refer to an event happening in a physical location like a shopping centre or a more abstract place like the communications industry.
‘Why’ can be hard to answer succinctly but you should make a start in your first paragraph or two. Finally, ‘When’ is easy. Was it yesterday? In the late 1980s? The future? For example, Over the next decade the number of women starting their own businesses is expected to increase dramatically due to government incentives.
Prioritising your Information
The rest of the article is then a process of expanding on what you’ve said in the opening paragraph, however, you may not get the chance to ‘tell them again’ at the end because editors typically cut articles from the base. This means you should write in what journalists think of as an inverted pyramid, where the most important information is placed in the first few paragraphs and the rest very quickly becomes expendable.
To give those middle paragraphs some bite, you should seek to present a range of views on the issue and maybe even throw in a quote or two. This might be hard if you’re writing about yourself but you can either create your own quote or get one from a customer or relevant expert to give the piece credibility. For example, “Until now, women have found it difficult to obtain capital for their ventures, but with these new government incentives they will be able to follow their dreams,” said Mrs Jane X, co-founder of internationally renowned Company Y.
Another thing that makes any article more substantial is statistics. No matter how dubious, statistics always add an air of scientific certainty. You’ll notice that the business people and analysts that get quoted often in the media always seem to be able to put a number on every situation. For example, Recent research from the Department of State and Regional Development indicates that 60% of all small businesses in NSW are started by women.
Remember the Reader Finally, always be sure to put yourself in the reader’s shoes before you set fingertip to keyboard. Who are you writing for? Why would they read your article? What new piece of information are you going to tell them? If you do that, then the rest should look after itself.
