How to Get An Article Published in a Magazine in 5 Easy Steps
by Mel Beasley | Oct 31, 2022 | Publishing
If you’re serious about making writing your career, knowing how to get published in a magazine is key to building a solid portfolio so that you can land quality writing gigs or a high-paying writing job. If your end goal is to eventually write books, having published work in magazines can also reveal a level of sincerity to literary agents that otherwise wouldn’t.
Why You Should Submit to Magazines
Getting published in a magazine will not only boost your confidence as a writer as you work toward your long-term writing goals, but it will also build your online presence as a writer and author. Here are just a few reasons you should pursue getting published in a magazine.
It Builds Your Online Presence
Building your audience as a writer doesn’t happen overnight. Even with a bestselling book, there’s often a great deal of marketing and press that happens before an audience is built and a book even gets close to the bestseller list. Not every publishing company will have the funding to push your book as hard as larger houses, so it’s best to play it safe and start marketing yourself as a writer or an author as soon as possible. Publishing short pieces in magazines will not only get your name floating across the internet, but it will hopefully encourage readers to find you on social media so you can market to them further later on.
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Published Work Leads to Writing Jobs
If you’re looking to work for a publication in the future, or you’d like to write for a company, your college essays won’t work as writing samples. However, getting published in a magazine adds credibility to you as a writer. A published article means you are talented and professional enough to make it past at least one editor, which instills confidence in employers that you can handle a writing position. Additionally, published pieces also indicate a level of passion and seriousness that unpublished work just can’t match because it takes time, editing, and research to get published.
It Makes Your Query Letter Stand Out
While it’s not impossible to get a book published without having previously published work, it most certainly helps add credibility to your query letter. When submitting your book idea to a literary agent, you’ll need to attach a query letter that provides a bit of information about you, and a summary of your book. You’ll also send something similar to magazine publications during the submission process. Agents and editors certainly take experience into account when considering pieces to publish, and that experience paired with the level of writing you’ve attached will certainly work hand-in-hand when they are deciding to publish your writing.
Getting Published in a Magazine Boosts Confidence
Getting published in magazines will boost your confidence as a writer. Let’s be real. Getting a book published is a long, arduous process. Not only does it take months and sometimes years to write a novel or a book, but landing an agent for it can take just as long. Even if you’ve landed an agent, you still have to wait until they’re able to find the right publisher for it. And, even after all that waiting, you still have to wait at least a year to two years before your book will finally hit the shelves. It’s extremely discouraging to receive rejection letters for your book, and it can feel impossible to get your book published when the end of the tunnel is so far off.
Getting shorter pieces published periodically as you work on longer projects will help keep you motivated and encouraged as a writer. Plus, you’ll most likely make some great contacts by interacting with editors, and potentially other writers who have been published in the same magazine. You’ll also most certainly learn a thing or two about editing your work based on the feedback you receive from magazine editors, which will only reflect positively on your other writing projects.
Getting published in a magazine will help solidify that you’re heading in the right direction with a career in writing. It will give you a sense of dignity and pride in your work, pushing you to get better and keep writing. Not only that, but it will give you evidence that you are who you say you are, a writer inside and out.
Publication in a Magazine Makes You a Better Writer
The submission and publishing process for magazines will help get you acclimated to the process as you prepare to dive into the book publishing world. It will teach you how to handle the submission process, query letters, and how to take rejection letters in stride. You’ll learn how to professionally communicate with editors, how to receive feedback, and how to translate an editor’s feedback into your writing so that it improves it overall. Every editor is different. Some editors are gentle and encouraging with their feedback, while others are more stern and blunt. You’ll learn how to not take feedback personally, and how to have a successful, professional relationship with both easygoing and difficult editors alike.
Steps to Getting Published in a Magazine
Submitting your writing to a literary magazine or any other kind of magazine isn’t as hard as it might seem. In fact, only a few simple steps stand between you and magazine publication, and the hardest one is writing the content. Check out the steps below.
- Write a Solid Article: You don’t necessarily have to have a finished article before choosing the magazine you want to submit to. It’s sometimes good to have an idea of the publications you’d like to be published in beforehand so that you know what they prefer to publish. Once you have an idea of what kind of essay or article you want to write, you’ll need to get it on paper and make sure you polish it up as much as possible. Write something you have adequate knowledge about rather than something you simply researched and regurgitated. Have a writer friend review the essay or article for you and provide feedback. Revise the piece until it’s as polished as possible.
- Find the right fit for your essay or article: When you’re ready to submit your finished article, don’t just submit it to every magazine possible. Do some research to find the best possible fit for your piece of writing. For example, if you’ve written a flash nonfiction piece, you should research literary magazines that frequently publish that kind of content. Spend some time reading their content to ensure your essay makes sense. No one likes a rejection letter, so don’t increase your odds of getting rejected by submitting to places that would never be interested in your essay or article.
- Find the submission guidelines and follow them precisely: If a publication is accepting submissions from the public, you’ll usually find a submissions page in the footer of their website or the main navigation. If you can’t find the submission page in the navigation or footer, try typing the name of the publication in Google along with the word “submission.” Don’t submit to magazines if they aren’t open for submissions. This will only annoy editors and possibly ruin your chances with them in the future. Once you find the submissions page, you should see information about that magazine’s submission guidelines. These guidelines will usually tell you what kind of content they are currently looking for, as well as the formatting instructions. Be sure to read and reread the instructions carefully, and follow the guidelines exactly. Failure to follow the submission guidelines could automatically withdraw your chances of acceptance. Plus, it’s annoying. Whether the magazine is asking for a specific email subject line, or that you send your document in a particular file format, do exactly that and you should be fine.
- Write a mini query letter: If you’re not familiar with query letters, this is a brief message that you’ll send along with your essay or article. Unlike book query letters, which tend to be on the longer, more detailed side, magazine query letters are a bit different. First, keep your query letter formal and brief. You’ll most likely be sending your letter as an email with your article as an attachment, so it should be short enough that your reader won’t have to scroll to finish reading it. You should say hello and use the name of one of the editors if you know it. You can find a list of staff for the magazine on the About page on most magazine websites. Next, briefly let the editor know what kind of content you’re submitting, and include a 150-word bio of yourself as a writer. It’s also a good idea to mention at least one article you’ve read from the magazine and explain why you feel your piece would make a good fit for publication as well. You won’t need to add a synopsis of your short story, essay, or article. It’s already short, so they won’t have any trouble breezing through and figuring it out on their own.
- Use writing submission websites: There are tons of writing submission websites out there that list all the open calls for submissions from publications all over the world. If you’re not the kind of person who reads a lot of magazines, or who enjoys doing a lot of research online, it might be easier to hop on one of these websites to find open calls for submissions.
- Submittable : This is one of the best places to seek out open calls for submissions as well as writing contests. Using this platform is free. You can create an account, fill out your profile, and then search for open submissions after that. You can submit through this platform and track your submissions as well.
- Poets & Writers : This is a great website to not only read about writing and read other people’s writing but also to submit your work. Here you can find information on literary agents, writing workshops, groups, and so much more. Not only will you discover open calls for submissions, but you can also find open writing contests that often come with cash prizes for winners.
- New Pages : This website looks very similar to traditional classifieds and provides an ongoing list of calls for submissions, information on literary events and writing workshops, and has an extensive list of literary magazines.
If you’re interested in getting published sooner rather than later, consider submitting to magazines. Getting published will not only boost your confidence as a writer, but it will also help you build your writing portfolio and online presence. Good luck out there!
Mel Beasley has a bachelor’s in creative writing and journalism from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He brings 9+ years of digital marketing and writing experience to the table by writing for publications such as Lumina News and Encore Magazine. He spent 2 years as a college-level writing tutor, and is a certified writing tutor through the CRLA, which is a prestigious cert recognized by the Association for the Coaching & Tutoring Profession. He is a professional SEO blogger with experience writing for brands such as Boardworks Education and The Greater Wilmington Business Journal. One of his latest website and marketing projects has been building the website for the now New York Times Bestselling author, Nina de Gramont .
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by Yen Cabag | 0 comments
For example, you’d approach a long feature article differently than a human interest piece; and if you are undertaking an investigative exposé, it will clearly call for different skills than a book review or cultural critique!
However, there are some basic principles and elements you need to master for any type of magazine writing. In this article, we’ll show you the general skills you need to succeed at writing for a magazine.
How Do You Start Writing for a Magazine?
If you want to write for a magazine, you need to adjust to a medium that digital technology has radically transformed. As you’ve probably noticed, many of the magazines of today have migrated to online platforms, and are read primarily on web browsers or mobile apps, such as Apple News.
The good news is that the online world has made it possible for more publications to spring up seemingly out of nowhere, giving you more options and places to pitch your ideas! Here are some tips to help you find your way into writing for magazines:
Pitch your ideas to the appropriate magazine.
Magazine writers are normally “hired” on the basis of their idea pitches, which are sent through a query letter . When you send your ideas, make sure your proposed topics are in tune with the magazine’s preferred themes. You don’t want to make the mistake of pitching a sports article to a magazine like Good Housekeeping .
Specialize.
With the increasing number of writers in the online space, magazines place a high value on specialization. For example, Brian Windhorst of ESPN fame reportedly rose among the ranks thanks to his expertise in basketball writing. You should focus on your strengths and leverage those for your writing.
Go the extra mile when it comes to research.
As a magazine writer, you will need to do a lot of research, but it’s better to do too much than too little. The more details you have on hand, the easier it will be to find the best slant for your article. And always be sure to fact check your information !
Write for the target audience of your chosen magazine.
One of the biggest mistakes that magazine writers make is to overlook who the magazine’s target audience actually is. Remember, a magazine exists only because of its readers, so make sure you speak straight to their hearts in any piece you submit. For example, if you are writing for a scientific journal, your readers will likely prefer more research-based content, instead of emotionally-driven pieces.
Contact the appropriate editor.
The magazine playing field is highly dynamic, with many editors frequently leaving one publication to join another.
Remember that as a writer, connections are everything! Your relationship with any given editor is always more important than your connection to the company—after all, they are your connection to any magazine! Value these relationships, as they are your only open door into getting your articles published.
6 Common Types of Magazine Articles
Here are some of the most common formats for magazine writing:
- Long-form investigative articles: These heavily-researched pieces tend to use numerous sources and citations, and can take months to write and edit.
- Character profiles: These articles can range from a few hundred words to several thousand. They focus on one person, and are often run as cover stories.
- Commentary: Magazines that feature current events tend to feature commentaries, too. A very common example is a sports commentary article.
- Criticism: Critical commentary or reviews are common for books, art, music, and film.
- Humor: Usually shorter in length, magazines like The New Yorker contain humor articles. These are often found in weeklies that accompany newspapers.
- Fiction: Fiction also has a place in magazines like The New Yorker and Harper , usually in short story form or as excerpts from longer works.
How Do You Write a Magazine Article?
Now that you have a run-down of the different types of magazine writing, let’s talk about how to write an actual magazine article.
1. Choose a subject you are an expert in.
Keeping true to our earlier advice of specializing, when you start to write a magazine article, choose a topic you show certain expertise in.
Publishers typically choose articles with an in-depth take on a subject, and that’s where your level of experience will come into play. The more authoritative you are, the greater the chances are that your article will make the cut.
2. Choose an interesting angle.
Magazine editors choose articles they believe will pique their readers’ interest. From your chosen topic, find the angles that may not have been discussed before, or at least a perspective that will catch your audience’s attention right from the get-go.
3. Research.
Before you start writing, do your research. Even if you think you already know everything there is to know, there is always more to be gained by added research. Who knows, you might come across fresh information that will give you a new spin on your article.
4. Write an outline.
No matter what your experience level is in terms of writing articles, creating an outline will help you organize your thoughts and make sure you don’t miss any important angles. In your outline, you can also plan where you might add images, graphics, or testimonials to supplement your piece.
5. Start writing.
The good news is that magazine writing is not terribly rigid in terms of structure and format. Be creative! Remember that readers of magazines usually read not just for information, but in order to be entertained, so write in a conversational tone when possible.
6. Make sure you follow style guidelines.
If you are writing an article for a specific magazine, ask about their style guidelines. There’s nothing more disappointing than pouring your heart and soul out writing a piece, only to have it rejected because it doesn’t meet the magazine’s guidelines!
How Is Magazine Writing Different From Other Types of Writing ?
One of the biggest distinctions between magazine writing and others types of writing is that magazines typically have their own house styles. Because writing articles for newspapers can follow a standard that is consistent throughout the country, it’s hardly possible to distinguish one newspaper from another simply by reading a couple of articles.
Magazines pride themselves for having their own unique style. This is why it’s relatively easy to identify whether an article is from Vogue , or from Ladies’ Home Journal. The writing style and tone for a famous fashion magazine, geared towards women who are into the latest fashion, are distinctly different from the magazine targeted towards stay-at-home moms.
This means that one of the most important skills you need to develop as a magazine writer is the flexibility to adjust your writing style to meet these house requirements.
Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:
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Yen Cabag is the Blog Writer of TCK Publishing. She is also a homeschooling mom, family coach, and speaker for the Charlotte Mason method, an educational philosophy that places great emphasis on classic literature and the masterpieces in art and music. She has also written several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her passion is to see the next generation of children become lovers of reading and learning in the midst of short attention spans.
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Just Publishing Advice For Writers and Authors
Free self-publishing advice, how to guides and tips
How You Can Get An Article Published Online Or In A Magazine
Many new writers think that they should write a book. Then they leap instantly into publishing and try to become a published author and make mistakes. But it’s much easier to get an article published online.
Getting a book deal with a traditional publisher is very difficult if you are a first-time author. You can take the self-publishing route, and then you don’t need an agent or publisher. But selling ebooks on Amazon to readers outside of your friends and family is tough work.
Sometimes it’s better to start where the pickings are much easier. If you want your work published, writing an article and having it accepted for publication can get you underway much faster.
Are you interested in freelance writing ? Well, let’s take a look at how to get an article published online.
Articles are a great way to learn the craft of writing
If you are a new writer, writing and submitting articles is one of the best ways to learn the basics of good writing.
You might be writing the occasional blog post on your personal site.
But that is not the same as a 2,000-word long-form article or news story. For this, you need research, clarity, focus, and above all, excellent writing skills.
There are so many aspects to consider. You need to know which point of view you will use and what reading level you are aiming for.
Another aspect is your choice of vocabulary—especially your use of strong verbs. You should also learn to write in the active voice and avoid the passive voice as much as possible.
It goes without saying that your grammar and spelling need to be as perfect as possible.
This is not difficult now with very affordable, high-quality writing checkers.
I know I have learned and acquired more writing skills from article writing than from writing book manuscripts.
It takes time to learn how to write the perfect article or post.
Find your niche to get published online
There is no doubt that online reading of newspapers, magazines, and journals is now how most people consume information.
Yes, there is still print, but it is no secret that it is in severe decline.
But the amount of new content online publishers need every day is enormous.
It is far too expensive to have teams of salaried writers, which is why freelance journalism and writers are usually the most practical answer.
All it takes is to write well and know where and who to approach. When you start to get accepted, article writing can then be your route to getting published.
Look at online newspapers and magazines.
You will see that a lot of articles are written by guest writers, contributors, and opinion writers. All of these news articles are written by freelance writers.
It is this area that you can exploit to your advantage. On top of that, you get paid for your work.
But you have to find the right match for your writing. If you are writing about pet care, there is no point in approaching a magazine focused on beauty tips.
Focus on your topics
I get so many requests every day from article writers.
Most of them offer articles that have nothing to do with publishing and writing. Why would I even consider publishing an article about trendy leather handbags?
Don’t fall for the trap of contacting hundreds of sites with your articles. Find sites that are the best match for the articles you want to write, and then you can pitch like crazy.
Make sure you are on-topic and your writing is top-notch. Then you will find that your chances of getting your article published are going to be close to 70%.
For major newspapers, you will have to be not only on-topic but very patient. Look past politics and news, and hunt for a feature section that could be a good match for your writing topic.
Check the footer of newspapers, magazines, and high-ranking websites for contact information.
You will often find a link for submissions or Write for Us. Check to see if there is any critical information about submissions.
But don’t overlook print and writing articles for newspapers.
Many local newspapers pay regular weekly columnists. In my local paper, there are two or three articles every day written by freelancers.
There is no reason why you can’t succeed if you have your heart set on getting published as an article writer.
It is a proud moment when you see your name in a byline on a top-ranking site. Or even perhaps a newspaper article in your local publication.
If you are thinking about academic, medical, or scientific writing, you might look at an open access journal . These sites usually offer peer review before publishing.
Publishing articles to earn passive income
You need a lot of patience to wait for online publishers to accept and publish your articles. Then hope they pay you.
But there is another straightforward way to profit from writing articles, and it is free of charge.
You can use free and open publishing platforms to make money by including affiliate links within your articles.
It is a much easier avenue because you don’t need to wait for approval or acceptance.
There are many free online publishing platforms.
But the quickest, easiest, and the most effective platform is probably Medium.
It works a little like a social media network. It has a vast readership, so you can hope to find readers quite quickly.
Once you get people to vote up your articles on Medium, you will start to get a lot of readers.
You could start by using affiliate links from Amazon Associates, Share-a-Sale, Clickbank, or one of many other affiliate networks.
All you need to do is apply, and once you get approval, you can start earning money from your articles.
Another option is to offer your articles for free to high-ranking blogs. But make sure they are okay with your affiliate links.
You can find blogs that accept guest writers by looking for a Write for Us link, which is usually in the site’s footer.
Become your own publisher
It takes much longer but starting your own blog or online magazine can be financially rewarding.
The biggest advantage of having your own site is that you completely control your online publishing. You can edit and improve your existing articles or add more content over time.
Another possibility is to invite guest writers to help you add more content to your site.
You can use so many different ways to monetize your site. Adding online advertising is easy. You could also accept paid sponsored articles.
It is much easier to build your affiliate marketing income with your site.
Yes, it does take time to start a new blog from scratch . But the financial return, in the long run, can often result in a full-time business for you.
Becoming a published writer is much easier than becoming a published author.
The process is much faster to get an article published online than a book on Amazon.
There is no need for extensive copy-editing, laborious proofreading, and waiting for beta readers. You don’t need to write query letters to hopefully find a literary agent.
There is much more to the publishing industry than just writing a great book.
Think of article writing as a form similar to a short story.
Investing your writing time in a 120,000-word novel or non-fiction book is daunting.
You could write 120 or more 1,000-word articles in the same amount of time. Each one will have the potential to get published and earn money for you.
It might not be for every writer, but it’s quite easy to learn how to get articles published, and it has huge advantages.
Related reading: The 12 Best Free Online Publishing Platforms For All New Writers
- ← Free Kindle Ebooks – Do They Help Generate Real Book Sales?
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Derek Haines
A Cambridge CELTA English teacher and author with a passion for writing and all forms of publishing. My days are spent writing and blogging, as well as testing and taming new technology.
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10 Simple Ways to Improve Your Magazine Writing Skills
- June 16, 2020
- 11 Comments
How do you write a magazine article? These tips will give you the confidence you need to write for magazines, submit query letters to editors, and get your writing published. Even if your goal isn’t to become a successful freelance writer, you will benefit from these simple ways to improve your magazine writing skills.
These aren’t “secret tips” on how to get your article published in a magazine – because there are no secrets for writing articles and getting published. Writing for magazines is much simpler than you think. Simple, but not easy . These tips worked for me when I started freelance writing over a decade ago, and they still work for me today. In fact, I have an article due to alive magazine in three business days. It’s about brain health and my recent trip to Nepal – which is a perfect start to my new life as a travel blogger. In fact, I just wrote an article about how to write travel articles for magazines .
Let’s start easy, with the foundational tip on how to write a magazine article. “Show, don’t tell.” Why start there? Because nobody does it! Most writers want to express their thoughts and show how much they know (or think they know). If you’re one of those rare writers who simply reports the facts in an interesting, engaging and clear manner then you’re already halfway to getting your magazine article published.
“Never tell your readers what they should think about something. You may write about amazing things, but never tell them that something is going to be amazing,” says William Zinsser in On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction . “Just lay out the facts and let the reader say, ‘Wow! Imagine that!'”
Zinsser’s advice means you shouldn’t add commentary to your articles – especially if you’re writing for a magazine. You can tell readers what you think in blog posts, newsletters, and your Facebook updates. But when you’re writing a magazine article, think “just the facts, ma’am.” Show, don’t tell. Describe, don’t opine.
How to Write a Good Magazine Article
Part of learning how to write a magazine article is decided what type of article you’re writing and who you are writing for. Read 11 Most Popular Types of Magazine Articles – Print & Online . I’ll wait here.
1. Learn the difference between “subject” and “story”
The fact that Anne Lamott or Stephen King both wrote books about writing is a subject . How Anne Lamott and Stephen King fought to get their books published is a story . What’s the difference between subject and story? Conflict. Suspense. Drama. Problems. Growth. Here’s another – better – example: “The cat is lying on her mat” is a fact. The story comes alive when “The dog and the cat both want to lie on the mat.” Knowing the difference between a subject and a story one of the most important tips on how to write a magazine article. Even nonfiction articles contain the threads of a story.
If you’re learning how to write magazine articles because you want to become a freelance writer, train yourself how to find stories. One of the more interesting ways to do this is to find temporary work stints in an office, museum, or coffee shop. You’ll find that being around regular people can will help you see and even write stories that can easily become publishable magazine articles. And, since freelance writing isn’t lucrative for beginners, the extra income will help you cope with the financial insecurities. Successful freelancers are most creative when they get away from their laptops, generate new article ideas, find inspiration, and even plan career moves and pivots. Getting paid to be out of the house is a great way to keep your creative juices flowing!
2. Don’t opine (give your opinion). Just write the article
This is a follow-up to the first tip on how to write a magazine article: don’t tell us what you think because – unless you are Anne Lamott or Stephen King and we’re a bunch of geeky writers – we don’t care. “Unless you are a recognized expert, your opinion is not relevant,” writes author Don McKinney in Magazine Writing That Sells . “To support your points, quote real experts.”
My Reader’s Digest editor also repeatedly gave me this writing advice. This is why I not only mentioned it before my tips on how to get a magazine article published, but am expanding on it now. I myself am still learning how to just tell or write a story instead of trying to explain every nuance to the reader.
How do you know if you’re over-explaining or overwriting? After all, you’re just beginning to learn how to write a magazine article! Here’s a tip: Reread and edit your past work. Don’t let your past articles, blog posts, book chapters, newsletter entries or editorial just sit there. Read them carefully and critically. How can you improve on your writing? What can you do to make it into a publishable magazine article? Challenge yourself. You’ll become a better writer.
3. Do extra research – especially when you’re still learning how to write a magazine article
It’s better to do too much research and have more information than you can include when you write your magazine article. Here are two reasons why:
- Your research will inform your writing even when you don’t include it all in the article (and you should never put all your research in one magazine article)
- You can use your research in a different magazine article. Your excess research won’t be wasted unless you throw it away. Don’t cram everything you learned in your article. Pick out the best information that makes your article better; save the additional information for a different magazine article, blog post, or medial outlet.
The more you practice writing articles for magazines, the better you’ll get at discerning how much information is “too much.”
4. Relax. There is no one “right” way to write a magazine article
While there aren’t any perfect, right or best ways to write good magazine articles, it’s important to remember the first sentence. The beginning of your magazine article can be the most frustrating and time-consuming part of writing. My first paragraphs and headline (article title) take more time that writing the whole article or blog post. This is because the lead or lede – the first sentence of your article or the introduction – is the most important. That, and the ending. Why? Because the lead is what will either hook your reader or leave her cold. If she’s cold, she doesn’t care about reading your work. Then all the time you spent learning how to write a magazine article was wasted! Unless, of course, you’re writing for your teacher or mom.
The best lead or introduction grabs the reader’s attention and forces her to read your whole entire article, start to finish. Here’s the problem with this “simple” writing tip: How do you know what will grab your reader’s attention? What captures my attention may not capture yours.
5. Don’t let rejection stop you from writing your best article
Here’s what I had to learn when I first started freelance writing for magazines: Writers get rejected dozens of times – especially when they’re first learning how to write articles for magazines. But even experienced freelancers and professional journalists get rejected. Not every query letter sells, not every pitch is sold, and not every magazine article is published.
The best writers do not associate rejection with themselves. That is, successful freelance writers know getting rejected is part of the game. And writing is a game! It’s fun to be a writer, so have fun with it. It’s even more fun to be a blogger, so have even more fun with writing blog posts. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Learn how to write good magazine articles, but loosen your collar. Ungrip your hands. Maybe even take them off the steering wheel. Do the best you can to write good articles for magazines and other media outlets, then let your writing go.
Do you want to get an article published in one of the most popular magazines in the world? Read How to Get Your Articles Published in Reader’s Digest .
6. Don’t even think about writer’s block
Jack London said something like, “Writer’s block? Writing inspiration? I see to it that I’m inspired every morning at 9 am.” Now that is a professional freelance writer who knows how to write magazine articles, books, blog posts and feature profiles.
Do you struggle with writer’s block? Here’s a writing tip: Stop writing while the writing is going well. Leave the paragraphs and sentences you know will come easily for tomorrow, or your next writing stint. For example, don’t stop writing when you come to a natural conclusion. Instead, stop writing when you know what’s coming next and you’re eager to continue. Some famous author even advised writers to stop writing in the middle of a
7. Remember who you’re writing for
“Even before writing the query, remember who you’re talking to,” writes McKinney in Magazine Writing That Sells . “At every stage of the process, from query to finished manuscript, remember three little words: Audience. Audience. Audience.” That’s a key tip on how to write a magazine article . Who are your readers? What are their pain points, fascinations, obsessions, yearnings? Knowing who you’re writing for will help you write better.
A great way to learn how to write for different readers is to read print newspapers and magazines. Vancouver-based freelance writer Daniel Wood encouraged writers to clip newspaper articles when they resonate with you. When a piece of writing stands out to you in some way, keep it close. Study it. Analyzing print writing will teach you how to write good magazine and newspaper articles. I enjoy reading the Vancouver Sun newspaper, but I have turned down article assignments from the editors. They don’t pay well. Nevertheless, reading the local paper or any new-to-you magazine or print publication is a great way to keep your writing fresh and remind yourself who your primary readers are.
8. Remember that good magazine articles start with the first sentence (or even the first word!)
Circling back on my fourth tip on how to write a magazine article: If you’re struggling with the introduction or lead, think about how you’d tell your story to a friend. Describe it in your own words, out loud, in your own voice. What are the most impressive things about your story? The one fact or event that stands out may be a good lead.
“If it’s the first thing you’d tell a friend, maybe it should be the first thing you’d tell a reader,” writes McKinney in Magazine Writing That Sells . Start with the most important, compelling, interesting information first. If you struggle with the beginning of your articles, read How to Write the Best Introduction for Your Readers .
9. Use different sentence lengths for different tones and moods
This isn’t just a tip on how to write a magazine article, it’s a general tip for good writing. Your writing should match the tone or mood of your piece. If you’re describing quick or abrupt action, for example, use short, punchy sentences. If you’re describing how the long green grass is swaying in the field, use longer sentences that flow. Also, don’t forget to vary the length of your sentences and type of punctuation you use! I gets boring to read the same style of writing, even if it’s just a 500 word magazine article.
How do you learn how to write better articles? Start a blog! When I first started freelancing I didn’t know if I should create a website. I eventually did, and called it The Adventurous Writer . Do you have a blog or website? Blogging is a fantastic way to learn how to write magazine articles; not only does it give you writing practice, it validates you as a publishable freelance writer. Your own blog or website is where magazine editors, experts you want to interview, and your own readers can learn more about you as a writer. After I created The Adventurous Writer I started my blogs, one right after the other. And, if you learn how to monetize your blog, it can be a good source of passive income.
Your own blog is worth the investment of your time and energy – especially if you’re serious about learning how to write magazine articles, get published, and become a successful freelance writer.
10. Help your interviewees sound good
My final tip on how to write a good magazine article involves interviewing experts or sources. Direct quotes or dialogue is a fantastic way to bring your story to life! Interviewing experts or regular folk is good for at least two reasons:
- You can include dialogue, which breaks up paragraphs or chunks of text
- Dialogue or direct quotes add flavor and color to your article
A word on how to write what an interviewee said to you: “No article has ever been published in which every word spoken is printed exactly as it was said,” writes McKinney. “You can cut. You can rewrite if necessary to make the speaker’s meaning more clear. You can rearrange the order in which the words were spoken – but you can never, never distort the meaning.”
If you want to get published quickly, read The Byline Bible: Get Published in Five Weeks by Susan Shapiro. Shapiro is a writing professor who has taught more than 25,000 students of all ages and backgrounds at schools such as New York University, Columbia, Temple, The New School, and Harvard University. In The Byline Bible she describes her wildly popular “Instant Gratification Takes Too Long” technique that helps writers get their magazine articles published quickly.
Your turn! Why are you looking for tips on how to write a magazine article? Is it a school assignment, or do you want to be a freelance writer?
If you’re hoping to make money writing, know what writers get paid. Read Freelance Writing Pay Rates for Newspaper and Magazine Articles .
Need encouragement? Stay in touch! Get my free weekly email
11 thoughts on “10 simple ways to improve your magazine writing skills”.
Here’s another freelance writing tip, from the author of five books and numerous articles:
Recycle, recycle, recycle. Make your articles go farther by reworking them for different publications. For example, I wrote an article on swaddling twin babies for a national magazine for parents of twins. Then I cut down the article and removed the product reviews for an online column I write about twins and multiples. After that, I took out the “twins angle” and generalized the article to include all babies for publication in a pediatric newsletter. I even recorded a podcast about swaddling! With just a little bit of work, I was able to use the same research in four different ways.
– Susan Heim
Excellent tips as always, Laurie! Practical and honestly, not the ones I’ve heard so often before. I am a BIG believer in trust your editor/s. I have learnt SO much from listening to what they had to say and then, applying that feedback to my writing. In fact, today, when I have clients return and compliment me on my writing, I send out a silent prayer of thanks to all my editors.
Lots of good tips for improving your magazine writing skills, thank you Laurie. My advice for new freelancers: tackle one tip at a time. Do it really well, then move on to the next. If you try to improve your writing with all these different tips at once you’ll feel overwhelmed. Just my 2 cents 🙂 Charlotte
Thank you, I’ll share these tips on how to write a magazine article with my journalism students. I saw you were a journalism teacher, and appreciate your knowledge.
Here is what I tell my students who want to be freelance magazine writers. Always pay attention to new writing opportunities that are waiting in the wings. It could be an opportunity to take your writing career in a whole new direction! If you’re a niche or trade writer, try looking for online writing markets outside your speciality. If you’ve tapped out the online market, try exploring different types of passive income such as monetizing your blog or writing ebooks. The more diversified you are as a writer, the less likely those stints between article assignments will affect you. Use those quiet moments to “think outside the box.”
I was a freelance writer and blogger for five years until I started to teach journalism. The more my students write in their journals and blogs, the better they get at writing magazines articles.
It took me a few months, but I finally wrote an article about doing interviews!
Here’s the link:
10 Tips for Interviewing Sources for Articles https://www.theadventurouswriter.com/blogwriting/10-tips-for-interviewing-sources-for-articles/
All best, Laurie .-= Laurie PK´s last blog post ..10 Tips for Interviewing Sources for Articles =-.
Hy, thank you for the details it really worked. Now I could easily write an essay for any magazine. The points are really helpful I had read an article before on EassyMin that also helped me.
Good tips there. My favorites are “Sleep on it” and “Ask the right questions”. I wouldn’t mind more tips on doing interviews.
Whether you write in third or first person depends on who you’re writing for. Some magazines, newspapers, or blogs welcome first person reviews, while others prefer the more objective third person. So, I think you need to adjust your perspective according to the publication and readers ship.
Good luck with the article!
Laurie .-= Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen´s last blog post ..My 12 Favorite WordPress Plugins for Bloggers =-.
When writing a article about visiting local water parks should I include myself in the article? Should i write it in third or first person?
William Goldman (novelist and award-winning screenwriter of Harper, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Hot Rock, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men, A Bridge Too Far, The Princess Bride, Misery, and other films) summed up in his memoirs something about Hollywood that screenwriters should keep in mind: “Nobody knows anything.”
I suspect that applies to other forms of writing, too. Moral of the story: study, learn and then have confidence in what you write because nobody knows anything!
Very nice article, and I’m thrilled to have The Shy Writer at the top. Much appreciated.
Hope Clark Fundsforwriters.com
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How To Write An Article For A Magazine
- July 25, 2022
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If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to write an article for a magazine, now is your chance! In this ultimate guide, we’ll take you through everything you need to know about writing articles for magazines, from coming up with ideas to pitching them to editors. We’ll also give you some insider tips on what makes a good article, and how you can make yours stand out from the rest.
What Is A Magazine Article
A magazine article is typically a short piece of writing on a specific topic . Magazine articles are usually written by journalists, experts, or celebrities. They are often designed to be informative and entertaining, and they often include pictures. Magazine articles can be found in both print and online magazines.
What Are The Different Types Of Magazine Articles
There are many different types of magazine articles, but they can generally be divided into three broad categories: news articles, feature articles , and opinion pieces. News articles report on current events or breaking news stories, giving readers timely information about what is happening in the world.
Feature articles are typically longer and more in-depth than news articles, offering readers an in-depth look at a particular subject. Opinion pieces offer the writer ‘s opinion on a current issue or debate, and can be either positive or negative in tone. No matter what type of magazine article you’re reading, they all share one common goal: to inform, educate, and entertain readers.
How Do You Come Up With An Idea For A Magazine Article
You come up with an idea for a magazine article the same way you come up with an idea for anything: by paying attention to the world around you and thinking critically about what you see. Start by evaluating your interests and expertise. What are you passionate about? What do you have experience in? Once you have a general area of focus, start paying attention to the people and problems in your life.
What are people talking about? What issues do they seem to be struggling with? Anticipate trends that might be on the horizon and look for stories that haven’t been told yet. By keeping your eyes and ears open, you’ll eventually stumble upon an idea that’s worth writing about.
But don’t stop there- once you have an idea, it’s important to spend some time developing it. Outline the key points you want to make and flesh out a few potential angles. The more time you spend thinking about your idea, the better prepared you’ll be when it comes time to sit down and write .
How Do You Research For A Magazine Article
The best magazine articles are the result of rigorous research. To write a truly great article , you need to go beyond simply regurgitating information that can be found in other sources. Instead, you need to do original research that will help your readers to see the world in a new way . This can involve interviews, surveys, experiments, and more.
The key is to be creative and to think outside the box. Once you have gathered your data, it is important to analyze it carefully and critically. Only then can you start to piece together the story that you want to tell. With careful planning and attention to detail, you can write a magazine article that is both informative and engaging.
How Do You Write A Rough Draft For A Magazine Article
The best way to write a rough draft for a magazine article is to start with a topic that you’re passionate about. Once you’ve chosen your topic, it’s important to do some research and figure out what angle you want to approach it from. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to sit down and start writing.
Don’t worry about making it perfect, just focus on getting your ideas down on paper. Once you’ve got the first draft, you can go back and revise it until it’s ready for submission. Keep in mind that most editors prefer articles that are between 800 and 1,200 words, so try to keep your rough draft within that range.
How Do You Polish And Revise A Magazine Article
After your first draft is complete, it’s time to revise. This is where you’ll get rid of anything that doesn’t work and make sure everything that remains is as strong as it can be. Here are a few revision tips:
- Read your piece aloud. This will help you catch awkward phrasing and spot areas that need clarification.
- Simplify your language. Use clear, concise sentences rather than long, complicated ones.
- Eliminate unnecessary words. Every word should earn its keep. If it doesn’t contribute to the meaning of your piece, cut it out.
- Check your facts. Make sure all the information in your article is accurate and up-to-date. Nothing will damage your credibility more than an error.
- Ask for feedback. G et input from a colleague or trusted friend before you publish. They may spot errors or areas that need further explanation.
How Do You Submit A Magazine Article
If you want to submit a magazine article, the best way to start is by writing a query letter. This is a brief letter that introduces you and your article idea to the editor. If the editor likes your idea, they will ask to see the full article . Therefore, it’s important to make sure that your query letter is well-written and persuasive.
In addition, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with the magazine before you submit your article. This way, you can be sure that your article is a good fit for the publication. Once you’ve submitted your article , the editor will review it and decide whether or not to publish it. If they decide to publish it, they will usually make some editorial changes before it goes to print.
However, if they decide not to publish it, they will usually let you know why. Either way, submitting a magazine article can be a great way to get your work out there. Who knows? Maybe your article will end up on the shelves of newsstands all over the country.
What Are Some Common Mistakes Writers Make When Writing A Magazine Article
One of the most common mistakes writers make when writing for magazines is not understanding the publication’s audience. Every magazine has a specific target reader, and it’s important to understand who that person is before you start writing . What are their interests? What are their needs? What kind of language do they use? Once you know who you’re writing for, you can tailor your article to speak directly to them.
Another mistake writers make is failing to pitch their idea to the editor first. The editors are the gatekeepers of the magazine, and they’re the ones who decide which articles get published . So it’s important to make a good impression with your pitch and give them a reason to say yes. Include a detailed summary of your article , as well as some information about why you’re the perfect person to write it.
What Are Some Tips For Writing A Great Magazine Article
Here are a few tips for writing great magazine articles:
- Write for your audience. You need to understand who your target audience is and what they’re interested in. Once you know this, you can tailor your article to appeal to them.
- Keep it interesting. A good magazine article should be engaging and Interesting from start to finish. Be sure to include plenty of facts, figures, and quotes to keep readers hooked.
- Make it visually appealing. A well-designed article will be more likely to catch a reader’s eye than one that is poorly laid out. Use headlines, subheadings, and pictures to break up the text and add visual interest.
- Keep it concise. Readers don’t have a lot of time, so make sure you get to the point quickly and don’t include any filler material. Stick to the essential information and keep your sentences short and to the point.
- Proofread carefully. Nothing will turn off readers faster than spelling mistakes and typos, so be sure to proofread your article carefully before sending it off to editors.
Where Can I Find More Resources On How To Write A Magazine Article?
If you want to write a magazine article, the best place to start is by reading some articles in your target magazine. This will give you a feel for the magazine’s style and audience. Once you have a good understanding of what the magazine is looking for, you can start brainstorming ideas for your article .
Keep in mind that a successful article will offer something new and unique, so try to think of an angle that has not been covered before. Once you have an idea, start pitching it to editors. If you’re not sure how to pitch your article, look for resources online or reach out to a professional editor for guidance.
Brainstorming Ideas For A Magazine Article
Brainstorming is an important part of the creative process, but it’s not always easy to come up with good ideas. One way to jump-start your brainstorming is to think about the people you want to reach with your article . Who are they?
What are their interests? What are their concerns? Once you have a good sense of your target audience, you can start to generate ideas that will resonate with them. Another approach is to think about the format of your article . What kind of information do you want to include? How can you make it engaging and visually appealing? Asking yourself these questions will help you generate ideas that are both informative and visually stimulating.
And, don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Sometimes the best ideas come from left field, so don’t limit yourself to predictable topics or standard formats. Brainstorming is all about generating new and innovative ideas , so let your imagination run wild.
Picking The Right Topic For Your Magazine Article
It doesn’t matter what you’re writing about, the most important thing is that you’re writing about something that matters to your audience. That might sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people choose their topic based on what they think is interesting , rather than what their readers will find useful or engaging.
So before you sit down to write your next article , ask yourself: what does my audience care about? What are they struggling with? What would make their lives better? Once you have a clear idea of what your readers are looking for, choosing a topic will be a breeze.
And don’t worry if it doesn’t seem like the most exciting subject in the world-remember, your job as a writer is to make even the dullest topics interesting. If you can do that, you’ll be sure to engage your readers and leave them coming back for more.
Deciding On The Focus Or Angle Of Your Magazine Article
Most people, when they start writing, have an idea of what they want to say. But what they don’t have is a focus. A focus is a thing that you’re going to laser in on, the thing that you’re going to be known for.
And it’s not just about picking the right topic. It’s about having a point of view, about taking a stand. It’s about bringing your voice to the party. So how do you find your focus? The answer is simple: You have to be willing to edit. A lot.
You have to be willing to cut out the things that don’t fit , the tangential things, the things that don’t support your thesis. And in the end, what you’re left with is something focused, something powerful, something worth reading. So go find your focus, and then go write something amazing.
Make A List Of Potential Sources For Your Magazine Article
A lot of people think that the best way to come up with ideas for their magazine articles is to sit down and brainstorm a list of potential topics. But in my experience, that’s not always the most effective approach.
Instead, I recommend keeping a running list of potential sources that you can turn to when you’re looking for article ideas. These sources could be anything from news articles and blog posts to personal experiences and observations.
By having a list of potential sources at your fingertips, you’ll always have somewhere to turn when you’re feeling stuck for ideas. And who knows, one of those sources might just lead you to your next great article idea.
Interviewing Experts For Your Magazine Article
If you’re interviewing someone for a magazine article, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Don’t try to be an expert yourself. The goal is to get the person you’re interviewing to share their expertise with your readers.
- Prepare some thoughtful questions in advance. This will help to keep the conversation flowing and ensure that you get the most out of your time with the expert.
- Be sure to listen carefully to the answers and take notes. This will help you to accurately convey the expert’s thoughts and insights to your readers.
Going On Field Trips Or Conducting Experiments For Your Magazine Article
If you’re a magazine writer, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ll be assigned to write an article that requires you to go on a field trip or conduct an experiment. While this may seem like a daunting task, it’s an excellent opportunity to learn more about your topic and to add an element of excitement to your article . Here are a few tips for making the most of your field trip or experiment:
- Plan ahead. Before you leave for your trip, make sure you know what you need to accomplish and what equipment you’ll need. This will help you make the most of your time on the trip.
- Be prepared to improvise. No matter how well you plan, there’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Be prepared to think on your feet and to adapt your plans as necessary.
- Take advantage of all the resources available to you. Field trips offer a unique opportunity to see things firsthand and to talk to experts in person. Make sure you take advantage of all the resources available to you during your trip.
- Keep meticulous records. When you’re experimenting, it’s important to keep track of all your data and observations. This will help you to accurately report your findings in your article .
- Have fun. Field trips and experiments can be a lot of work, but they can also be a lot of fun. Be sure to enjoy the experience and share your excitement with your readers.
Taking Notes While Researching For Your Magazine Article
The Internet has made it easier than ever to research a topic, but it has also made it easy to get lost in a rabbit hole of information. When you’re researching for a magazine article, it’s important to take notes so that you can keep track of the most useful information. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself going down endless Internet rabbit holes and coming up with nothing but a headache.
When taking notes, be sure to include the source of the information so that you can go back and check it later if need be. You should also take note of any key points or interesting tidbits that you come across. If you’re using your notes to write an article , then it’s also important to organize them in a way that will make sense to your readers. Otherwise, your article will be a jumbled mess of information.
Organizing Your Research For Your Magazine Article
When you’re working on a project, you need to permit yourself to change your mind about what’s important. The work is never done until the deadline arrives, and so everything before that is research. That means it’s okay ( crucially, it’s essential) to be constantly refining your focus, priorities, and questions.
This is especially true when you’re researching for a magazine article. There are endless rabbit holes you could go down, which is why it’s important to have a clear sense of what you want to achieve before you start. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to resist the temptation to keep digging.
So take some time to figure out what questions you need to answer and what information would be most useful. Once you have a plan, stick to it as best you can. Remember, the goal is not to gather as much information as possible – it’s to find the right information that will help you tell a fascinating story.
Writing A Lead Or Hook For Your Magazine Article
The lead, or hook, of your magazine article, is the first sentence or two and sets the tone for the rest of the piece. It should be interesting and grab the reader’s attention so they want to read more. There are a few different article .
Drafting The Body Paragraphs Of Your Magazine Article
This is where you make your case, one paragraph at a time. Each paragraph should have a point, evidence to support that point, and (sometimes) a transition to the next point. The key is not to try to cover everything in each paragraph , but rather to make one convincing argument at a time.
That’s why it’s called draft–because you’ll keep revising until each paragraph is as strong as it can be. And then you’ll do the same thing for the other paragraphs in your article . By the time you’re finished, you should have a manuscript that’s tight, focused, and persuasive.
Writing A Strong Conclusion For Your Magazine Article
Summarizing what you’ve just written is a good way to start your conclusion , but it’s not the only way to end your article. You can also choose to:
- Make a statement that extends your main idea. For example, if you’re writing about the power of positive thinking, you could end with a call to action , encouraging your readers to think more positively in their own lives.
- Leave your readers with something to think about. If you want your readers to remember your article , end with a thought-provoking question or quote that summed up your main idea.
- End on a strong note. Your conclusion is your last chance to make an impression on your readers, so make sure it’s a good one!
Use strong language and powerful words to leave them feeling inspired, hopeful, or excited about what they’ve just read. Whatever tone you choose for your article , make sure it fits with the rest of your piece and leaves your reader with a lasting impression.
Adding Quotes And Expert Opinions To Your Magazine Article
Whenever you’re writing something important to you – whether it’s a blog post , a school essay, or a magazine article – it’s tempting to rely on your own opinion. After all, who knows better than you what you think? However, adding quotes from experts and other authoritative voices can add both depth and credibility to your writing .
Not only does it provide supporting evidence for your argument, but it also shows that you’ve done your research and are familiar with the latest thinking on the topic. Of course, it’s important to use quotes judiciously, as too many can make your writing sound stilted and overwrought. But when used sparingly and effectively, quotes can help take your writing to the next level.
Incorporating Visuals Into Your Magazine Article
As any writer knows, getting someone to read your article is only half the battle. The other half is keeping their attention long enough to finish it. One way to do this is to incorporate visuals into your article . A strong visual can break up the text and add another layer of interest for the reader.
But beware: a poorly chosen visual can do more harm than good. It’s important to select visuals that are relevant to the topic at hand and that compliment the overall tone of the piece. When used effectively, visuals can be a powerful tool for engaging readers and ensuring that your article makes a lasting impression.
Editing And Revising Your Magazine Article
The best magazine articles are usually the result of a lot of editing and revision. Some of the most successful articles are those that have been through an extensive editing process . The key is to get feedback from as many people as possible and to be willing to make changes based on their suggestions.
Of course, it’s also important to trust your instincts and to ultimately make the decisions that you feel are best for the article . But if you’re willing to put in the hard work, and to listen to feedback, then you’ll likely end up with a magazine article that is both successful and impactful.
Polishing Your Magazine Article
A lot of people think that once they’ve written an article , their job is done. But that’s not true! To get your article published in a magazine, you need to polish it until it shines. Here are three tips to help you do just that.
- Make sure your article is well-organized. Readers should be able to follow your argument easily, without getting lost in a jumble of ideas.
- Check your facts! Nothing will sink an article faster than an inaccuracy.
- Take the time to revise and edit your work . A well-written article is more likely to catch an editor’s eye.
Formatting Your Magazine Article
If you’re writing a magazine article, there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to formatting:
- Your article should be concise and to the point. Don’t try to cram too much information into a small space – use headings and subheadings to break up the text and make it easy to read.
- Make sure your article flows well from beginning to end. Each paragraph should lead logically into the next, and your overall argument should be clear and convincing.
- Don’t forget to proofread your work carefully before submitting it. A few small typos can make a big impression on readers, so take the time to ensure that your article is error-free.
Writing A Catchy Headline For Your Magazine Article
Your headline is the most important part of your magazine article. It’s what will make people want to read your article in the first place. A good headline should be interesting, attention-grabbing, and relevant to the article’s content.
- It should also be concise and easy to understand. To write a good headline, start by brainstorming a list of potential topics for your article .
- Choose the one that you think will be most interesting to your readers.
- Come up with a few different headlines for your article and test them out on friends or family members to see which one is most effective.
- Don’t be afraid to be creative with your headlines – sometimes, the more unusual, the better!
Writing An Enticing Meta Description For Your Magazine Article
- You have a split second to make a good impression. Write a meta description for your article that will make people want to click.
- Your meta description is like the headline of your article , but even more important because it shows up in search results. You have a limited amount of characters to make a good impression, so use them wisely!
- Think about what would make you want to click on an article . Is it an interesting title? A promise of valuable information? Something new and exciting? Whatever it is, make sure your meta description reflects that.
- Your meta description doesn’t have to be serious all the time – in fact, sometimes a little humor can go a long way. Be creative and have fun with it!
Just remember: the goal is to get people to click on your article. So however you do it, make sure your meta description is catchy, compelling, and above all else, relevant to the article itself.
Submitting Your Magazine Article To Editors
You’ve got a great article and you’re ready to submit it to editors. But don’t just fire off your work to the first magazine on your list. Do your research and target editors who are looking for pieces like yours. When you do submit, make sure your article is well-written and free of typos.
Editors are busy people, and they’re more likely to reject an article that’s not up to their standards. Take the time to polish your work before you hit “send.” It could make all the difference.
Following Up With Editors After Submitting Your Magazine Article
They have a lot on their plates and it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. So, if you’ve submitted a piece to a magazine and haven’t heard back in a couple of weeks, it’s perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged) to follow up. A quick email or call to check in shows that you’re interested and passionate about your work – two qualities that any editor is looking for.
It also helps to build relationships with editors, which can come in handy down the road. So, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone or shoot off a quick email – it may just be the thing that sets your article apart from the rest.
Writing for magazines can be a great way to get your work seen by a wider audience. By following these simple tips, you can make sure that your article is well-written and polished before submission. Editors are busy people, so it’s important to make their job as easy as possible. A little bit of effort on your part can go a long way in getting your work published. So don’t hesitate – start writing today !
What should I consider before writing an article for a magazine?
There are a few things you should take into account before you start writing your article . You need to understand the purpose or mission of the magazine. What is this publication trying to achieve? Every magazine has a target audience, so make sure you understand who the readers are and what they’re interested in.
What kind of topics are usually covered in the magazine?
You should also familiarize yourself with the type of topics that are usually covered in the publication. This will give you a good sense of what kinds of articles are appropriate.
How long should my article be?
Articles can range in length from a few hundred words to several thousand, so it’s important to find out the word count requirements before you start writing .
What is the magazine’s style?
Each magazine has its unique style, so it’s important to understand the publication’s tone and voice before you start writing . This will help ensure that your article is a good fit for the magazine.
Are there any specific guidelines I should follow?
Be sure to ask the editor if there are any specific guidelines you should follow when writing your article . These could include things like formatting requirements or deadlines.
How can I make my article stand out?
There are a few ways you can make your article stand out from the rest. Try to come up with a unique or interesting angle on a familiar topic. This will make your article more likely to catch the editor’s attention. You can also try to write in a clear and concise style that is easy for the reader to follow.
What are some common mistakes to avoid?
There are a few common mistakes you should try to avoid when writing your article:
- Don’t submit an article that is too short or too long for the publication you’re targeting.
- Don’t pitch an idea that has already been covered extensively by other magazines.
- Don’t forget to proofread your article before you submit it!
Where can I submit my article?
Once you’ve written your article, you’ll need to find a magazine that is willing to publish it. Start by looking for publications that cover similar topics to the one you’ve written about. Then, check the submission guidelines to see how to send in your article.
What are some other ways to get my work published?
If you’re having trouble getting your article published in a magazine, there are a few other options you can try. You can try submitting your article to an online publication. This can be a good way to get your work out there and build up your portfolio.
You can also try self-publishing your article by creating a blog or website. This can be a good option if you’re having trouble finding a magazine that’s willing to publish your work.
How can I make a living as a writer?
If you’re interested in making a career out of writing , there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of success.
- Try to build up a strong portfolio of published work. This will show editors that you’re serious about your craft and that you have the skills to back up your claims.
- You can also try to specialize in a certain type of writing, such as copywriting or SEO writing. This will make you more attractive to businesses that are looking to hire freelance writers .
- Don’t be afraid to market yourself and promote your work . The more people who see your writing, the more likely you are to find success as a writer .
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- Write for Magazines: 21 Publications That Pay $500+ Per Assignment
Evan Jensen
1. AARP, The Magazine
2. alaska beyond, 3. the atlantic, 4. chatelaine magazine, 5. delta sky, 6. discover magazine, 7. early american life, 8. earth island journal, 9. eating well, 10. enroute, 11. family circle, 13. green entrepreneur, 14. hakai magazine, 15. hemispheres, 16. kitplanes, 17. liisbeth, 18. popular science, 20. smithsonian, 21. the sun, get paid to write for magazines, previous post, related posts, 10 paid poetry contests (and how to enter your poem to win), cryptocurrency jobs for writers: 9 paying markets to pitch, 20 break-in magazines for new freelance writers.
It’s a great way to make a living writing if you pitch the right publications. How about $500 or more per assignment?
If you’ve been cranking out magazine stories for $50 to $150 a pop, you may be wondering if that’s really even possible. That’s often the going rate for local, regional, or small-circulation magazines.
If you want to write for magazines, and have limited experience, these are great places to get some clips, and earn some money, but it shouldn’t be your last stop.
Many consumer and trade magazines pay $500 or more per assignment. And the pitching process is pretty much the same as smaller pubs:
- Identify a magazine you want to write for
- Study the submission guidelines
- Develop a solid story idea
- Do a little research and interview a source
- Write a killer query letter, and pitch your story idea to an editor
If you can do that, you’ve got the chops to get paid well to write for any magazine on the market . But you need to know where to look for those $500-plus assignments. Check out these 21 magazines to find freelance writing jobs .
Here’s an interesting fact about the magazine published for readers over age 50. AARP has the highest circulation of any magazine in the United States, with more than 35 million subscribers.
That also means it pays well, on average $1/word or $1,500 per assignment. Publishes news, features, how-tos, and essays about money, health and fitness, food, travel, relationships, and more for over-50 readers.
AARP may be a tough magazine to crack for newbies, but it’s not impossible. Smart networking efforts and a solid story idea helped Freelance Writers Den member Willi Morris land an assignment with AARP , one of her dream clients.
Contact: Senior Editor George Mannes or Features Editor George Blooston
Not all in-flight magazines openly publish writer’s guidelines, but Alaska Beyond is one that does. About 75 percent of this magazine is written by freelancers. Best way to break in: Pitch a short piece for “The Feed” department. Then you’re a lot more likely to land higher paying assignments (up to $700) for travel, news, and feature stories.
Contact: Editor Paul Frichtl
If you want to write for The Atlantic , a magazine that covers news and analysis on politics, business, culture, technology, national, international and political life, read this by former Atlantic staffer Garance Franke-Ruta: “ How (not) to pitch: A guide for freelance writers .”
FYI – The Atlantic is also open to working with new freelancers. It’s where Freelance Writers Den member Douglas Fitzpatrick landed his first magazine assignment as a newbie for a piece about the career trajectory of Donald Trump.
Want to write for The Atlantic? Study the magazine and pitch an idea with a query first . Pays $150 to $1,600 depending on assignment.
Contact: See department staff info here
Chatelaine is a popular monthly women’s magazine in Canada that covers health and fitness, finance, social issues, fashion, beauty, food, and home decor. It’s target audience is active women ages 25 to 54.
“The Health section covers the latest news and studies, gives fitness and workout tips and explores hot-button issues,” says Managing Editor Laura Brown. Query with a story idea first. Pays an average of $1/word or $1,500 per assignment.
Contact: Managing Editor Laura Brown
If you’re interested in writing for custom pubs for airlines, pitch the in-flight magazine Delta Sky . Carol Tice happens to be a regular contributor, including a story in the November 2018 issue.
Pitch story ideas about food, sports, lifestyle, business, and travel (including international destinations). The current issue includes stories about destinations around the world like Seoul, Korea, Beijing, China, Grenada, and must-see places across the U.S.
Contact: Editor Sarah Elbert
If you customized your search in Writer’s Market to find magazines that pay the highest rate, this is one that would rise to the top of the list. How about $2/word or $3,000 for a 1,500-word feature story.
This science-based magazines features stories about medical research, scientific breakthroughs, technology, physics, space travel, and even paleontology. Keep in mind it’s written for a lay audience, so academic language won’t get you an assignment.
Want to write for Discover? Here’s some advice from freelancer Susan Etchey : “The only way a new writer has a chance to get the attention of its editors is to have an explosive, compelling untold science story to tell.”
Contact: Senior Editor Gemma Tarlach or another member of the editorial team .
From colonization to life in the mid-1800s, this magazine features stories about history, architecture, antiques, crafts, and travel destinations for people interested in early American life.
In the most recent issue, you’ll learn about rolling pins from the Colonial era, the evolution of the bald eagle as America’s mascot, brewing in the 1700s, and more.
Know how to dig up the bones to pitch a story about early American life? It’s worth the effort. This pub pays an average of $500 to $2,000 per assignment.
Contact: Executive Editor Jenmarie Andrews
If you want to write for Earth Island Journal , follow the first rule of writing for any magazine. Read it. Study back issues.
In the current issue, you’ll learn about Donald Trumps rhetoric about the environment, the trouble with hydroponic growing and our food supply, bee conservation, a curious new way to clean up trash, and more.
Pays an average of $1,000 per assignment for stories about science, technology, the environment, and people making a difference.
Contact: Editor Maureen Nandini Mitra
Get in line at the grocery story, and you might see this magazine on the news stand. But it’s not just a magazine filled with recipes, photos of tasty food, and tips for healthy eating.
There’s a lot more “meat” in the pages of Eating Well that explains the science behind the taste, textures, and flavors that make food delicious. If you can combine smart storytelling with science and food, write a query letter and pitch an idea. Eating Well pays an average of $1/word.
Contact : Associate Nutrition Editor Julia Westbrook or another member of the editorial team.
Glamping, conservation efforts, fishing for a record-setting marlin, and a Canadian’s guide to the Louvre. Those are just a few of the the types of stories featured in Air Canad’s in-flight magazine enRoute.
“We engage our audience through intelligent writing, insight, humour and spot-on service journalism,” says Editor-in-chief Jean-François Légaré. Study the guidelines, back issues, and media kit before pitching a story idea.
Contact: Editor Caitlin Walsh Miller
How do you run a house, pursue a career, take care of kids, eat healthy, look good, and feel good? It’s the kind of answers you’ll find in the articles published in Family Circle magazine. It’s a national women’s magazine with a circulation of around 4.2 million readers, and a healthy budget to pay freelancers $1/word.
Need some story ideas? In the current issue, you’ll find stories about raising teenagers, the struggle to lose weight and keep it off, popular vacation spots for kids, and more
Contact: Associate Editor Caroline Mullen or another member of the editorial staff .
Carol Tice spend over a decade writing about business, commerce, entrepreneurship, finance, and big businesses like Amazon and Microsoft. And it was the perfect proving ground for her to land a long-term gig writing for Forbes.
This business magazine is among the most recognized for publishing stories about the people, businesses, and trends in entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, and more. And it’s good for freelancers. Forbes pays an average of $1/word and up.
In the most current issue, you’ll learn about tennis phenom Serena Williams smart investing strategies. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the deal to build Trump Tower. You’ll be exposed to a new perspective on climate change truths that may impact everyone’s bottom line, and more.
Contact: Senior Editor Susan Adams or another member of the editorial staff.
Last year, Entrepreneur magazine launched GreenEntrepreneur.com , to give readers that latest news about entrepreneurship, business, technology and lifestyle aspects of the cannabis industry.
“Rarely does a new industry explode with the exponential success that the legal marijuana trade has experienced,” Entrepreneur Media President Bill Shaw, said in a press release.
If you want to write for Green Entrepreneur , study the guidelines and pitch a story idea about the cannabis industry. Pays up to $1.50/word.
Looking for story ideas? The latest buzz in Green Entrepreneur includes stories about a new weed vaporizor that may popularize smoking marijuana, a $400 million shopping spree spent on cannabis, the latest news about legalization, and more.
Contact: Executive Editor Jonathan Small
If you want to write about archaeology, ecology, biology, geology, and oceanography of marine coastal environments, take a closer look at Hakai magazine.
You’ve got the chops to write for this magazine that pays up to $1/word if you have solid journalism experience, research skills, and the ability to interview sources.
“We are interested in great stories and strong voices,” says Editor Jude Isabella. “We tilt toward science and environmental stories, but we’re also interested in people and communities and how they interact with coastal ecosystems.”
Pitch short news stories about coastal environmental topics (500 to 800 words), or an in-depth feature (1,000 to 5,000 words).
If you can provide video (five minutes or less) or content for an infographic, to go with your story, your chances of acceptance go up.
Contact: Editor Jude Isabella
The United Airlines in-flight magazine, Hemispheres , happens to be one of two in-flight magazines listed in Writer’s Market listed with a $$$ pay rate.
Translation: This magazine pays freelancers an average of $750 to $1,500 per assignment. Publishes stories about global culture, adventure, business, entertainment, and sports .
Inside the current issue, you’ll find stories about must-see-and-do activities in Chicago, insights on life, career and relationships from actress Kristen Bell, moon-landing anniversary celebration tips, and more.
Contact: Editor Ellen Carpenter
This is what the Wright Brothers inspired more than 100 years ago: build a plane from a kit, and fly it.
You might not think a highly-niche magazine with a small circulation (about 72,000 readers). But Kitplanes pays well enough to be included in this list, up to $1,000 per assignment.
Pitch story ideas about building and design, flight testing, construction techniques, personal experience, and features on the people and businesses who are involved in building personal aircraft.
Contact: Editor Paul Dye
Before you pitch a story idea to this feminist-focused magazine that covers entrepreneurship, innovation, social issues, and the politics and policies of business, be sure to read the LiisBeth Manifesto .
If you can pitch a story idea that jives with that about people and businesses making a difference, you’re on your way landing an assignment that pays up to $1,500 U.S. You best bet for a well-paid assignment…pitch a story idea for a profile, how-to, or investigative feature.
Contact: Editor Margaret Webb — This email no longer works. Per the publication guidelines, you can send queries to [email protected] – or do some sleuthing and find another editor contact!
If science and technology writing for an educated lay audience is your niche, don’t waste another minute waiting to pitch Popular Science. It’s one of the oldest magazines still in existence with roots dating back to the late 1800s.
It’s got a circulation of about 1.5 million readers, and a healthy budget to pay freelancers. How about $2/word or $1,000-plus per assignment?
Need story ideas? In the current issue, you’ll read about new threats posed by the Zika virus, rapidly-evolving drone technology, a cookie-test kitchen in outer space, and more.
Contact: Senior Editor Rachel Feltman
When Sierra magazine editor Jason Mark stepped into his new role a few years ago, he had just walked through Nevada’s Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, surrounded by massive wildfires. That solo experience shaped his mission to lead this magazine dedicated to causes to protect the planet, natural spaces, and outdoor recreation.
“I keep thinking about that trip to the Sierra, which seems emblematic of the challenges facing the environmental movement today,” says Mark. “We want to celebrate and enjoy the big, open spaces we love. At the same time, we have to be always on guard to protect those places. ”
This is the magazine for Sierra Club members. Pitch story ideas about outdoor adventure, environmental issues, and people on a mission to “explore, enjoy, and protect the planet.” Pays $1/word and up per assignment.
Contact: Editor Jason Mark
Did you know the Smithsonian Institute includes 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and 2.7 million square feet of indoor space? There’s a lot to know and a lot to learn about the past, present and future of science, technology, the environment, and even the universe.
And you can write about it for the Smithsonian magazine and get paid well. The Smithsonian pays freelancers $1-$3/per word, which means a $500 assignment is more than realistic. So how do you break into this magazine?
“There has to be something surprising and narratively interesting there,” says Senior Editor Jenny Rothenberg Gritz . “If the story is about the natural world, either the person you’re writing about has to be super charismatic and interesting, or something done about the issue has to be amazing.”
Contact: Associate Editor Thomas Stackpole or another member of the editorial staff.
Here’s an interesting way to differentiate yourself as a news and literary magazine…no advertising. That’s the Sun’s approach to focus on great writing.
This magazine has been around for 40-plus years, and is looking for essays, interviews, and story ideas about political and cultural issues. The Sun pays up to $2,000 per assignment.
“We’ve been described in many ways,” says Editor and Publisher Sy Safransky. “Celebratory, fierce, unflinching, thoughtful, truthful, dark, darkly funny, tender.”
And it shows in recent articles on food inequalities in the U.S., an outsider’s view from inside the commercial fishing industry, the uncanny sense for home that dog’s have, and more.
Contact: Senior Editor Andrew Snee or another member of the editorial staff .
If you’re looking for magazines that pay $500 or more per assignment, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Lots of magazines pay pro rates.
- Check Writer’s Market (print or online) for more. Skip over the magazines that pay low rates, and focus those that pay $1/word or more.
- Get in touch with the editors at custom pubs and trade magazines . These mags frequently work with freelance writers and pay pro rates, but aren’t as easy to find as consumer pubs in Writer’s Market .
- Keep on pitching. Then work through the process to study the magazine, develop a story idea, and write a killer query letter. If you can do this for magazines that pay lower-rates, you can do it for bigger magazines that pay top dollar.
What well-paying magazines do you write for? Tell us in the comments below.
Evan Jensen is a contributing writer for Make a Living Writing. When he’s not on a writing deadline or catching up on emails, he’s training to run another 100-mile ultra-marathon.
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How to Write a Magazine Article Editors Will Love
One thing I learned early in my freelance writing career is that, in order to gain experience and traction, I had to step out of my wheelhouse from time to time.
As a writer, I love writing blog content!
Especially for my sites where I can share information and stories to really connect with my audience.
But I’ve also written all different kinds of content and quickly learned that sometimes the content we write as freelance writers can be as different as apples and oranges.
For instance, writing a magazine article is vastly different from writing a blog post.
For that reason, if you are interested in writing for publications instead of websites, you need to know what editors are looking for.
Editors are the head honchos who receive pitches and vet content for publications.
If you’re wanting to learn how to write a magazine article for such publications as Reader’s Digest, for example, you can’t pitch them the same articles as you would for a blog post.
So how do you write a magazine article that editors will love? I’m glad you asked!
Because in this post, I’m going to show you the differences between blogs and magazines, the different types of magazine articles you can write, and how to write one that editors can’t ignore.
Ready? Let’s go!
How is Writing For a Magazine or Publication Different From Writing For a Blog?
With so much content out there that can be written by freelance writers, it’s hard to distinguish the differences – especially between magazines articles and blog articles.
The biggest difference between the two is that blog posts are published on blogs while articles are published, well, everywhere else!
This can include printed publications such as newspapers or online content for online magazines .
There’s also a difference in the writing styles as well. Blog posts are generally written with shorter paragraphs to make it easier to read on a computer or phone screen.
Plus, blog readers are notorious skimmers and are generally checking out content to get an idea or answer a question.
Magazine articles tend to be more in-depth with readers purposely sitting down to read something lengthy and informative.
Speaking of length, blog posts are generally anywhere between 500-2000 words while magazine articles can top 5000 words or more.
Language-wise, a blog post is more informal and sometimes includes more personality and slang while magazine articles are more formal.
Understanding the differences is key to knowing how to write an article that editors will love!
Magazine Article Template to Use
It’s a good idea to understand the magazine article layout template before pitching to magazines. To help you, I created an article outline template you can use when you start pitching to magazines.
In the magazine article template I listed out the parts of a typical magazine article with the information you need to write this article.
For example, understanding the differences between a nut graph and a lede can help you create the right pitch for an article, since some magazine want the fleshed out article or parts of your article.
To learn more about how to write an article, check out the next section where I go through important tips to help you be successful when you send your magazine pitch.
How to Write a Magazine Article
Writing articles for magazines can be extremely lucrative for freelance writers , since many publications will may more for content than a website or blog.
However, in order to make money and get published, you need to know how to write an article that editors will get excited for an accept!
Here are some tips for writing an article for a magazine or publication.
1. Target Your Pitches
Just like any other freelance writing job, you need to pitch your article idea to magazine and publication editors. Most importantly, however, you need to make sure you are pitching an appropriate topic.
If you’re trying to pitch a scientific article to a magazine about travel, for example, your query letter will likely be ignored.
Before you pitch to a publication or an editor, take the time to look at their content. Get a feel for the types of articles they publish and check out their submission guidelines.
And don’t be discouraged if you’re pitch isn’t accepted – simply by pitching, you are engaging with an editor and beginning a relationship.
2. Write an Article Summary Outline
If you research, “How to write a summary of an article,” you’ll likely get results referring to summarizing existing articles for academic purposes.
When it comes to writing an article editors will love, it’s all about organizing your content to ensure it is informative and easy to read.
Writing an article summary is a great way to structure your article when you beginning to write your article.
It’s also great to have on hand when pitching to editors since you can pare it down when you send along your pitch.
In order to write an article summary, start by jotting down your main thoughts. Oftentimes, these can be used for the headings and subheadings of your article.
Once you have your headings established, write down key points and statements for each while taking note of areas that are going to require research (which I’ll talk about in the next step).
Yes, this is kind of like an outline but you’re adding in more than headings and bullet points so that, in the end, you have a summary of what your article is about.
3. Research…Then Research Some More
No matter the type of article you are writing, you need to back up your claims and opinions with research such as statistics, quotes, or other sources of information.
There’s no harm in over-researching and gathering more resources than you actually need for your article.
This way, when it’s time to expand your article summary into a full-blown piece, you have enough substantive facts to validate your story.
Editors want informative and provocative pieces but they are also looking for something that is rooted in fact. They’re likely not interested in posting your thoughts if you don’t have any research to back them up.
4. Think About the Magazine’s Target Audience
Magazines depend entirely upon their readers – it’s the whole reason why they exist!
Editors know and understand their readers very well and curate content that speaks directly to them – not only about topics they are interested in but also in their language.
For instance, you could aim to write for popular magazines such as Cosmo or Vogue but you can’t populate your content with technical words and concepts.
These readers want something quick and easy to digest, which also means not a 5,000 word article.
This is why it’s important to get to know the magazine’s target audience almost as well as the editor knows them. This way, you’ll not only know what kind of topics to write about but also what kind of voice and tone to use in your writing.
5. Write an Attention-Grabbing Title
When it comes to how to write a magazine article, this step can happen anytime during the process. Sometimes the entirety of a great article starts with a catchy title!
But there’s nothing wrong with waiting until the article is written to come up with a headline. The important thing is that the title is attention-grabbing – editors love this!
For my article template I decided to write a lifestyle title for a lifestyle magazine such as Cosmopolitan.
I decided to pair two things that aren’t always related to each other: crystals and relationships.
So what makes a good magazine headline? Let’s look at some tips to help you out:
- Creative: Magazine titles are usually bold and creative. Next time you’re at a grocery store, let your eyes scan the magazines at the checkout. Which headlines caught your eye? Why did they catch your attention?
- Clear Angle: We know in blog writing that asking questions and teasing is a great way to get people to click on your article. However, when it comes to magazine article, you don’t have time to tiptoe around the topic because your content is competing directly against other magazine titles because everything is on display.
- Emotional Language: Magazine titles should create an emotional connection with the reader and have them engaged with the content before they even read it.
- Wanting More: While you want your headline to have a clear angle, you don’t want to give too much about your article away. Let the title give them a little taste.
Types of Magazine Articles
Now that you know how to write an article, let’s look at the type of magazine articles you can pitch to editors!
Informational Pieces
Informational pieces offer knowledge to the reader through well-researched content. These articles are typically fact-driven and educational, informing readers about things that will affect their lives.
They can also serve to explain a trend or dispel misunderstandings.
Informational pieces are best written for industry-specific publications or publications that focus on specific organizations or groups.
An example of a publication or magazine that has these types of informational magazine articles, is Writer’s Digest .
How-To Articles
A how-to article outlines a step-by-step explanation of a process. When writing how-to articles, it’s important to assume that the reader does not understand how to do something, which is why you are showing them how.
This can be done by avoiding specific language related to your trade or expertise in order to make your article relatable to people of all backgrounds.
You can also include anecdotes to illustrate points and address any common mistakes made during the process you are explaining.
First-Person Pieces
First-person articles are written from personal experience and typically in first-person form. This means that instead of merely providing information, you are telling a story from your perspective using words such as “I”, “me”, etc.
Because you are recounting a personal story, it’s important to draw the reader into your experience. You can do this by using sensory details such as touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound.
However, you want to make sure you telling a story with a point that will show the readers a realization or discovery.
If you’re interested in writing a first-person piece, here are some ideas to get you started:
- Memory: Share a unique experience or perspective based on something that has happened to you in the past, focusing on how the even affected you and how others can relate to the experience.
- Skill or Talent: If you have a unique skill or talent, tell your story about what separates you from the rest.
- Observation: You can also use first-person to highlight a topic from a different perspective. Try writing about a sport you know nothing about or a fashion trend you don’t understand.
First-person pieces can be really fun to write but, unless you are providing value to the reader, they can be difficult to have accepted by editors.
Think about the experience you want to write about and how it can relate to the readers of the publication you are pitching to.
An example to see this is Motherboard’s article on an eating disorder movie.
Article Reviews
In the world of academics, article reviews are a well-structured presentation of arguments – mainly referring to other pieces of work or literature in a particular field of study. Article reviews are usually presented through summary, classification, analysis, and comparison.
So what does that have to do with writing for magazines? Is there any point to knowing how to write an article review?
Depending on the niche you write for, article reviews are very popular – especially in the world of science and technology. You can write reviews of other articles and research papers in a way that is more easily digestable for a broader audience.
Article reviews use theories, ideas, and research to evaluate the work of others. You can write a review article in favor of someone else’s theory or idea or you can write something in opposition.
You can present new information or simply respond to another writer’s work – the choice is yours!
Opinion Pieces
Even though you can write an opinion piece in the first-person narrative, an actual opinion piece is typically less personal. These articles are more journalistic in nature, answering the “5 Why’s and H”: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?
To make an opinion pieces more attractive to editors and more relevant to their target audience, add the question: “Who cares?”
When choosing a topic, keep in mind that the readers are going to scrutinize whether or not you qualified to offer the opinion you are writing about. In other words, we all have opinions – why should the readers care about yours?
Always state your expertise when writing an opinion piece in order to build trust with the reader. This is another thing editors will love!
To see an example of an opinionated magazine article, check out this one from Wired .
Think Pieces
Think pieces are more investigative in tone and often show the downside of a particular trend, whether it’s fashion, sports, politics, etc.
These types of article dig deeper than an informational piece and often includes interviews with experts in order to establish credibility of the information being presented.
Think pieces are provocative and well-researched and inspire readers to really think about the adopting a different perspective on the topic.
Go Wow Some Editors!
Knowing how to write an article that editors will love is a great first step to adding magazine writing to your freelance portfolio !
But I’m curious: Have you ever written for a magazine or publication? I’d love to hear your stories about writing magazine articles and getting accepted by publications!
Share them in the comments below!
Share this post with your friends!
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A magazine article.
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Instructions
Do the preparation exercise first. Then read the text and do the other exercises.
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Can you get five correct answers in a row? Press reset to try again.
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How You Can Make Money Writing Articles For Magazines – 10 Tips For Beginner Journalists
Have you always wanted to write articles for magazines? Here are 10 trade secrets to help you get your name in the byline.
By nichola meyer.
1. How do I submit my first magazine article?
You have two options.
“On spec”: The first method is to write the article, and then e-mail the piece with a cover letter to the features editor of a magazine. You can find his or her details on the masthead page in a magazine where the staff members are listed.
When you send a completed article, it’s known as “submitting on speculation” (or “on spec”). This method works well if you’re a novice writer and need a foot in the door with a magazine.
The editor can immediately assess the quality of your writing and if it will fit with the style and tone of the magazine.
Remember, you will need to study the magazine carefully before you even start writing. Requesting the magazine style guide from the features editor is another way to tune in to the type of reader the magazine is targeting.
“Querying or pitching”: The other option is to pitch your idea straight to the features editor in a query letter, and see if the editor is interested in your proposed article.
If the features editor likes your idea and gives you the go-ahead to write the article, then you simply need to deliver the piece to deadline . This method works well if you’ve written for the magazine before, and the editor trusts that you will produce what you have promised in your query letter.
2. What makes for a good magazine journalist?
Surprisingly, good journalism is not just about fine writing skills. Editors emphasise these five key habits of their star journalists:
1. Their writing captures the unique tone, style and content of the magazine – and fits with the needs of the target reader. 2. They can stick to deadlines. 3. Their facts are accurate; their research is sound and thorough. 4. Their work is not “shoddy” – meaning that spelling, grammar and punctuation are correct, and sentences are carefully crafted. 5. They behave professionally, from their well-written cover letter to their invoice.
3. How much money can I make as a magazine writer?
Regardless of how many years you’ve worked in the industry, your income as a freelancer depends entirely on how hard you’re willing to work, how well you can write, the thoroughness of your research and your general professionalism when dealing with the publishing houses.
Rates vary depending on the country and the magazine’s circulation. Best is to find out the rate by phoning the magazine and speaking to the features editor. Here are some rough guidelines.
Most often you are paid per word. The recommended going rate for beginner journalists is 60 c per word in New Zealand and Australia (70 p per word in the UK, and R2.00 upwards per word in South Africa). Specialist writers can get double that amount per word. Per month:
Considering that most features are 1500 words in length (2200 words at most), do your sums to work out your income per article. And then, remember, you’d still need to pay up to 25 % tax on that income.
Seasoned journalists write about 13 pieces per month (this can include columns, advertorials and other business writing).
4. When do I get paid for articles?
Some publishing houses pay upon publication, i.e. the month-end following when your article appeared in the magazine. But what few know is that magazines work 6 to 12 months in advance, so the fee for the piece you sell today could only appear in your bank account a year later!
A few publishing houses pay upon acceptance of your piece, which means roughly one month after acceptance.
5. How do I get paid for articles?
As a freelance journalist, you are in charge of your own “small business”. You are responsible for invoicing the publishing houses.
The features editor will let you know when you need to e-mail your invoice – either upon acceptance, or upon publication of your article to the accounts department. You are usually paid by electronic transfer directly into your bank account.
6. How much scope is there for work in the writing industry?
There are hundreds of publications and speciality publications looking for freelance contributions. Apart from shelves loaded with consumer magazines, there are trade magazines and inflight magazines that offer outlets for freelancers, although they may pay slightly less per word.
Furthermore, we have thousands of reputable webzines and paying blogs online. Many of these publications don’t pay for writing, but for those that do, you generally get paid a flat fee for a 300- to 500-word article.
7. How do I get commissioned to write an article?
Once an editor knows you and likes your work, it won’t be long before you receive your first commission.
What is a commission? It’s when the editor asks you to write a piece on a particular topic, and gives you a brief to follow. You need to follow the specifications in the brief – and deliver to deadline. It’s easier to work this way, rather than go through the more work-intensive process of querying or writing on spec, but you first need to build a good relationship with the editor.
8. What skills do I need to increase my chances of making it in the magazine journalism industry?
Apart from the essential skills already mentioned under question 3 above, you will also need:
- Networking ability (just like in any business!). The more editors you know – the more commissions you’re likely to land.
- Integrity: plagiarism and faulty research are likely to spell the end of your career
- Determination: One magazine’s “No” can be another’s “Yes”. Keep trying, keep writing.
9. What happens if a magazine doesn’t want to publish one of my articles?
This can happen to the best of writers! The magazine may have recently published something on the topic you’ve covered, or the article simply doesn’t fit the style of the magazine. In those cases (and you can politely ask a features editor why they’ve declined to buy your piece), you can send it on to another magazine for possible publication.
However, sometimes articles are simply not up to standard. In that case, you need to rewrite and edit, before you can try selling it again.
10. What legal rights and support do I have as a writer?
As the writer, you retain copyright over your piece, as long as you don’t sign away “All Rights” in a contract with the publisher. This means that a magazine has no legal right to re-sell your piece in any form or format, without paying you again for the re-sale. Every country has writers’ guilds or groups of writers that can support you. All freelancers are highly advised to join one of these guilds, not just for invaluable advice, but also ongoing support from other journalists.
About the Author
Nichola Meyer has been the principal of The Writers College ( SA Writers College , NZ Writers College and UK Writers College ) for the past 15 years.
With a background in lecturing at secondary and tertiary colleges, she taught magazine journalism for several years. She was also a journalist specialising in parenting and women’s issues for several magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine , Femina, Child Magazine and Baby & Me .
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How to Write a Magazine Article? 12 Golden Rules
Knowledge Base > Magazines > How to Write a Magazine Article? 12 Golden Rules
Although the number of magazines is shrinking in the digital age, many magazines have moved online. Many magazines created with online magazine maker are still popular, and authors enjoy fame and respect. That’s why, for many freelance writers, writing articles in magazines is often a career goal – because the pay can be ten times more per word than writing articles or texts for the local newspaper.
Writing magazine articles requires a different skill set than writing blog posts, screenplays, or advertisements. What’s more, as a magazine writer, more than in any other industry, you need to specialize to succeed. You write articles about history differently, sports differently, and sports history in a different way still.
A talent for writing, a love of meticulous research, and flexibility in creating texts are vital skills you need to master. Therefore, many people are interested in creating and publishing their own magazine need to master this specific style and learn how to write a magazine article.
What is a magazine article?
What is a magazine.
A magazine is a publication that is a collection of articles that appears regularly. The magazine articles can be about any topic, as well as topics that interest a specific group, such as sports fans, music fans, or board game enthusiasts.
A magazine can be published weekly, monthly, bimonthly, or only a few times a year. Most magazines are published once a week or once a month. Most magazine articles do not have a list of sources and are written by regular magazine editors and writers, rarely freelance writers.
Most magazine articles are easy to read and don’t take too long to read. They are often illustrated with photos or other images. Today, magazines are increasingly being replaced by websites, but there are still many magazines on various topics.
A magazine article is a specific text that can be found in a magazine or newspaper. It can be a report, a profile of an important person, an opinion piece, a discussion of a topic or a personal essay. Depending on the topic, a magazine article is usually 1,000 to 5,000 words long.
The magazine usually employs a group of editors who come up with a theme for each issue and relevant article ideas. This way, all the articles and features in the issue will have something in common. A sports magazine might talk about the start of a new season, a political magazine about an upcoming election, and a Valentine’s Day issue might be about romance.
How the format of a magazine article differs from that of a newspaper or other articles? In a newspaper that comes out every day, put the most important parts of the story first. Newspaper articles are usually read once and aren’t supposed to influence anyone. It has to be news, something you want to read.
On the other hand, a good magazine article should often start with a mystery, a question, or a situation that makes the reader want to read on. Daily newspaper articles should be unbiased descriptions of what happened, while magazine articles, often subjective, can cover a particular topic from a certain angle. To learn how to write a magazine article, you need to know what the magazine is about and how to appeal to its readers.
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Types and examples of magazine articles
Magazine editors categorize articles by type and often mention them in publication’s submission guidelines, so knowing these types by name will help you communicate with the editor. These are: First Person Article, Opinion Piece, Information or Service Piece, Personality Profile, and Think Piece. Many news articles, how-to articles, and reviews can also be found in magazines, but they are slightly different, and many of these have moved online, to digital magazines . Articles can also feature essays or humor pieces.
First Person Article
First-person magazine articles are written in the first person because they are based on personal experience. Depending on their length and newsworthiness, they can be sold as feature articles or essays. They are frequently personal accounts, especially interesting if they are written by a well-known magazine writer or celebrity. Typically, the purpose of such an article is stated in the first line or paragraph to hook the magazine’s target audience, such as “I voted for this politician, and now I regret my life choices.” When you write a magazine article like this one, you should present an unpopular or overlooked point of view from a fresh perspective.
Opinion Piece
This kind of magazine writing piece or opinion essay is less personal than the First-Person Article, but it still requires a narrow focus on a specific topic. The reader’s main question is, “Why are you qualified to render an opinion?” Everyone has an opinion, but why should anyone read yours?
If you’re an expert on this subject, let the reader know right away. Don’t criticize music trends if you’re not a musician! Demonstrate your knowledge, and support your opinion with up-to-date information and credentials.
Information/Service Piece
An informational or service piece expands the reader’s understanding of a particular subject. This can be a guide, a list of important issues. You can either be the expert or interview one. These are extremely pertinent to a specific industry. In a sports magazine article, you can explain a complete history of a sports team and its roster for the upcoming season.
You can expect some in-depth knowledge if the article title contains the phrases like Myths about or Secrets of. Explain everything you know: magazine journalism is different than being a freelance writer in that you should have some industry knowledge already.
Personality profile
This type of magazine article can present a silhouette of an important or relevant person – a politician, a political activist, a sports legend… If you’re writing for a video game magazine you can showcase a famous game designer or even an entire article can be about a game character like Lara Croft or Guybrush Threepwood, if the fictional character is detailed enough! Explain why readers will find this person interesting or noteworthy.
Think Piece
Written in an investigative tone, the think piece frequently shows the downside or less popular ideas of a popular industry aspect. This magazine article could also explain why something is popular or why a political party lost elections. A think piece is more in-depth than most feature articles and necessitates credibility. Confirm your thesis by interviewing analysts and experts.
How to start a magazine article?
Most creative writing professionals would agree that the best way to start writing a magazine article is with a strong opening sentence. A feature article must draw the attention of your target audience, and grab them from the go.
You can start by asking the reader a question which you will answer in the text of the article – for instance “Did you know that most users of Windows never use 80% of their functions – and that’s a good thing?”. In the content of your magazine articles you will be able to answer this question.
Another example of a good magazine article beginning is storytelling – human brains are fascinated by stories. Starting your example with “20 years ago no one in the industry knew what a genitine was, but now their inventor is one of the most influential people” can draw attention and spike up curiosity.
A great example is also a shocking quote – a compelling idea that goes against the grain is sure to capture the reader’s attention.
Most creative magazine article ideas
Even the most experienced journalists can often be looking for ideas for great articles. How to write a magazine article if you don’t have the slightest idea? Here are some of our suggestions:
Take a look at your specialty. If you’re a freelance writer, it’s a good idea to write about what you know. Delve into a topic thoroughly, and you’ll eventually find your niche and you might move from freelance writing jobs to magazine writing! Why? Having a writing specialty will make magazine editors think of you when story ideas in that genre come up.
Check out what’s trending. When browsing popular stories on social networks, many freelancers choose to write about current events. Lists of popular articles can help you understand what to focus your efforts on. Keep in mind that an article for national magazines needs to be well researched, and what’s trending now may change before the magazine finally comes out.
Reach out to the classics. Nostalgia always sells well. You can go back to books or movies that people remember from their youth or, for example, summarize the last year. Lists and numbers always look good!
12 rules on how to write great magazine articles
1. Write what you know about
If your articles are really fascinating and you know what you are writing about, you have a better chance of getting published, whether in a local newspaper or in a major magazine. Writing requires researching your chosen issue thoroughly. Identify perspectives that have not been explored before – describe something from the perspective of a woman, a minority, or a worker.
2. Research how you should write
Check the writing style requirements or guidelines of the magazines to which you want to submit your work. Each magazine has its own set of guidelines on what topics, manner and tone to use. Check out Strunk and White Elements of Style for tips on writing styles, as this is what many magazines draw from.
3. Remember to be flexible
One of the most valuable writing talents a journalist can possess is flexibility. You may find that you discover completely new facts while writing a magazine article and completely change your approach. Maybe you’ll change your mind 180 degrees and instead of attacking someone, you’ll defend them – anything to attract attention.
4. Make connections and meet people
Networking is important in any business, especially for freelance writers who want to make a jump to magazine writing. Editors regularly quit one magazine to work for another. Therefore, remember to know the people first and foremost than the magazine they work for.
5. Prepare a query letter
A query letter tells the editors why your magazine article is important, whether you think someone will want to read it and why you feel obligated to write it. Add to it a text sample and some information about yourself as a writer. Even a local magazine might not be aware of who you are, after all.
6. Prepare an outline
Always before writing a text have an outline that you can use when composing your articles. It must contain the important ideas, the content of the article body and the summary, the points you will include in it. You will find that it is easier to fill such a framework with your own content.
7. Meet the experts
You need to know pundits in your industry. There are several methods of locating experts, from networking to calling organizations or agencies in your field of interest. If you want to meet a police officer, call the police station and ask if someone could talk to a journalist – many people are tempted if you promise them a feature article.
8. Talk to experts
Once you get a contact for an expert, do your best to make the expert look as good as possible. The more prominent the expert, the better your text. Make a list of questions in advance and compare it with the outline to make sure you don’t forget anything. Remember to accurately describe your expert’s achievements and personal data.
9. Create a memorable title
This step can occur at any point in the process of writing an article for a magazine. Sometimes the whole article starts with a good title! However, there is nothing wrong with waiting until the article is finished before coming up with a title. The most important thing is that the title is catchy – editors-in-chief love that!
10. To write, you have to read
You never know where you will come across an inspiring text. It’s your duty as a good writer to read everything that falls into your hands, whether it’s articles on the front pages of major publications or small blog posts. Learn about the various issues that may be useful to your magazine writing skills.
11. Add a strong ending
End with a strong concluding remark that informs or elaborates on the theme of your piece. The last paragraph should make the reader satisfied, but also curious about the future progress of the issue. He must wonder “what’s next?” and answer the important questions himself.
12. Don’t give up
Writers are rejected hundreds of times, especially when they are initially learning how to create articles for magazines. However, even a seasoned freelance writer and professional journalist can get rejected. The most successful authors simply keep writing – being rejected is part of magazine writing. Freelance writing is a good school of writing career – including coping with rejection.
Now you know how to write a magazine article that will be engaging and interesting. Despite the digitalization of the market, writing magazine articles still offers many possibilities to a freelance writer or a seasoned professional. The market of press and magazines is evolving fast, but the basic principles of journalistic integrity stay the same!
You may be also interested in:
How To Publish Digital Magazine? How to Make a Magazine Cover With a Template? 5 Reasons to Start Using a Magazine Maker
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FreelanceWriting
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Writing contests, make money writing, hottest topics, 6 important tips for magazine article writing.
Writing articles for magazines is definitely a dream for a lot of writers. This is because the pay is usually huge. Not only that, it can also offer exposure that can lead to more article writing projects. Below are the things that you need to learn in order to write amazing articles for magazines:
1. Make sure to choose a topic that you’re an expert on or you feel interested in.
You’ll most likely to produce high quality magazine articles if you choose topics that are included in your areas of expertise and areas of interest. Publishers always look for articles that contain in-depth information or those that are very authoritative. I would recommend that you list down all the things that you feel you’re very good at. Then, choose those ones that you can easily sell to different magazines.
2. Choose interesting angles.
You have better chances of getting your articles published if they’re very interesting. Study your chosen topic carefully and figure out the angles that were not yet discussed before and those that will grab your target audience by the throat. Also, make sure that you do not write about general topics. Publishers in general do not like articles that contain too many information that are not really useful or beneficial to their clients.
3. Research.
Even if you think that you know your chosen topic inside out, I am sure it wouldn’t hurt if you conduct research. This will surely allow you to get more useful and fresh information that can make your articles more informative and more valuable to the eyes of your target audience. Read relevant resources and if needed, interview other experts.
4. Create an outline.
Next step is to create a structure that you can follow when writing your articles. This must contain the ideas that you’re going to discuss on your introduction, article body, and conclusion. Decide if you’re going to add images, testimonials, and graphics.
5. Write your articles.
Unlike when writing news articles, you’re not required to follow specific structure or format when writing your magazine articles. You can be as creative as you want to be. To hook your readers, I suggest that you write using their language. It will also help if you strive to sound upbeat and warm all the time. Remember, your readers are reading magazine articles not just to get informed but to be entertained as well.
6. Check out the style sheet or guidelines of the magazines where you would like to submit your articles to.
Every magazine has its own list of instructions about the subjects, approach, and tone that you need to use. If these are not published, I would recommend that you read all the articles that were used by the magazines where you would like to submit your copies to. Doing this will surely give you a clear idea as to what exactly they’re looking for.
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How to use ChatGPT to help you write
ChatGPT's advanced capabilities have created a huge demand , with the 'app' accumulating over 100 million users within two months of launching. One of the biggest standout features has been its ability to compose all sorts of text within seconds, including songs, poems, bedtime stories, and essays.
Also: What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? Here's everything you need to know
Contrary to popular opinion, ChatGPT can do a lot more than just write an essay for you (which could be called plagiarism). What is more useful is how it can help guide your writing process. If you are a looking for ways to use ChatGPT to support your writing, here are five different ways to explore.
How to improve your writing process with ChatGPT
1. use chatgpt to generate essay ideas.
Before you can even get started writing an essay, you need to flesh out the idea. When professors assign essays, they generally give students a prompt that gives them leeway for their own self-expression and analysis. As a result, students have the task of finding the angle to approach the essay on their own.
If you have written an essay recently, you know this step is often the trickiest part -- and this is where ChatGPT can help.
Also: I wish I had ChatGPT when I was in college. But not for the reason you might expect
All you need to do is input the assignment topic, include as much detail as you'd like -- such as what you're thinking about covering -- and let ChatGPT do the rest. For example, based on a paper prompt I had in college, I asked:
Can you help me come up with a topic idea for this assignment, "You will write a research paper or case study on a leadership topic of your choice." I would like it to include Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid and possibly a historical figure.
Within seconds, the chatbot produced a response that provided me with the title of the essay, options of historical figures I could focus my article on, and insight on what information I could include in my paper, with specific examples of a case study I could use.
2. Use the chatbot to create an outline
Once you have a solid topic, it's time to start brainstorming what you actually want to include in the essay. To facilitate the writing process, I always create an outline, including all the different points I want to touch upon in my essay. However, the outline writing process is usually tedious.
With ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it to write it for you.
Also : ChatGPT productivity hacks: Five ways to use chatbots to make your life easier
Using the topic that ChatGPT helped me generate in step one, I asked the chatbot to write me an outline by saying:
Can you create an outline for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid"
After a couple of seconds, the chatbot outputted a holistic outline divided into seven different sections, with three different points under each section.
This outline is thorough and can be condensed for a shorter essay, or elaborated on for a longer paper. If you don't like something or want to tweak it further, you can do so either manually or with more instructions to ChatGPT.
3. Use ChatGPT to find sources
Now that you know exactly what you want to write, it's time to find reputable sources to get your information from. If you don't know where to start, like with all of the previous steps, you can just ask ChatGPT.
All you need to do is ask it to find sources for your essay topic. For example, I asked it the following:
Can you help me find sources for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."
Also : The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT and other interesting alternatives to try
The chatbot output seven sources, with a bullet point for each that explained what the source was and why it could be useful.
The one caveat you will want to be aware of when using ChatGPT for sources is that it does not have access to information before 2021, so it will not be able to suggest the freshest sources. However, it is a start.
4. Use ChatGPT to write a sample essay
It is worth noting that if you take the text directly from the chatbot and submit it, your work could be considered a form of plagiarism, since it is not your original work. As with any information taken from another source, text generated by any AI should be clearly identified and credited in your work.
In most educational institutions, the penalties for plagiarism are severe, ranging from a failing grade to expulsion from the school.
Also : ChatGPT is changing everything. But it still has its limits
If you want ChatGPT generate a sample piece of text, put in the topic, the desired length, and watch for what it generates. For example, I input the following text:
Can you write a five-paragraph essay on the topic, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."
Within seconds, the chatbot output exactly what I asked for: A coherent, five-paragraph essay on the topic which can help you to guide you in your own writing.
At this point it's worth remembering how tools like ChatGPT work: They put words together in a form that they think is statistically valid but they don't know if what they are saying is true or accurate. That means you might find invented facts or details or other oddities. It won't be able to create original work because it is simply aggregating everything it has already absorbed. It might be a useful starting point for your own work, but don't expect it to be inspired or accurate.
5. Use ChatGPT to co-edit your essay
Once you've written your own essay, you can use ChatGPT's advanced writing capabilities to edit it for you.
You can simply tell the chatbot what you specifically want it to edit. For example, I asked it to edit for essay structure and grammar, but other options could have included flow, tone, and more.
Once you ask it to edit your essay, it will prompt you to paste your text into the chatbot. Once you do, it will output your essay with corrections made. This could be the most useful tool as it can edit your essay more thoroughly than a basic proofreading tool could, going beyond spelling.
You could also co-edit with the chatbot, asking it to take a look at a specific paragraph or sentence and asking it to rewrite or fix it for clarity.
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The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT and other interesting alternatives to try
How to learn to code: Our beginner's guide to coding & programming
Learning how to code will allow you to do everything from build complex apps to make your smart lights flash when you receive an email. Here's our guide on how to get started.
What language should I learn?
What platform should i write code on, what apps should i write code in, where can i learn online, how can i get support, will chatgpt make learning to code redundant, how can i stay motivated, how long will it take to learn to code.
To survive in the modern world you need certain life skills: Skills like knowing how to turn off motion smoothing on your parents’ TV, or how to perform the latest TikTok dance. But perhaps more than anything else, it is knowing how to code that will prove the most life changing.
If you can master the most modern tools of the coding trade, then you can unlock new job opportunities, a higher income, and spend less time on menial admin tasks that code can do for you. But how do you get started with coding? What are the first steps? Read on to find out.
But first, be sure to check out the Live Science guide on coding vs programming (opens in new tab) if you're not sure what coding actually is yet. When you're all set up and ready to code, Live Science also has a best laptops for coding (opens in new tab) guide.
If you’re not sure where to begin, JavaScript is a great starting point. According to Stack Overflow’s 2022 developer survey (opens in new tab) , JavaScript is the most popular programming language in use today, and it’ll give you a solid grounding in the fundamentals of object-oriented programming.
JavaScript (opens in new tab) is extremely flexible, having transcended its origins as a scripting language to display dynamic content on websites to become a more general purpose language. For example, you can even use it to interact with hardware and run backend systems using a ‘runtime’ called Node.
Ultimately, choosing which language to learn depends on what you want to do. For example, if you want to build iPhone apps, then a great place to start might be with Swift. This high-level programming language lets you generate basic apps with standard features like menus, and buttons, in just a few lines of code.
If you want to jump in at the deep end and build complex software, C# is the place to go (or Rust, if you want to learn a cutting-edge language). But if you just want to go with something simple, the best place to start is with Python, which is both easy to pick up and pretty powerful. Python is incredibly useful for countless small computing tasks that might otherwise take you hours in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
If you want an absolutely fool-proof way to start, pick up a Raspberry Pi. It’s a tiny computer about the size of your palm, but fully functional, and can be used either with a monitor and keyboard/mouse plugged in, or it can run “headless” on your home network, acting as a local web server.
This means that you can run your code on a completely separate computer and, if anything goes wrong, it’s easy to wipe clean and start again — no need to screw with your real, work-critical operating system while experimenting with code.
Another alternative, particularly if you want to develop web apps or write Python scripts, could be to lease a computer in the cloud using Amazon EC2. It’s fiddly to set up, but will grant you access to a remote Linux box on which you can do, well, whatever you like, for a small fee every month.
If you're introducing a child to the world of coding, there are plenty of coding toys available that will teach kids the basics of conditional logic and other major concepts, all without making it seem like hard work.
Every language has a slightly different development environment. Some languages have fully-featured development suites. For example, Apple has Xcode, which is a fully-featured Mac app for writing iPhone, iPad and Mac apps.
But there are also more general purpose apps available. The most popular integrated development environment at the moment is Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, or VS Code, according to Stack Overflow’s survey. Visual Studio Code works with a number of different languages to highlight the syntax as you write, making it much easier to make sure your variables, strings and classes are all in order.
Finally, if you’re really hardcore and want to feel like you’re in The Matrix, you could always write directly in your operating system’s terminal, using an app like Nano or Emacs. But this probably isn’t the best place to start for absolute beginners.
There are plenty of places you can learn to code online, often for free. Sites like Udemy (opens in new tab) and Code Academy (opens in new tab) will teach you the basics in no-time, splitting the learning up into different courses and lessons, so that you can learn at your own pace in a safe environment.
If you’re feeling more ambitious, sometimes the best way to learn is by doing — and messing around with someone else’s code. The way I learned wasn’t through any formal training, but by taking code written by other people and modifying it to suit my own purposes.
We've put together a guide to the sites that we think offer the best online coding courses out there to help you choose.
The secret that every coder will tell you is that the trick to writing code isn’t storing everything you need to know in your head all at once, it’s knowing where to look to see how everyone else did it before you.
The most powerful tool in the programmer’s arsenal is Google, because when an error message pops up, the chances are that you’re not the first person to see it, and someone will have figured it out and posted the solution on StackOverflow.
StackOverflow is a forum website that works a bit like Reddit. Queries are posted, and the many thousands of helpful coders who hang out there can offer assistance. Just make sure that you thoroughly search to see if your problem has already been solved on an earlier thread before posting!
GitHub is another platform where you can find help when coding. Writing code isn’t like writing a novel, it’s more like a collage, where you can bring in code that someone else has written to solve a particular problem.
For example, if you’re writing a Twitter app using PHP, there’s no need to start from scratch when interacting with the Twitter application programming interface (API), because TwitterOAuth (opens in new tab) already exists, and takes care of most of the hard work for you. Or, want to control your LED lights? Then you can simply use WLED (opens in new tab) to communicate with the guts of the electronics, and instead focus your code on designing intricate patterns.
And finally, one other potential major source of future help could be in the form of ChatGPT, the AI-bot that has captured headlines since it launched on Nov. 30, 2022. ChatGPT doesn’t just speak great English, it can code too, so you can easily ask it to write code for you, explain why a piece of code works the way it does or debut something you’ve written.
It might feel like an unusual time to want to learn to code, given we’re witnessing the generative AI revolution in real time. Tools like ChatGPT (opens in new tab) and GitHub CoPilot (opens in new tab) — another AI tool — are astonishingly capable and can write code for us, to do exactly what we need, with little more than a brief text prompt. So, is AI going to make learning to code pointless?
No, but it's going to change how we code. Though it's still early days, in the future, AI tools like ChatGPT are going to become for coders what calculators are to accountants and mathematicians: Useful tools for solving particular problems, but just as a calculator can’t tell you whether certain purchases could reasonably qualify as expenses, an AI assistant can’t make sure your software is doing exactly what you need it to do.
It’s still important to know how to code — just as a mathematician needs to know how long division works, even if they don’t need to do it themselves every time.
Making your code work isn’t always easy. In good times, writing code is like solving dozens of little logic puzzles, and can give you the same rush of endorphins as when you complete a tricky crossword or Sudoku. But in the bad times, any children nearby are going to learn a few new swear words, as you curse your computer for not compiling the code you have written, or not doing the thing that you want it to do.
Getting past this comes easier to some, as we covered when we looked at why some people are more motivated than others , but we've put some general tips below to help you keep your drive up.
How can you stop yourself from rage quitting? One way is to make sure that you’re not just trying to learn for learning’s sake, but to find a real world problem that you want to use code to solve. Thinking to yourself “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could take this data from one source, and put it into another?” will lead you down the rabbit hole of learning about how to interact with databases and APIs, or wondering if you can make your smart lights flash when you receive an email will teach you about interacting with hardware, and so on.
And if you solve enough little "problems" like this, the knowledge will slowly add up.
If you learn by doing, and put time into it, you’ll build up your basic skills in a matter of weeks and months. But you’ll never “finish” learning how to code. Platforms and programming languages are constantly evolving.
Sometimes, transformative new technologies will shake up everything we thought we knew — like the birth of AI — so it’s important to keep your skills sharp and continue learning. But the good news is, that’s the fun part!
And who knows, maybe you'll eventually get good enough to hack time like Hackerman. That's why we're all here, after all, right?
James O’Malley is a freelance technology writer and data wrangler. He was previously editor of Gizmodo UK, and over the years has written for everywhere from Wired, Engineering & Technology, TechRadar, Which? Computing, and PC Pro. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations and takes every opportunity to flex his coding muscles.
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How to Get ChatGPT to Write Effective Code & Build Websites
Last Updated: March 6, 2023
How to Use ChatGPT for Coding
Getting effective code from chatgpt.
wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, volunteer authors worked to edit and improve it over time. Learn more...
By now, you've heard that ChatGPT can write code. But can the AI chatbot generate effective code? While ChatGPT isn't an experienced software engineer, the chatbot can help you write, debug, test, and improve code in languages like Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, Ruby, C++, C#, PHP, Swift, TypeScript, and SQL. This wikiHow guide will teach you the best ways to use ChatGPT to write code and boost your productivity as a software developer.
Things You Should Know
- ChatGPT can clean up existing code by correcting mistakes, simplifying complex ideas, and ironing out bugs.
- To save time as a developer, use ChatGPT to create scaffolding, templates, and boilerplate code for your applications.
- ChatGPT does make mistakes, so it's not a replacement for a software engineer. Always test ChatGPT code before implementing.
- 3 Add to or improve existing code. Ask ChatGPT how to change your existing code to make it faster, sleeker, and/or do other things. Paste your code into the chatbot, along with what you want to change about the code. For example, "I want to display the results in numerical order based on the ID column," "Add these items to the to the list at position 3," or "Simplify this code."
- 4 Explain bits of code. Whether you're confused about a code snippet or an entire program, you can ask ChatGPT to break it down for you. Simply paste code into ChatGPT and ask questions like, "What does this function do?" or "How does this algorithm work?"
- 5 Find mistakes and bugs. ChatGPT can be helpful in identifying and repairing errors in your code. Ask questions like, "What's wrong with this code?" or "How do I fix the bug in this program?" and paste the code into the field. If ChatGPT needs more information, it will prompt you to enter additional details, and provide fixes as needed.
- 6 Translate code into other languages. If you're already well-versed in one programming language, you can use ChatGPT to convert code to a language you're less familiar with . For example, try pasting a C++ program into ChatGPT and asking "translate this code to Java."
- 7 Test functions in seconds. Instead of spending time writing your own test cases for functions, ask ChatGPT to write them for you. ChatGPT will perform several test cases on the function you specify and report the results.
- "Build a simple one-page website for my pet-sitting services, which include dog walks and overnight house-sitting stays. Create a table that contains my services and rates, which are $60 per night for overnight stays, and $20 for one-time 30-minute walks. Create a contact form that customers can fill out to request my services. On the form, allow the customers to select their desired dates from a calendar. Send customer responses to me via email at [email protected]"
- With this example, ChatGPT will provide the HTML and CSS code for a simple website that you can upload to your web host. You'll just need to make a few minor tweaks to personalize the website, but the code is now yours to play with.
- Before, we asked ChatGPT to code us a website for a pet-sitting business. What if we also want to add our grooming rates to the table on the page? All you'll need to do is say, "Add grooming services for $100 to my rate list," and ChatGPT will regenerate the code to include your changes.
- You can also add other details, like "change the title tag to Affordable Pet Sitting Services in San Francisco," and "display a "thank you" page to the customer after they submit the form."
- Remember that ChatGPT is not a software engineer—it does not understand nuance, nor can it determine context that it can't find in its training data. It also relies primarily on data that was available on the internet prior to 2021, and cannot search the web for newer content on demand. [2] X Research source
- 4 Don't trust ChatGPT's code without testing it yourself. While ChatGPT can provide surprisingly good code for an AI chatbot, it often makes coding mistakes that it does not (or refuses to) correct. If ChatGPT's training data contains bad code examples, ChatGPT will interpret those bad examples as truths. Because of this, ChatGPT is not (yet) reliable enough to trust for writing programs on its own. Use ChatGPT as a resource while coding, but not as a replacement for a software engineer (or learning to code yourself).
Expert Q&A
Video . by using this service, some information may be shared with youtube..
- Your conversations with ChatGPT may be used to improve the quality of the service, so don't divulge anything private. [3] X Research source ⧼thumbs_response⧽ Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
- ChatGPT's training data cuts off at 2021. If you're working on a program that requires libraries or coding conventions newer than that, ChatGPT will not provide accurate code. ⧼thumbs_response⧽ Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
- If ChatGPT is at capacity , try refreshing the page, or logging back in another time. ⧼thumbs_response⧽ Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
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- ↑ https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6787051-does-chatgpt-remember-what-happened-earlier-in-the-conversation
- ↑ https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-chatgpt-general-faq
- ↑ https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
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The New Anarchy
America faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
“Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this … may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.”
I. ON THE BRINK
In the weeks before Labor Day 2020, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, began warning people that he believed someone would soon be killed by extremists in his city. Portland was preparing for the 100th consecutive day of conflict among anti-police protesters, right-wing counterprotesters, and the police themselves. Night after night, hundreds of people clashed in the streets. They attacked one another with baseball bats, Tasers, bear spray, fireworks. They filled balloons with urine and marbles and fired them at police officers with slingshots. The police lobbed flash-bang grenades. One man shot another in the eye with a paintball gun and pointed a loaded revolver at a screaming crowd. The FBI notified the public of a bomb threat against federal buildings in the city. Several homemade bombs were hurled into a group of people in a city park.
Explore the April 2023 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Extremists on the left and on the right, each side inhabiting its own reality, had come to own a portion of downtown Portland. These radicals acted without restraint or, in many cases, humanity.
In early July, when then-President Donald Trump deployed federal law-enforcement agents in tactical gear to Portland —against the wishes of the mayor and the governor—conditions deteriorated further. Agents threw protesters into unmarked vans. A federal officer shot a man in the forehead with a nonlethal munition, fracturing his skull. The authorities used chemical agents on crowds so frequently that even Mayor Wheeler found himself caught in clouds of tear gas. People set fires. They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. They swung hammers into windows. Then, on the last Saturday of August, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters rode into Portland waving American flags and Trump flags with slogans like TAKE AMERICA BACK and MAKE LIBERALS CRY AGAIN . Within hours, a 39-year-old man would be dead—shot in the chest by a self-described anti-fascist. Five days later, federal agents killed the suspect—in self-defense, the government claimed—during a confrontation in Washington State.
What had seemed from the outside to be spontaneous protests centered on the murder of George Floyd were in fact the culmination of a long-standing ideological battle. Some four years earlier, Trump supporters had identified Portland, correctly, as an ideal place to provoke the left. The city is often mocked for its infatuation with leftist ideas and performative politics. That reputation, lampooned in the television series Portlandia , is not completely unwarranted. Right-wing extremists understood that Portland’s reaction to a trolling campaign would be swift, and would guarantee the celebrity that comes with virality. When Trump won the presidency, this dynamic intensified, and Portland became a place where radicals would go to brawl in the streets. By the middle of 2018, far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer had hosted more than a dozen rallies in the Pacific Northwest, many of them in Portland. Then, in 2020, extremists on the left hijacked largely peaceful anti-police protests with their own violent tactics, and right-wing radicals saw an opening for a major fight.
What happened in Portland, like what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, was a concentrated manifestation of the political violence that is all around us now. By political violence, I mean acts of violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideological vision or by delusions and hatred. More Americans are bringing weapons to political protests. Openly white-supremacist activity rose more than twelvefold from 2017 to 2021 . Political aggression today is often expressed in the violent rhetoric of war. People build their political identities not around shared values but around a hatred for their foes, a phenomenon known as “negative partisanship.” A growing number of elected officials face harassment and death threats, causing many to leave politics. By nearly every measure, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was five years ago. A 2022 UC Davis poll found that one in five Americans believes political violence would be “at least sometimes” justified, and one in 10 believes it would be justified if it meant returning Trump to the presidency. Officials at the highest levels of the military and in the White House believe that the United States will see an increase in violent attacks as the 2024 presidential election draws nearer.
In recent years, Americans have contemplated a worst-case scenario, in which the country’s extreme and widening divisions lead to a second Civil War. But what the country is experiencing now—and will likely continue to experience for a generation or more—is something different. The form of extremism we face is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies. Unchecked, it promises an era of slow-motion anarchy.
Consider recent events. In October 2020, authorities arrested more than a dozen men in Michigan, many of them with ties to a paramilitary group. They were in the final stages of a plan to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer , and possessed nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition and hundreds of guns, as well as silencers, improvised explosive devices, and artillery shells. In January 2021, of course, thousands of Trump partisans stormed the U.S. Capitol, some of them armed, chanting “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Mike Pence!” Since then, the headlines have gotten smaller—or perhaps numbness has set in—but the violence has continued. In June 2022, a man with a gun and a knife who allegedly said he intended to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was arrested outside Kavanaugh’s Maryland home. In July, a man with a loaded pistol was arrested outside the home of Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She had heard someone outside shouting “Fuck you, cunt!” and “Commie bitch!” Days later, a man with a sharp object jumped onto a stage in upstate New York and allegedly tried to attack another member of Congress, the Republican candidate for governor. In August, just after the seizure of documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, a man wearing body armor tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office . He was killed in a shoot-out with police. In October, in San Francisco, a man broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In January 2023, a failed Republican candidate for state office in New Mexico who referred to himself as a “MAGA king” was arrested for the alleged attempted murder of local Democratic officials in four separate shootings. In one of the shootings, three bullets passed through the bedroom of a state senator’s 10-year-old daughter as she slept.
Gretchen Whitmer: The plot to kidnap me
Experts I interviewed told me they worry about political violence in broad regions of the country—the Great Lakes, the rural West, the Pacific Northwest, the South. These are places where extremist groups have already emerged, militias are popular, gun culture is thriving, and hard-core partisans collide during close elections in politically consequential states. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia all came up again and again.
For the past three years, I’ve been preoccupied with a question: How can America survive a period of mass delusion, deep division, and political violence without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us? I went looking for moments in history, in the United States and elsewhere, when society has found itself on the brink—or already in the abyss. I learned how cultures have managed to endure sustained political violence, and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact.
Some lessons are unhappy ones. Societies tend to ignore the obvious warning signs of endemic political violence until the situation is beyond containment, and violence takes on a life of its own. Government can respond to political violence in brutal ways that undermine democratic values. Worst of all: National leaders, as we see today in an entire political party, can become complicit in political violence and seek to harness it for their own ends.
II. SALAD-BAR EXTREMISM
If you’re looking for a good place to hide an anarchist, you could do worse than Barre, Vermont. Barre (pronounced “berry”) is a small city in the bowl of a steep valley in the northern reaches of a lightly populated, mountainous state. You don’t just stumble upon a place like this.
I went to Barre in October because I wanted to understand the anarchist who had fled there in the early 1900s, at the beginning of a new century already experiencing extraordinary violence and turbulence. The conditions that make a society vulnerable to political violence are complex but well established: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it. All of those conditions were present at the turn of the last century. All of them are present today. Back then, few Americans might have guessed that the violence of that era would rage for decades.
In 1901, an anarchist assassinated President William McKinley —shot him twice in the gut while shaking his hand at the Buffalo World’s Fair. In 1908, an anarchist at a Catholic church in Denver fatally shot the priest who had just given him Communion. In 1910, a dynamite attack on the Los Angeles Times killed 21 people. In 1914, in what officials said was a plot against John D. Rockefeller, a group of anarchists prematurely exploded a bomb in a New York City tenement , killing four people. That same year, extremists set off bombs at two Catholic churches in Manhattan, one of them St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1916, an anarchist chef dumped arsenic into the soup at a banquet for politicians, businessmen, and clergy in Chicago; he reportedly used so much that people immediately vomited, which saved their lives. Months later, a shrapnel-filled suitcase bomb killed 10 people and wounded 40 more at a parade in San Francisco. America’s entry into World War I temporarily quelled the violence—among other factors, some anarchists left the country to avoid the draft—but the respite was far from total. In 1917, a bomb exploded inside the Milwaukee Police Department headquarters, killing nine officers and two civilians. In the spring of 1919, dozens of mail bombs were sent to an array of business leaders and government officials, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
All of this was prologue. Starting late in the evening on June 2, 1919, in a series of coordinated attacks, anarchists simultaneously detonated massive bombs in eight American cities. In Washington, an explosion at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer blasted out the front windows and tore framed photos off the walls. Palmer, in his pajamas, had been reading by his second-story window. He happened to step away minutes before the bomb went off, a decision that authorities believed kept him alive. (His neighbors, the assistant secretary of the Navy and his wife, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, had just gotten home from an evening out when the explosion also shattered their windows. Franklin ran over to Palmer’s house to check on him.) The following year, a horse-drawn carriage drew up to the pink-marble entrance of the J. P. Morgan building on Wall Street and exploded, killing more than 30 people and injuring hundreds more .
From these episodes, one name leaps out across time: Luigi Galleani. Galleani, who was implicated in most of the attacks, is barely remembered today. But he was, in his lifetime, one of the world’s most influential terrorists, famous for advancing the argument for “propaganda of the deed”: the idea that violence is essential to the overthrow of the state and the ruling class. Born in Italy, Galleani immigrated to the United States and spread his views through his anarchist newspaper , Cronaca Sovversiva , or “Subversive Chronicle.” He told the poor to seize property from the rich and urged his followers to arm themselves—to find “a rifle, a dagger, a revolver.”
Galleani fled to Barre in 1903 under the name Luigi Pimpino after several encounters with law enforcement in New Jersey. He attracted disciples—“Galleanisti,” they were called—despite shunning all forms of organization and hierarchy. He was quick-witted, with an imposing intellect and a magnetic manner of speaking. Even the police reports described his charisma.
The population of Barre today is slightly smaller than it was in Galleani’s day—roughly 10,000 then, 8,500 now—and it is the sort of place that is more confused by the presence of strangers than wary of them. The first thing you notice when you arrive is the granite. There is a mausoleum feel to any granite city, and on an overcast day the gray post-office building on North Main Street gives the illusion that all of the color has suddenly vanished from the world. Across the street, at city hall, I wandered into an administrative office where an affable woman— You came to Barre? On purpose? —generously agreed to take me inside the adjacent opera house, which, recently refurbished, looks much as it did on the winter night in 1907 when Galleani appeared there before a packed house to give a speech alongside the anarchist Emma Goldman.
Galleani almost certainly could have disappeared into Barre with his wife and children and gotten away with it. He did not want that. In his own telling, Galleani’s anger was driven by how poorly the working class was treated, particularly in factories. In Barre, granite cutters spent long hours mired in the sludge of a dark, unheated, and poorly ventilated workspace, breathing in silica dust, which made most of them gravely ill. Seeing the town, even a century after Galleani was there, I could understand why his time in Vermont had not altered his worldview. In the foreword to a 2017 biography , Galleani’s grandson, Sean Sayers, put a hagiographic gloss on Galleani’s legacy: “He was not a narrow and callous nihilist; he was a visionary thinker with a beautiful idea of how human society could be—an idea that still resonates today.” For Galleani and other self-identified “communist anarchists” like him, the beautiful idea was a world without government, without laws, without property. Other anarchists did not share his idealism. The movement was torn by disagreements—they were anarchists, after all.
In Galleani’s day, as in our own, the lines of conflict were not cleanly delineated. American radicalism can be a messy stew of ideas and motivations. Violence doesn’t need a clear or consistent ideology and often borrows from several. Federal law-enforcement officials use the term salad-bar extremism to describe what worries them most today, and it applies just as aptly to the extremism of a century ago.
When Galleani had arrived in America, he’d encountered a nation in a terrible mood, one that would feel familiar to us today. Galleani’s children were born into violent times. The nation was divided not least over the cause of its divisions. The gap between rich and poor was colossal—the top 1 percent of Americans possessed almost as much wealth as the rest of the country combined. The population was changing rapidly. Reconstruction had been defeated, and southern states in particular remained horrifically violent toward Black people, for whom the threat of lynching was constant. The Great Migration was just beginning. Immigration surged, inspiring intense waves of xenophobia. America was primed for violence—and to Galleani and his followers, destroying the state was the only conceivable path.
The spectacular violence of 1919 and 1920 proved a catalyst. A concerted nationwide hunt for anarchists began. This work, which culminated in what came to be known as the Palmer Raids, entailed direct violations of the Constitution. In late 1919 and early 1920, a series of raids—carried out in more than 30 American cities—led to the warrantless arrests of 10,000 suspected radicals, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Attorney General Palmer’s dragnet ensnared many innocent people and has become a symbol of the damage that overzealous law enforcement can cause. Hundreds of people were ultimately deported. Some had fallen afoul of a harsh new federal immigration law that broadly targeted anarchists. One of them was Luigi Galleani. “The law was kind of designed for him,” Beverly Gage, a historian and the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded , told me.
The violence did not stop immediately after the Palmer Raids—in an irony that frustrated authorities, Galleani’s deportation made it impossible for them to charge him in the Wall Street bombing, which they believed he planned, because it occurred after he’d left the country. Nevertheless, sweeping action by law enforcement helped put an end to a generation of anarchist attacks.
That is the most important lesson from the anarchist period: Holding perpetrators accountable is crucial. The Palmer Raids are remembered, rightly, as a ham-handed application of police-state tactics. Government actions can turn killers into martyrs. More important, aggressive policing and surveillance can undermine the very democracy they are meant to protect; state violence against citizens only validates a distrust of law enforcement.
But deterrence conducted within the law can work. Unlike anti-war protesters or labor organizers, violent extremists don’t have an agenda that invites negotiation. “Today’s threats of violence can be inspired by a wide range of ideologies that themselves morph and shift over time,” Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Josh Geltzer told me. Now as in the early 20th century, countering extremism through ordinary debate or persuasion, or through concession, is a fool’s errand. Extremists may not even know what they believe, or hope for. “One of the things I increasingly keep wondering about is—what is the endgame?” Mary McCord, a former assistant U.S. attorney and national-security official, told me. “Do you want democratic government? Do you want authoritarianism? Nobody talks about that. Take back our country . Okay, so you get it back. Then what do you do?”
III. CREEPING VIOLENCE
In another country , and in a time closer to our own, a sustained outbreak of domestic terrorism brought decades of attacks—and illustrates the role that ordinary citizens can sometimes play, along with deterrence, in restoring stability.
On Saturday, August 2, 1980, a bomb hidden inside a suitcase blew up at the Bologna Centrale railway station, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds more, many of them young families setting off on vacation. The explosion flattened an entire wing of the station, demolishing a crowded restaurant, wrecking a train platform, and freezing the station’s clock at the time of the detonation: 10:25 a.m.
The Bologna massacre remains the deadliest attack in Italy since World War II. By the time it occurred, Italians were more than a decade into a period of intense political violence, one that came to be known as Anni di Piombo , or the “Years of Lead.” From roughly 1969 to 1988, Italians experienced open warfare in the streets, bombings of trains, deadly shootings and arson attacks, at least 60 high-profile assassinations, and a narrowly averted neofascist coup attempt. It was a generation of death and bedlam. Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, during the Years of Lead, at least 400 people were killed and some 2,000 wounded in more than 14,000 separate attacks.
As I sat at the Bologna Centrale railway station in September, a place where so many people had died, I found myself thinking, somewhat counterintuitively, about how, in the great sweep of history, the political violence in Italy in the 1970s and ’80s now seems but a blip. Things were so terrible for so long. And then they weren’t. How does political violence come to an end?
No one can say precisely what alchemy of experience, temperament, and circumstance leads a person to choose political violence. But being part of a group alters a person’s moral calculations and sense of identity, not always for the good. Martin Luther King Jr., citing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote in his “ Letter From Birmingham Jail ” that “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” People commit acts together that they’d never contemplate alone.
From the August 1963 issue: Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail
Vicky Franzinetti was a teenage member of the far-left militant group Lotta Continua during the Years of Lead. “There was a lot of what I would call John Wayneism, and a lot of people fell for that,” she told me. “Whether it’s the Black Panthers or the people who attacked on January 6 on Capitol Hill, violence has a mesmerizing appeal on a lot of people.” A subtle but important shift also took place in Italian political culture during the ’60s and ’70s as people grasped for group identity. “If you move from what you want to who you are , there is very little scope for real dialogue, and for the possibility of exchanging ideas, which is the basis of politics,” Franzinetti said. “The result is the death of politics, which is what has happened.”
In talking with Italians who lived through the Years of Lead about what brought this period to an end, two common themes emerged. The first has to do with economics. For a while, violence was seen as permissible because for too many people, it felt like the only option left in a world that had turned against them. When the Years of Lead began, Italy was still fumbling for a postwar identity. Some Fascists remained in positions of power, and authoritarian regimes controlled several of the country’s neighbors—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. Not unlike the labor movements that arose in Galleani’s day, the Years of Lead were preceded by intensifying unrest among factory workers and students, who wanted better social and working conditions. The unrest eventually tipped into violence, which spiraled out of control. Leftists fought for the proletariat, and neofascists fought to wind back the clock to the days of Mussolini. When, after two decades, the economy improved in Italy, terrorism receded.
The second theme was that the public finally got fed up. People didn’t want to live in terror. They said, in effect: Enough. Lotta Continua hadn’t resorted to violence in the early years. When it did grow violent, it alienated its own members. “I didn’t like it, and I fought it,” Franzinetti told me. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara who lived in Rome at the time, recalled: “It went too far. Really, it reached a point that was quite dramatic. It was hard to live through those times.” But it took a surprisingly long while to reach that point. The violence crept in—one episode, then another, then another—and people absorbed and compartmentalized the individual events, as many Americans do now. They did not understand just how dangerous things were getting until violence was endemic. “It started out with the kneecappings,” Joseph LaPalombara, a Yale political scientist who lived in Rome during the Years of Lead, told me, “and then got worse. And as it got worse, the streets emptied after dark.”
A turning point in public sentiment, or at least the start of a turning point, came in the spring of 1978, when the leftist group known as the Red Brigades kidnapped the former prime minister and leader of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro, killing all five members of his police escort and turning him into an example of how We don’t negotiate with terrorists can go terrifically wrong. Moro was held captive and tortured for 54 days, then executed, his body left in the back of a bright-red Renault on a busy Rome street. In a series of letters his captors allowed him to send, Moro had begged Italian officials to arrange for his freedom with a prisoner exchange. They refused. After his murder, the final letter he’d written to his wife, “my dearest Noretta,” roughly 10 days before his death, was published in a local newspaper. “In my last hour I am left with a profound bitterness at heart,” he wrote. “But it is not of this I want to talk but of you whom I love and will always love.” Moro did not want a state funeral, but Italy held one anyway.
The conventional wisdom among terrorism experts had been that terrorists wanted publicity but didn’t really want to kill people—or, as the Rand Corporation’s Brian Jenkins put it in 1975, “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” But conditions had become so bad by the time Moro was murdered that newspapers around the world were confused when days passed without a political killing or shooting in Italy. “ Italians Puzzled by 10-Day Lull in Terrorist Activity ,” read one headline in The New York Times a few weeks after Moro’s murder. “When he was killed, it got a lot more serious,” Alexander Reid Ross, who hosts a history podcast about the era called Years of Lead Pod , told me. “People stopped laughing. It was no longer something where you could say, ‘It’s a sideshow.’ ”
The Moro assassination was followed by an intensification of violence, including the Bologna-station bombing. People who had ignored the violence now paid attention; people who might have been tempted by revolution now stayed home. Meanwhile, the crackdown that followed—which involved curfews, traffic stops, a militarized police presence, and deals with terrorists who agreed to rat out their collaborators—caused violent groups to implode.
The example of Aldo Moro offers a warning. It shouldn’t take an act like the assassination of a former prime minister to shake people into awareness. But it often does. William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds , is not optimistic that anything else will work: “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm.” What if, he went on—“I almost hesitate to say this”—but what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? “I think that would have ended it. I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm. I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.” Bernstein wasn’t the only expert to suggest such a thing.
No wonder some American politicians are terrified. “We’ve had an exponential increase in threats against members of Congress,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, told me in January. Klobuchar thought back to when she was standing at President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, two weeks after the attempted insurrection. At the time, as Democrats and most Republicans came together for a peaceful transfer of power, she felt as though a violent eruption in American history might be ending. But Klobuchar now believes she was “naive” to think that Republicans would break with Trump and restore the party’s democratic values. “We have Donald Trump, his shadow, looming over everything,” she said.
This past February, Biden sought to dispel that shadow as he stood before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address. “There’s no place for political violence in America,” he said. “And we must give hate and extremism in any form no safe harbor.” Biden’s speech was punctuated by jeers and name-calling by Republicans.
IV. A BROKEN SOCIAL CONTRACT
The taxonomy of what counts as political violence can be complicated. One way to picture it is as an iceberg: The part that protrudes from the water represents the horrific attacks on both hard targets and soft ones, in which the attacker has explicitly indicated hatred for the targeted group—fatal attacks at supermarkets and synagogues, as well as assassination attempts such as the shooting at a congressional-Republican baseball practice in 2017. Less visible is the far more extensive mindset that underlies them. “There are a lot of people who are out for a protest, who are advocating for violence,” Erin Miller, the longtime program manager at the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, told me. “Then there’s a smaller number at the tip of the iceberg that are willing to carry out violent attacks.” You can’t get a grip on political violence just by counting the number of violent episodes. You have to look at the whole culture.
A society’s propensity for political violence—including cataclysmic violence—may be increasing even as ordinary life, for many people, probably most, continues to feel normal. A drumbeat of violent attacks, by different groups with different agendas, may register as different things. But collectively, as in Italy, they have the power to loosen society’s screws.
In December, I spoke again with Alexander Reid Ross, who in addition to hosting Years of Lead Pod is a lecturer at Portland State University. We met in Pioneer Courthouse Square, in downtown Portland. I had found the city in a wounded condition. This was tragic to me two times over—first, because I knew what had happened there, and second, because I had immediately absorbed Portland’s charm. You can’t encounter all those drawbridges, or the swooping crows, or the great Borgesian bookstore, or the giant elm trees and do anything but fall in love with the place. But downtown Portland was not at its best. The first day I was there I counted more birds than people, and many of the people I saw were quite obviously struggling badly.
On the gray afternoon when we met, Ross and I happened to be sitting at the site of the first far-right protest he remembers witnessing in his city, back in 2016; members of a group called Students for Trump, stoked by Alex Jones’s disinformation outlet, Infowars, had gathered to assert their political preferences and provoke their neighbors. Ross is a geographer, a specialty he assumed would keep him focused on land-use debates and ecology, which is one of the reasons he moved to Oregon in the first place. After that 2016 rally, Ross paid closer attention to the political violence unfolding in Portland. We decided to take a walk so that Ross could point out various landmarks from the—well, we couldn’t decide what to call the period of sustained violence that started in 2016 and was reignited in 2020. The siege? The occupation? The revolt? What happened in Portland has a way of being too slippery for precise language.
We walked southwest from the square before doubling back toward the Willamette River. Over here was the historical society that protesters broke into and vandalized one night. Over there was where the statues got toppled. (“Portland is a city of pedestals now,” Ross said.) A federal building still had a protective fence surrounding it more than a year after the street violence had ended. At one point, the mayor had to order a drawbridge raised to keep combatants apart.
On the evening of June 30, 2018, Ross found himself in the middle of a violent brawl between hundreds of self-described antifa activists and members of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, a local pro-Trump offshoot . Ross described to me a number of “ghoulish” encounters he’d had with Patriot Prayer, and I asked him which moment was the scariest. “It’s on video,” he told me. “You can see it: me getting punched.” I later watched the video. In it, Ross rushes toward a group of men who are repeatedly kicking and bludgeoning a person dressed all in black, lying in the street. Ross had told me earlier that he’d intervened because he thought he was watching someone being beaten to death. After Ross gets clocked, he appears dazed, then dashes back toward the fight. “That’s enough! That’s enough!” he shouts.
By the time of this fight, Patriot Prayer had become a fixture in Portland. Its founder, Joey Gibson, has said in interviews that he was inspired to start Patriot Prayer to fight for free speech, but the group’s core belief has always been in Donald Trump. Its first event, in Vancouver, Washington, in October 2016, was a pro-Trump rally. From there, Gibson deliberately picked ultraliberal cities such as Portland, Berkeley, Seattle, and San Francisco for his protests, and in doing so quickly attracted like-minded radicals—the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, Identity Evropa, the Hell Shaking Street Preachers—who marched alongside Patriot Prayer. These were people who seemed to love Trump and shit-stirring in equal measure. White nationalists and self-described Western chauvinists showed up at Gibson’s events. (Gibson’s mother is Japanese, and he has insisted that he does not share their views.) By August 2018, Patriot Prayer had already held at least nine rallies in Portland, routinely drawing hundreds of supporters—grown men in Boba Fett helmets and other homemade costumes; at least one man with an SS neck tattoo. In 2019, Gibson himself was arrested on a riot charge. Patriot Prayer quickly became the darling of Infowars.
The morning after I met Ross, I drove across the river to Vancouver, a town of strip-mall churches and ponderosa pine trees, to meet with Lars Larson, who records The Lars Larson Show —tagline: “Honestly Provocative Talk Radio”—from his home studio. Larson greeted me with his two dogs and a big mug of coffee. His warmth, quick-mindedness, and tendency to filibuster make him irresistible for talk radio. And his allegiance to MAGA world helps him book guests like Donald Trump Jr., whom Larson introduced on a recent episode as “the son of the real president of the United States of America.” Over the course of our conversation, he described January 6 as “some ruined furniture in the Capitol”; suggested that the city government of Charlottesville, Virginia, was secretly behind the violent clash at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally; and made multiple references to George Soros, including suggesting that Soros may have paid for people to come to Portland to tear up the city. When I pressed Larson on various points, he would walk back whatever he had claimed, but only slightly. He does not seem to be a conspiracy theorist, but he plays one on the radio.
Larson blamed Portland’s troubles on a culture of lawlessness fostered by a district attorney who, he said, repeatedly declined to prosecute left-wing protesters. He sees this as an uneven application of justice that undermined people’s faith in local government. It is more accurate to say that the district attorney chose not to prosecute lesser crimes, focusing instead on serious crimes against people and property; ironically, the complaint about uneven application comes from both the far left and the far right. When I asked Larson whether Patriot Prayer is Christian nationalist in ideology, the question seemed to make him uncomfortable, and he emphasized his belief in pluralism and religious freedom. He also compared Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer marching on Portland to civil-rights activists marching on Selma in 1965. “What I heard people tell Patriot Prayer is ‘If you get attacked every time you go to Portland, don’t go to Portland,’ ” he told me. “Would you have given that same advice to Martin Luther King?”
Gibson’s lawyer Angus Lee accused the government of “political persecution”; Gibson was ultimately acquitted of the riot charge. Patriot Prayer, Lee went on, is “not like these other organizations you referenced that have members and that sort of thing. Patriot Prayer is more of an idea.” Gibson himself once put it in blunter terms. “I don’t even know what Patriot Prayer is anymore,” he said in a 2017 interview on a public-access news channel in Portland. “It’s just these two words that people hear and it sparks emotions … All Patriot Prayer is is videos and social-media presence.”
The more I talked with people about Patriot Prayer, the more it began to resemble a phenomenon like QAnon—a decentralized and amorphous movement designed to provoke reaction, tolerant of contradictions, borrowing heavily from internet culture, overlapping with other extremist movements like the Proud Boys, linked to high-profile episodes of violence, and ultimately focused on Trump. I couldn’t help but think of Galleani, his “beautiful idea,” and the diffuse ideology of his followers. One key difference: Galleani was fighting against the state, whereas movements like QAnon and groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have been cheered on by a sitting president and his party.
When I met with Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, at city hall, he recalled night after night of violence, and at times planning for the very worst, meaning mass casualties. Portlanders had taken to calling him “Tear Gas Ted” because of the police response in the city. One part of any mayor’s job is to absorb the community’s scorn. Few people have patience for unfilled potholes or the complexities of trash collection. Disdain for Wheeler may have been the one thing that just about every person I met in Portland shared, but his job has been difficult even by big-city standards. He confronted a breakdown of the social contract.
“Political violence, in my opinion, is the extreme manifestation of other trends that are prevalent in our society,” Wheeler told me. “A healthy democracy is one where you can sit on one side of the table and express an opinion, and I can sit on the other side of the table and express a very different opinion, and then we have the contest of ideas … We have it out verbally. Then we go drink a beer or whatever.”
When extremists began taunting Portlanders online, it was very quickly “game on” for violence in the streets, Wheeler said. In this way, Portland stands as a warning to cities that now seem calm: It takes very little provocation to inflame latent tensions between warring factions. Once order collapses, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore. And it can be dangerous to attempt to do so through the use of force, especially when one violent faction is lashing out, in part, against state authority.
Aaron Mesh moved to Portland 16 years ago, to take a job as Willamette Week ’s film critic, and since then has worked his way up to managing editor. He is sharp-tongued and good-humored, and it is obvious that he loves his city in the way that any good newspaperman does, with a mix of fierce loyalty and heaping criticism. Like Wheeler, he trained attention on the dynamic of action and reaction—on how rising to the bait not only solves nothing but can make things worse. “There was this attitude of We’re going to theatrically subdue your city with these weekend excursions ,” Mesh said, describing the confrontations that began in 2016 as a form of cosplay, with right-wing extremists wearing everything from feathered hats to Pepe the Frog costumes and left-wing extremists dressed up in what’s known as black bloc: all-black clothing and facial coverings. “I do want to emphasize,” he said, “that everyone involved in this was a massive fucking loser, on both sides.”
It was as though all of the most unsavory characters on the internet had crawled out of the computer. The fights were enough of a spectacle that not everyone took them seriously at first. Mesh said it was impossible to overstate “the degree to which Portland became a lodestone in the imagination of a nascent Proud Boys movement,” a place where paramilitary figures on the right went “to prove that they had testicles.” He went on: “You walk into town wearing a helmet and carrying a big American flag” and then wait and see “who throws an egg at your car or who gives you the middle finger, and you beat the living hell out of them.”
Both sides behaved despicably. But only the right-wingers had the endorsement of the president and the mainstream Republican Party. “Despite being run by utter morons,” Mesh said of Patriot Prayer, “they managed to outsmart most of their adversaries in this city, simply by provoking violent reactions from people who were appalled by their politics.” The argument for violence among people on the left is often, essentially, If you encounter a Nazi, you should punch him. But “what if the only thing the Nazi wants is for you to punch him?” Mesh asked. “What if the Nazis all have cameras and they’re immediately feeding all the videos of you punching them to Tucker Carlson? Which is what they did.”
The situation in Portland became so desperate, and the ideologies involved so tangled, that the violence began to operate like its own weather system—a phenomenon that the majority of Portlanders could see coming and avoid, but one that left behind tremendous destruction. Most people don’t want to fight. But it takes startlingly few violent individuals to exact generational damage.
V. THE COMPLICIT STATE
America was born in revolution, and violence has been an undercurrent in the nation’s politics ever since. People remember the brutal opposition to the civil-rights struggle, and recall the wave of terrorism spawned by the anti-war movement of the 1960s. But the most direct precursor to what we’re experiencing now is the anti-government Patriot movement, which can be traced to the 1980s and eventually led to deadly standoffs between federal agents and armed citizens at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Three people were killed at Ruby Ridge. As many as 80 died in Waco, 25 of them children. Those incidents stirred the present-day militia movement and directly inspired the Oklahoma City bombers, anti-government extremists who killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. The surge in militia activity, white nationalism, and apocalypticism of the 1990s seemed to peter out in the early 2000s. This once struck me as a bright spot, an earlier success we might learn from today. But when I mentioned this notion to Carolyn Gallaher, a scholar who spent two years following a right-wing paramilitary group in Kentucky in the 1990s, she said, “The militia movement waned very quickly in the 1990s not because of anything we did, but because of Oklahoma City. That bombing really put the movement on the back foot. Some groups went underground. Some groups dispersed. You also saw that happen with white-supremacist groups.”
A generation later, political violence in America unfolds with little organized guidance and is fed by a mishmash of extremist right-wing views. It predates the emergence of Donald Trump, but Trump served as an accelerant. He also made tolerance of political violence a defining trait of his party, whereas in the past, both political parties condemned it. At the height of the Patriot movement, “there was this fire wall” between extremist groups and elected officials that protected democratic norms, according to Gallaher. Today, “the fire wall between these guys and formal politics has melted away.” Gallaher does not anticipate an outbreak of civil strife in America in a “classic sense”—with Blue and Red armies or militias fighting for territory. “Our extremist groups are nowhere near as organized as they are in other countries.”
Because it is chaotic, Americans tend to underestimate political violence, as Italians at first did during the Years of Lead. Some see it as merely sporadic, and shift attention to other things. Some say, in effect, Wake me when there’s civil war. Some take heart from moments of supposed reprieve, such as the poor showing by election deniers and other extremists in the 2022 midterm elections. But think of all the ongoing violence that at first glance isn’t labeled as being about politics per se, but is in fact political: the violence, including mass shootings, directed at LGBTQ communities, at Jews, and at immigrants, among others. In November, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin warning that “the United States remains in a heightened threat environment” due to individuals and small groups with a range of “violent extremist ideologies.” It warned of potential attacks against a long list of places and people: “public gatherings, faith-based institutions, the LGBTQI+ community, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel, U.S. critical infrastructure, the media, and perceived ideological opponents.”
The broad scope of the warning should not be surprising—not after the massacres in Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo, and elsewhere. One month into 2023, the pace of mass shootings in America—all either political or, inevitably, politicized—was at an all-time high. “There’s no place that’s immune right now,” Mary McCord, the former assistant U.S. attorney, observed. “It’s really everywhere.” She added, “Someday, God help us, we’ll come out of this. But it’s hard for me to imagine how.”
The sociologist Norbert Elias, who left Germany for France and then Britain as the Nazi regime took hold, famously described what he called the civilizing process as “a long sequence of spurts and counter-spurts,” warning that you cannot fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that made it deteriorate in the first place. Violence and the forces that underlie it have the potential to take us from the democratic backsliding we already know to a condition known as decivilization. In periods of decivilization, ordinary people fail to find common ground with one another and lose faith in institutions and elected leaders. Shared knowledge erodes, and bonds fray across society. Some people inevitably decide to act with violence. As violence increases, so does distrust in institutions and leaders, and around and around it goes. The process is not inevitable—it can be held in check—but if a period of bloodshed is sustained for long enough, there is no shortcut back to normal. And signs of decivilization are visible now.
“The path out of bloodshed is measured not in years but in generations,” Rachel Kleinfeld writes in A Savage Order , her 2018 study of extreme violence and the ways it corrodes a society. “Once a democracy descends into extreme violence, it is always more vulnerable to backsliding.” Cultural patterns, once set, are durable—the relatively high rates of violence in the American South, in part a legacy of racism and slaveholding, persist to this day. In The Delusions of Crowds , William Bernstein looks further afield, to Germany. He told me, “You can actually predict anti-Semitism and voting for the Nazi Party by going back to the anti-Semitism across those same regions in the 14th century. You can trace it city to city.”
Three realities mark the current era of political violence in America as different from what has come before, and make dealing with it much harder. The first—obvious—is the universal access to weaponry, including military-grade weapons.
Second, today’s information environment is simultaneously more sophisticated and more fragmented than ever before. In 2006, the analyst Bruce Hoffman argued that contemporary terrorism had become dangerously amorphous. He was referring to groups like al-Qaeda, but we now witness what he described among domestic American extremists. As Hoffman and others see it, the defining characteristic of post-9/11 terrorism is that it is decentralized. You don’t need to be part of an organization to become a terrorist. Hateful ideas and conspiracy theories are not only easy to find online; they’re actively amplified by social platforms, whose algorithms prioritize the anger and hate that drive engagement and profit. The barriers to radicalization are now almost nonexistent. Luigi Galleani would have loved Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. He had to settle for publishing a weekly newspaper. Because of social media, conspiracy theories now spread instantly and globally, often promoted by hugely influential figures in the media, such as Tucker Carlson and of course Trump, whom Twitter and Facebook have just reinstated.
The third new reality goes to the core of American self-governance: people refusing to accept the outcome of elections, with national leaders fueling the skepticism and leveraging it for their own ends. In periods of decivilization, violence often becomes part of a governing strategy. This can happen when weak states acquiesce to violence simply to survive. Or it can happen when politicians align themselves with violent groups in order to bolster authority—a characteristic of what Kleinfeld, in her 2018 book, calls a “ complicit state .” This is a well-known tactic among authoritarian incumbents worldwide who wield power by mobilizing state and vigilante violence in tandem.
Complicity is insidious. It doesn’t require a revolution. You can see complicity, for example, in Trump’s order to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in the months ahead of January 6. You can see it in the Republican Party’s defense of Trump even after he propelled insurrectionists toward the U.S. Capitol. And you can see it in the way that powerful politicians and television personalities continue to cheer on right-wing extremists as “patriots” and “political prisoners,” rather than condemning them as vigilantes and seditionists.
Americans sometimes wonder what might have happened if the Civil War had gone the other way—what the nation would be like now, or whether it would even exist, if the South had won. But that thought experiment overlooks the fact that we do know what it looks like for violent extremists to win in the United States. In the 1870s, white supremacists who objected to Reconstruction led a campaign of violence that they perversely referred to as Redemption. They murdered thousands of Black people in terror lynchings. They drove thousands more Black business owners, journalists, and elected officials out of their homes and hometowns, destroying their livelihoods. Sometimes violence ends not because it is overcome, but because it has achieved its goal.
Norbert Elias’s warnings notwithstanding, dealing seriously with society’s underlying pathologies is part of the answer to political violence in the long term. But so, too, is something we have not had and perhaps can barely imagine anymore: leaders from all parts of the political constellation, and at all levels of government, and from all segments of society, who name the problem of political violence for what it is, explain how it will overwhelm us, and point a finger at those who foment it, either directly or indirectly. Leaders who understand that nothing else will matter if we can’t stop this one thing. The federal government is right to take a hard line against political violence—as it has done with its prosecutions of Governor Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers and the January 6 insurrectionists (almost 1,000 of whom have been charged). But violence must also be confronted where it first takes root, in the minds of citizens.
Ending political violence means facing down those who use the language of democracy to weaken democratic systems. It means rebuking the conspiracy theorist who uses the rhetoric of truth-seeking to obscure what’s real; the billionaire who describes his privately owned social platform as a democratic town square; the seditionist who proclaims himself a patriot; the authoritarian who claims to love freedom. Someday, historians will look back at this moment and tell one of two stories: The first is a story of how democracy and reason prevailed. The second is a story of how minds grew fevered and blood was spilled in the twilight of a great experiment that did not have to end the way it did.
*Lead image source credits from left to right: Kathryn Elsesser / AFP / Getty; Michael Nigro / Sipa USA / Alamy; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP / Getty; Alex Milan Tracy / AP; Michael Nigro / Sipa USA / Alamy; Michael Nigro / Sipa USA / AP; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP / Getty; Mark Downey / ZUMA / Alamy; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP / Getty
This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “The New Anarchy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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The new Omega x Swatch Gold MoonSwatch just landed – and it’s as subtle as it is genius
By Mike Christensen
Whoever you are, whatever peaks your interest, one thing is guaranteed – you will have noticed the craziness that ensued last year around the Swatch x Omega MoonSwatch . It was seismic. In hindsight, such a collaboration seemed so obvious, so simple – yet in reality it took everyone by total surprise.
A year on, the watches are still not available online. You still have to go to a Swatch store around the world to get one on your wrists. A genius move, as not only has it conjured up visions in our heads of famous watch heads like Ed Sheeran and Daniel Craig queuing up to get hold of one, it has also meant that the hype and thirst to own one is still very much alive.
Here’s everything you need to know about the new MoonSwatch collection, including the latest way to get hold of one
Reports earlier in the year suggested that a literal million MoonSwatch pieces – from your Missions to Neptune to Mars, the Moon and Uranus – have already been sold. As successful collabs go, they struck literal gold. Which goes a long way to explaining why this week Omega and Swatch are at it again.
Over the weekend, Swatch dropped another tantalising MoonSwatch teaser, this time with a golden moon and the words “Mission to Moonshine Gold”. Naturally, the watch world has once again lost its proverbial mind. Theories and hypotheses are swirling, so without further ado, here’s everything you need to know about the latest MoonSwatch release.
Everything you need to know about the latest Moonshine MoonSwatch release
This time the Mission to the Moon has a seconds hand made of OMEGA’s Moonshine Gold, and it’s very much a continuation of what already exists. Of the 11 MoonSwatch models that have been in circulation for the past year, the Mission to the Moon is the truest to its inspiration, Omega’s iconic Speedmaster Moonwatch. Omega and Swatch both value history, heritage and classics, so it’s no surprise that collectively their next move was going to be true to their core values and DNA.
Moonshine Gold is a type of 18k yellow gold alloy created exclusively by Omega in 2019 for some of its most sought after watches, so it’s a classy move for the new MoonSwatch to have a nod to this. While the teaser caused many enthusiasts to predict a full Bioceramic Moonshine gold version was on the cards, Swatch and Omega have reserved ultimate grace and patience (after all, they have years to do a full gold piece) by dropping a new MoonSwatch that has a subtle but impactful flash of Moonshine gold, namely on its all important seconds hand.
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Indeed, these MoonShine Gold-coated seconds hands were made exclusively during the full moon of February – exactly the type of kooky Easter egg vibes that will drive Omega Speedy fans wild – with an actual certificate with each watch to prove it.
How much is it and where is it available to buy
There will be questions aplenty around, first and foremost, where to get hold of this new MoonSwatch Moonshine Gold. But most importantly, we should confirm that this is not replacing any of the other MoonSwatches, it is adding to the options on offer.
Even James Bond had to wait to get his hand on an Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch
This watch costs £250, so slightly more expensive than the original. In terms of where you can get your mitts on one, from today for the time being they will be available in four separate locations around the world. So if you happen to be in London, Milan, Tokyo and Zurich right now, you are in luck – or at least you stand a chance – as each of these cities will have a special pop up for the foreseeable (but unconfirmed how long) future. Each city has been selected for its own special reason – for example Bank in London got the call up because the price of gold is fixed there on a global level; Paradeplatz in Zurich for its banks and gold reserves.
Before you start booking flights to those four cities though, Swatch and Omega have hinted that the new Moonshine MoonSwatch will be coming to other cities soon. “Probably, yes,” they say.
Is the Moonshine MoonSwatch limited edition?
Ever fans of cryptic messaging and keeping people guessing, Swatch and Omega have said that because the seconds hands were produced during the full moon, “it’s not limited, however the limitation comes from the production itself (only one day).” Which is to say that there is “not enough” to go around.
Many will have wondered what Swatch and Omega’s next power move would be in this space, after such wild scenes last March. So it’s safe to say, they have done it again.
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If your intention is to submit to a print magazine, pick up the most recent copy from the newsstand and look for the same information. Print magazines often have contact information listed in the front or back pages, which is helpful to have for submissions. 5. Submit your article.
You'll most likely be sending your letter as an email with your article as an attachment, so it should be short enough that your reader won't have to scroll to finish reading it. You should say hello and use the name of one of the editors if you know it. You can find a list of staff for the magazine on the About page on most magazine websites.
Writing How to Pitch an Article to a Magazine Written by MasterClass Last updated: Aug 19, 2021 • 6 min read Some of the very best English language journalism appears in magazines, in publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Politico, New York, The Week, and more.
Now that you have a run-down of the different types of magazine writing, let's talk about how to write an actual magazine article. 1. Choose a subject you are an expert in. Keeping true to our earlier advice of specializing, when you start to write a magazine article, choose a topic you show certain expertise in.
Coming up with an idea for a magazine article is the first step in good writing. Some ways to generate ideas include: Keeping a journal to record breaking news, an interesting quote, or a...
I type my query letter or finished article in 12-point Times New Roman or Courier New and double-space. I put my name and contact information in the upper left-hand corner. I like to use 1.5″ inch margins. A magazine's guidelines will tell you if the editor prefers query letters or finished manuscripts.
When you start to get accepted, article writing can then be your route to getting published. Look at online newspapers and magazines. You will see that a lot of articles are written by guest writers, contributors, and opinion writers. All of these news articles are written by freelance writers.
20 Ways to Generate Article Ideas 1. Pick up any trade magazine lying around the house (perhaps even this one!). See that cover story? How can you modify it so that it appeals to a consumer magazine or newspaper audience? 2. Pick up today's newspaper and read a national story. How can you make it local?
Submitting to magazines is a great way to break into the publishing world. For starters, magazine credits lend writers credibility, whether they're publishing short stories, poems, or nonfiction articles on a subject. Beyond that, it can be a nice way to earn some money as well.
While there are many ways to write articles for magazines, here are some general steps you can follow: 1. Write for a local publication Consider starting your career by writing for a local magazine. Writing for a small publication can help you gain entry-level experience before you pursue jobs at national publications.
The more you practice writing articles for magazines, the better you'll get at discerning how much information is "too much." 4. Relax. There is no one "right" way to write a magazine article. While there aren't any perfect, right or best ways to write good magazine articles, it's important to remember the first sentence.
If you want to submit a magazine article, the best way to start is by writing a query letter. This is a brief letter that introduces you and your article idea to the editor. If the editor likes your idea, they will ask to see the full article. Therefore, it's important to make sure that your query letter is well-written and persuasive.
Step 1: Choose a magazine Step 2: Get to know your audience Step 3: Confirm or choose your topic. If you already have an idea…. If you need an idea…. Step 4: Choose an angle Step 5: Write a query letter Step 6: Know the job Step 7: Research the topic Step 8: Interview sources Finding an expert Interviewing the expert Step 9: Create an outline
Write for Magazines: 21 Publications That Pay $500+ Per Assignment 1. AARP, The Magazine 2. Alaska Beyond 3. The Atlantic 4. Chatelaine magazine 5. Delta Sky 6. Discover magazine 7. Early American Life 8. Earth Island Journal 9. Eating Well 10. enRoute 11. Family Circle 12. Forbes 13. Green Entrepreneur 14. Hakai Magazine 15. Hemispheres 16.
To write a good magazine article, you should focus on generating strong article ideas and crafting and revising the article with high attention to detail. Part 1 Generating Article Ideas 1 Analyze publications you enjoy reading. Consider magazines you have a subscription to or enjoy reading regularly.
Select a topic to write about. Identify your target audience. Research facts that reinforce your story. Come up with an outline of your article. Write a rough draft and pare down your outline. Specify your subject matter. Read aloud until your draft is error-free. Read more: What Is a Content Management System? 1. Select a topic to write about
1 Target Your Pitches. Just like any other freelance writing job, you need to pitch your article idea to magazine and publication editors. Most importantly, however, you need to make sure you are pitching an appropriate topic. If you're trying to pitch a scientific article to a magazine about travel, for example, your query letter will likely ...
Letter to Past Self Examples. Dear Past Self, I know you're struggling right now, and I want you to know I'm here for you. You might feel like you're never going to get past this, but I promise you will. You might feel small, helpless and incapable, but believe me, that's not true.
A magazine article Look at the magazine article and do the exercises to improve your writing skills. Instructions Preparation Check your understanding: multiple choice Check your writing: word 2 word - questions Check your writing: gap fill - opinion adverbs Worksheets and downloads A magazine article - exercises 1.07 MB
"On spec": The first method is to write the article, and then e-mail the piece with a cover letter to the features editor of a magazine. You can find his or her details on the masthead page in a magazine where the staff members are listed. When you send a completed article, it's known as "submitting on speculation" (or "on spec").
A magazine article is a specific text that can be found in a magazine or newspaper. It can be a report, a profile of an important person, an opinion piece, a discussion of a topic or a personal essay. Depending on the topic, a magazine article is usually 1,000 to 5,000 words long.
Decide if you're going to add images, testimonials, and graphics. 5. Write your articles. Unlike when writing news articles, you're not required to follow specific structure or format when writing your magazine articles. You can be as creative as you want to be. To hook your readers, I suggest that you write using their language.
How to improve your writing process with ChatGPT. 1. Use ChatGPT to generate essay ideas. Before you can even get started writing an essay, you need to flesh out the idea. When professors assign ...
Man at wooden desk with tablet, laptop and smartphone (Image credit: JKstock via Shutterstock) (opens in new tab). If you want an absolutely fool-proof way to start, pick up a Raspberry Pi. It's ...
1. Create structure for your code. One of the most best uses for ChatGPT in software development is to create scaffolding for your programs. Tell ChatGPT what type of program you want to write, and paste in any libraries, dependencies, file names, and other details to include. You can type your query naturally, using complete sentences and ...
The police lobbed flash-bang grenades. One man shot another in the eye with a paintball gun and pointed a loaded revolver at a screaming crowd. The FBI notified the public of a bomb threat against ...
Everything you need to know about the latest Moonshine MoonSwatch release. This time the Mission to the Moon has a seconds hand made of OMEGA's Moonshine Gold, and it's very much a ...