Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019
How to please editors
Tips on writing
I have been an editor for much of my life, so I think I know what editors want. If you’re trying to get something published, in all likelihood the editor wants one of three things: to be surprised by something; to be given a new perspective on an old problem; or to be delighted and impressed by the writing.
Beyond that, editors like people who are easy to work with. People who answer their email immediately, drop whatever they are doing to answer questions, and don’t complain unduly about edits. Most editors are just too busy, so the more you can do for them, the better. The editor neglected to keep a list of what was coming up? You remind her. The editor, in a revise, put in an error? You fix it, without recriminations. The easier you make her job, the more success you’ll have. I’m not saying that annoying, difficult, demanding, egotistical writers don’t succeed. They do, if their work is too amazing to pass up. But if you’re contributing pieces occasionally and want to be asked back, be a paragon of cooperation, because plenty of other people are happy to write.
Writers find themselves rejected because their articles are too long, need too much work, or just aren’t surprising enough to find an editor who will spend the time required to make something succeed. Don’t make your style so dazzling that it drowns out what you are saying; one of my favorite responses to a piece from a well-known writer was, “Wow, yikes, the only word of this I really understood was bumfuzzling.”
In any kind of opinion writing, have a clear logical argument and conclusion. If you fail to do that, editors will take the easy way out and move on to something else, because there are always other possibilities and other choices. A quiet but damning comment from an editor on a piece about to be rejected has stuck with me: “Nah. Nice piece, but inessential.”
You want to be essential. Make your piece the one that doesn’t need a lot of work. Whether it’s a professor reading it late at night for a course or an editor at a website, you don’t want to cause them work, just as you don’t want to strain the readers by requiring too much effort.
Before you get discouraged by an editor who rejects your writing, remember that evaluating words is subjective. No two editors are alike. Yes, there is writing so bad that almost everyone will conclude that it doesn’t succeed. But from there, it’s all a matter of taste and preference. I saw that vividly one day when emailing with a Times friend who had edited a story with a fascinating tidbit from Bill Gates, who revealed that his favorite comic was transgender and British. I never expected to be introduced to someone like that by Gates. My friend told me that the final editor on the piece, faced with a too-long story, had wanted to cut out exactly that line.
It can be frustrating for writers to know that getting published might depend on who happens to read their piece. If you have a piece rejected, it is painful to know that the particular editor who would have loved it and fought for it was out sick that day.
Editors can sound cruel when you hear them discussing articles far from the writer’s hearing. Through our shared email, the Times Op-Ed staff would react to what was arriving in our email inboxes. We would lump writers into categories, for ease of communication. One piece, an editor said, was “basically a mom story,” while another was basically a “depressed man story.” A writer who had endured a harrowing life in North Korea produced something that didn’t quite speak to people. Editors felt guilty about that, but reality is reality. “Some of the details are telling,” one editor wrote, “but it ends up feeling very shallow to me, which is a mean thing to say about someone who’s had such a tough life. Is it better than I think?”
Editors aren’t heartless, but they often have to reject people. It is better to do so quickly without getting attached. It’s also best to avoid explanation. If someone asked me why a piece was rejected, I never answered. It was a matter of sanity and triage. If I answered every writer, I’d never get the Op-Ed pages out. So if you are sending out your work and not getting responses, don’t assume the work is hopeless and should be trashed. It just means that editor is too busy to explain why it doesn’t suit his or her particular needs on that particular day.
Although some editors had memories so strong they didn’t have to Google, most of us used the skills of basic reporting to find people who might write interesting pieces for us. When Japan was hit with an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, my deputy, Sewell Chan, spent much of the night at the office trying to reach writers and novelists in Japan who might be willing to write. Within days, he had a vivid piece from the novelist Kazumi Saeki about what it was like to experience the disaster. Sewell, a relentless reporter, is the intense son of Chinese immigrants, and he has degrees from both Harvard and Oxford. While I had most of my communications by email, Sewell would have long phone conversations with writers, becoming excited by their ideas, pushing them to do more. He always felt the pain of his writers and their stories. I never cried and rarely showed emotion about personal issues, whereas Sewell, on a tough day, would come to my office to talk; and if he was feeling upset for one of our staffers or for some tragedy somewhere in the world, his eyes would well up. Much more similar to me in style was Honor Jones, a gifted editor who taught me a lot about how to assess opinion pieces. Although decades apart, we had nearly identical backgrounds, editing styles, taste in fiction, and reactions to proposed articles. Maybe it was all those years on horseback.
I liked the varied personalities among my editors and thought that was one reason Op-Ed was fun. The noun op-ed, meaning “opposite editorial,” originated in 1970 when the Times introduced the Op-Ed page. But today, op-ed is widely used to describe a particular type of short-form persuasive writing. And it’s a form that many people want to master, from college students to chief executives to Nobel Prize winners. When I was in Op-Ed, we had eight Nobel Prize winners write for us, including Joseph Stiglitz, Desmond Tutu, and Amartya Sen.
Most days in Op-Ed began with a 10:30 a.m. meeting to talk about ideas and the news. In theory, the editors had to arrive at 10 a.m. and start reading the news, looking for stories that merited an opinionated reaction. But that was the old, pre-web reality. Few of us waited until 10 in the morning to start thinking about the news. Most of the editors had read the news sites the night before when fresh stories were posted online. Some of us had been emailing one another since 7 a.m. or even earlier, talking about ideas. I had no right to ask anyone who wasn’t in management to start that early; but if they offered, I didn’t try to stop them. If that meant they disappeared to take a son or daughter to the dentist in the middle of the day, I didn’t mind. We weren’t staffed to be a twenty-four-hour opinion operation—yet in reality, we had to be one.
I often started that morning meeting by mentioning something I had noticed, and then others would jump in. We tried to think of perspectives that hadn’t been published and come up with names of likely writers. Our published work was a mix of articles we sought and articles that arrived unsolicited. Thinking of ideas and then suggesting names of possible writers was a big part of that meeting. We had to find angles that the newsroom wouldn’t pursue, and think far enough ahead that anything we found from an academic or expert wouldn’t seem old by the time it was written and edited. I would turn to one of my regular contributors like Pamela Druckerman, Jennifer Weiner, or Steven Rattner if they seemed like the best person to react to the news. After twenty or thirty minutes of debating ideas, we would return to our desks to get in touch with writers.
Throughout the day, we would read submissions both solicited and unsolicited. When there was finally a consensus about a piece we were batting around in Op Discuss, our internal email group, we used shorthand to signal where things stood: NMR meant “no more readers,” as in “This piece won’t work, and no more readers are needed.” If my staff liked it and I did too, I’d say, “Let’s schedule it.”
You learn so much from the process of analyzing the work of others. If you want to improve your own writing, find examples of the form that interests you and immerse yourself in it until something about its structure winds its way into your unconscious. Read writing that is popular, and try to figure out why it works. If you want to write a speech, look up great speeches.
How to Write and Pitch an Op-Ed
Know what has run and find a different angle. Often the secret to getting an editor’s attention is to approach something in a different way. If you want to write about why asthma medicine costs so much—well, that’s been done. But if you refashion the piece as one about a doctor who is at odds with his own medical society over this issue so central to care, that angle might be different enough to break through.
Make an argument and offer a solution. Let’s say you are writing that football players shouldn’t kneel during the national anthem. Tell me why stopping them is not a violation of their free speech, and tell me what course of action their bosses should pursue. You need to offer an opinion, not just an analysis of the problem or applause for someone else’s solution. Your opinion must be clear, and more than an affirmation of something that the audience already agrees with. I remember getting an op-ed from a group of chief executives who bemoaned the lack of tech talent available and praised a city effort to provide more computer science education. That doesn’t make a persuasive piece; it’s not surprising, and it doesn’t go beyond the news. It was thick with words that put people to sleep, like diversity, initiative, and collaboration. And it was devoid of stories about real people.
Focus. Make sure that your story has a central point, sharply rendered. The editor will want to write the headline, but if you’re trying to be sure you have kept the piece tight and to the point, try writing a headline for it. If you have trouble doing that, it is not yet focused enough on a central point that is easy to explain. So keep editing yourself until you can compose a headline that pleases you.
Get to your main idea quickly. Many years ago, I got the best advice on how to write a story for the Wall Street Journal from my friend John Emshwiller, whom I had known from the Daily Californian at Berkeley. He began working at the Journal after college and helped me get hired. I was trying to write a page one story after spending weeks reporting it. The mass of stuff that I had to make simple, seamless, and interesting was overwhelming. I stayed up late, night after night, struggling. Finally, I asked John what I should do. He said this: Start out with what you would tell someone at a party. What is the most interesting thing? That advice was a revelation, and it changed the way I looked at the structure of that article and many of those that followed. I especially thought of John and his advice when I was in Op-Ed, where I saw too many smart people trying to bury their most interesting thought because they didn’t think it seemed right to start with it.
If it’s timely, you’ve got to be fast. The moment passes quickly. If you are trying to persuade an editor to run something you have just written, don’t delay. Don’t fiddle in pursuit of perfection. Do it fast, and send it. You don’t want to have written the third piece that comes in that day on some development in cybertechnology, because the editors might already have decided to take the first one. If it is an anniversary or an event, submit your piece at least two weeks early. By doing that, you will make things easier for the editor and preempt those who wait until four days before the anniversary to file.
Think about order. Editors spend a lot of time rethinking and reorganizing articles. Writers often don’t have the best perspective on what they know and may not understand what would be most appealing to the general reader. Our virtual conversations in Op-Ed were frequently about the order of things: How fast or how slowly did the writer get to something we considered crucial? Often when looking at a draft of an op-ed for a client or a friend, I like the idea and the writing, but the order doesn’t seem right, and I just move the paragraphs around until they flow easily into one another. Because I have distance on the piece, it is easy to fix. The best order is usually the one that you would use if you were telling the story to someone in person.
Clichés and jargon will doom you. As in all persuasive writing, as I have said, you must avoid clichés and jargon. But that’s even more important when you’re submitting to Op-Ed editors. Editors are probably more sensitive to clichés than readers are, because they are reading all day long. I remember a submission from an impressive, accomplished athlete who relied on tired words. By the end, one editor said, “I felt like I’d swum through a 110-mile anthology of clichés.”
Avoid the obvious. A piece by a famous novelist was rejected because he was writing in defense of banned books. For a liberal audience that doesn’t believe in banning books, there is nothing to make you click on that idea. As one editor said, “’In defense of banned books’ is the easiest, limpest op-ed topic I can think of, particularly during Banned Book Week, which is a thing?” That piece got the dreaded NMR. I always felt sorry for writers when I saw that.
Don’t be blatantly self-promotional. You can write something that indirectly benefits your business or grows out of your professional knowledge, but you have to make your connection clear. For instance, Ezekiel J. Emanuel often writes about health care for the Times, and whenever he touches on any aspect of the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—he discloses that he worked on that bill for the president. That’s allowed. But you can’t sell an op-ed on, say, the amazing benefits of your new online clothing business. Because even if there are social benefits—maybe your clothes are for overweight women, who have few choices in stores—it will read like advertising for your brand.
How do you know whether something is ready to send to an editor or to your teacher? If it’s a short piece, look at the basics. Is it focused clearly on one or two points? Is it logically told, so that a reader doesn’t stop short and say, “I already read about that two paragraphs ago”? Is it original, and based on something you know or are expert in? And does it track? You never want your reader to think, “I have to reread that; I don’t quite get it,” because that reader will then be tempted to wander off and do something more rewarding.
If you make every effort to please the reader, you will inevitably find an editor who wants to publish your work.