When you are writing it is always important that you understand the different styles that you need to write in, depending on what you are writing for. I always wanted to be a writer but I always struggled to write for the likes of blogs and magazines. I was very fortunate therefore to be able to learn how to write magazine-style articles in my first job working at Best Version Media. If you don’t know what the company does, it is a publishing company who create micro tag magazines for niche areas, communities and for small businesses, creating beautiful magazines which are informative and specialized. This was a brilliant company to work for and one which is full of great people and a culture that is perfect for up and coming writers. I now have no issues with magazine articles and so I wanted to pass on some tips for you, so that you can get this style right.
Topical
The topic is so important when you are writing magazine articles as you need to make sure that you are really providing value to the reader. There are not many highly skilled writers in the world who have the ability to make a boring subject sound exciting, so it is important that you let the topic do the work for you. Prior to writing ask yourself why this topic, and whether or not you think people will be interested.
Snappy
When writing a short magazine-style article you need to make sure that you are choosing your words very carefully, as you do not have too many to play with. A magazine piece can be anywhere from 150 words to 500 words, which means that you are going to be very limited on how much you can write. With this in mind it is vital that you make the piece as snappy as possible, so that you can make the most of the words which you have. If you like to write detailed analysis or lengthy stories, you will need to greatly change your approach in order to write these kinds of pieces.
Call to Action
You need to employ a kind of bait and switch when you are writing these articles, so that you draw the reader into the story but then ask something of them. The key here is to try and make the piece interactive with calls to action, that require the reader to make decisions or form opinions.
Simplistic
Using your entire arsenal of vocabulary won’t be necessary here as you need to write a piece which is simple and very easy to read. The reason for this is that magazines are considered light reading, that means no long winded paragraphs or high level vocabulary, but something that can be picked up and easily digested. Readers will give the article minimum attention so you need to make sure that you have written in a simple way that can be easily absorbed.