Five Mistakes Aspiring Opinion Writers Make
I write opinion columns for a living and have assigned many of them. Here’s why your column isn’t getting published.
I’m a contributing writer for The New York Times Opinion section and I teach an online workshop on opinion writing, so I naturally have some extensive opinions about, well, how to articulate opinions. (I’ve also written opinion pieces for The Washington Post and was a columnist at Fortune and Fast Company.) I also work with executives, academics, and journalists who want editorial help with columns-in-progress but don’t know how to structure them for major publications or what gets a column assigned or rejected.
I am here to help! For our purposes, I’m going to lean on my experience as an editor who has assigned opinion columns and who has been writing them for two decades.
First, if you don’t already have a working relationship with an editor at the publication you’re aiming for, it’s likely that you’ll have to write your column “on spec,” which means you’ll have to write the whole thing and submit it.
Most editors won’t have the time to give you extensive feedback about why your column gets rejected, so I’m going to give you some tips that will keep you from making broad mistakes that prevent good…
