How To Write Articles – Decide On The Format

Andrew Rondeau — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:45:23 +0000

This sounds like a particular uninspiring topic. What does the format have to do with how to write articles? It actually does have some relevance. In fact the newspaper and magazine publishers have made format into an art.

Have you ever noticed that newspapers and magazines have different column widths? There is an interesting theory behind this. It takes your eyes longer to scan content when the line of text scans from one end of the page to the other.

This means that scientific journals tend to run their lines right across the page. On the other end of the spectrum, how much attention does one have if reading about celebrities? Not much. Readers just want to get the quick details. The bits of scandal is all they are interested in.

This means that magazines publishing to an audience who want to quickly read about their favourite or not so favourite celeb will want to read quickly. You will notice, now that you are looking at it, that these rag mags have quite narrow columns and short paragraphs.

It makes it easier to scan the content. For scientific or architectural journals the reader will want to take his time and read carefully in order to understand the content. Your audience composition therefore will influence how your format of your article will look.

If you are writing your articles for the internet you will need to remember that most readers will visit the internet to learn something quickly, scan content for relevance and in general remember that the internet reader is not there for leisurely browsing.

This is the reason why short articles are favoured over lengthy tombs of content. It also means that your paragraphs should be short and your articles not too long. About five hundred words is a good length to aim for.

A particularly popular format for the internet is the point form article. These articles usually have titles such as ‘5 reasons you got ditched’ or 10 things to remember when …’. The reason for this particular genre to be appreciated is that readers are in a hurry. A point format article gives the sense of an informative but nevertheless quick read.

On the other hand if you are writing articles that will be used in a more learned environment your approach would probably need to be quite different. You would need to write longer, provide many cross references and substantiate your arguments with supporting data.

Besides your width of your column, length of article, the use of point form and the size of your paragraph what other format considerations would one need to bear in mind? Some format suggestions which are not entirely article writing related are such items as not using font that is too small.

In particular for writers wishing to publish their articles on the internet such consideration as background colour and font style are formating issues which do make a difference but could be the topic of another article. Learning how to write articles requires you to consider format as well as the words you write.

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How To Write Articles – Decide On The Format

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