“I should write an article for Frankly Speaking!” This is what crosses my mind every time I see the newest edition populating the tables in the dining hall, and yet it’s somehow taken me a few months to get this article from concept to reality. Allow me to show you how to overcome the very same barriers I faced so you can have your very own article published right away in the September issue (my timing is rather poor, isn’t it?).
Now, don’t sit there with this paper in your hands and think to yourself that you have nothing to write about. Local newspapers are meant to build community by testing ideas, promoting healthy discourse, and ultimately helping us learn more about each other. It’s the perfect venue to respectfully share that passionate opinion of yours and engage the bright minds of your peers!
Ideating is as simple as picking out a particularly captivating hot take of yours (shout-out to Sammy and his thoughts on cheese), dropping your thoughts on the latest piece of media you spent some time with (shout-out to Ivy’s book reviews), or even sharing some of your personal experience in that class, project team, club, or off-campus activity you took a chance on.
We all have a lot to learn from each other, and a few more articles per Frankly Speaking issue might help drive student engagement. CORe elections might be more contested, there might be more 30-second videos, and maybe our hearts will even have room for a few more P&M surveys. Where does this engagement piece come from? Well, we noted in Local Democracy (a wonderful class!) that if a town has lively local journalism, it increases voter turnout in elections, reduces candidate bias, prevents polarization, and most certainly keeps people informed. These principles likely don’t fully translate to our cutesy little college, hence my ‘might’s and ‘maybe’s earlier, but the worst that could happen from an uptick in thoughtful Frankly Speaking articles is getting a few more ideas brewing in the mind of the dear reader.
What does this mean for ideating? Well, I’m not suggesting you pump out an article to support your campaign for CORe president, but if you recognize your influence and skip your monthly album review to advocate for having a formal at Olin every semester, it would not go amiss! Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that you should do some ideating for your next Frankly Speaking article. Stay with me now.
You may ask me how you might bring your idea to life in writing if it’s been a year or two since your last English class. After doing some research and analyzing some Frankly Speaking articles with a small set of Olin and Babson students (feel free to ask me for my process if you’re curious), I have five main recommendations for you:
- Do your research
- Write from personal experience
- Understand your audience and adjust accordingly
- Drop hook after hook until you’re certain your reader is fully committed
- Use persuasive frameworks such as ethos/pathos/logos or problem/solution/benefit to organize your thinking as needed
If you want to communicate an opinion or write something persuasive, you have to understand what you’re talking about. Usually, this means doing your research. Effective opinion or persuasive pieces often use a constructivist approach that builds on a set of facts or shared understanding to get to an argument and research helps make this possible. As a side effect, showing how your argument is connected to existing sources helps establish its credibility. Addressing any counterarguments that you found while researching is also important, as it gives the reader more control on what they can take away from your writing and allows for good faith interaction between an author and the reader. This is critical for any piece of local news that is meant to enrich a community.
However, sometimes even well-researched pieces with well-executed and logically sound claims fail to connect, potentially due to a lack of personal touch. This is where your lived experience becomes critical, as putting your voice into your writing helps meet your reader halfway and ensure they can relate to what you’re talking about. They are reading because they are interested in what you have to say, and you have to repay that interest ahead of time with personal stories, a strong sense of self, or anything else that affirms the humanity of everyone involved (I’m most certainly knocking AI here).
Integrating your research with your voice will only get you so far without considering your audience. Your credibility and relatability will falter if you don’t recognize that you are bound to your target audience in some capacity. For example, there’s plenty of Olin-specific language or culture such as acronyms, classes, or traditions to address or use as context in your writing so your argument can hit closer to home. Our shared understanding of our values, tensions, and lived experiences as Olin students is an additional basis from which to construct or support arguments designed to be read by each other.
Make sure to start off your writing strong! Even though I believe we should all be reading every article in Frankly Speaking, I also believe you should be ruthless and not give your reader a chance to look away from the page. Use engaging writing and a strong introduction to compel your reader to read the entire piece.
Lastly, there’s plenty of frameworks and tips out there to help with executing an argument. Notice how I didn’t say “create”. I scoured the internet for argument structures, and none of my peers thought them particularly necessary for delivering a strong opinion or persuasive piece. I agree with them that ethos, pathos, and logos, for example, is one version of a checkbox to use to see if your writing is organized and clear. So if you find yourself looking for a metric or two that can tell you how your writing is, I’d recommend you to print out your writing and close your computer. Go find a friend or peer and ask them to check up on your credibility and relatability, along with leaving you any other feedback they deem relevant. Hopefully they don’t leak your insightful argument to Carpe before your article is published.
Okay, that’s all from me! Knowing that you’ve read all the way through, I’m filled with determination and I hope you are as well. I look forward to seeing your articles next semester :)
Cheers,
ELDN