Lovely Girl   +  writing

By Angelita WilliamsAs a former newspaper reporter, I understand the importance of headlines and first paragraphs for hooking readers in to a hard news story. I accepted that the lion's share of my readers wouldn't make it past the first few sentences, and packed every ounce of my ingenuity into them. But when my career transitioned from writing practically to writing passionately, I decided that having readers absorb my first paragraph and nothing more just wasn't good enough anymore. I needed to learn what it took to up my chances of a reader devouring the whole piece like a book they can't put down.

Don't get me wrong. A catchy first paragraph is key to getting two kinds of readers into your freelance writing: One, the lazy reader who skims for something that piques his wandering interest, and two, the fully involved reader who has so much exceptional reading material in his queue that he must have a good reason to drop that momentarily to read your work. The real challenge, however, is getting a reader to the end of your piece. Here's what I've discovered.

1. Don't get lazy. We must be fully involved in our freelance work and believe every word we write. Like the poets, we must find ways to pack more meaning into fewer words, instead of letting lifeless qualifiers, passive voice and inefficient description run amok. To counter this, pick random sentences from the thick of your freelance piece and study them out of context. Are they all alive or do some of them fall flat?
2. Collect honest eyes. When writing a lengthy freelance piece on a topic that's not your passion, enlist a few colleagues to read it and circle any areas where they start to get bored. Do not confuse this process with peer proofreading or general editing. By doing this consistently, you learn where the meat of your writing begins to lose its flavor.
3. Put your audience first. Think about who will be reading your piece and write for them, not for yourself. Answer any questions you believe they will have and guard against expounding on your own personal reactions to the topic. Good freelance writing is rarely self-serving.
4. Kill cliches. Oh, how often we fall back on tired-and-trendy bits in the thick of our freelance writing! Part of the joy of what we do is finding new ways of looking at a topic instead of rehashing old thoughts. Make it your goal for a reader to say, "I'd never thought of it that way before" after reading your piece.