hello my name is jeffrey seglin i am a senior lecturer and director of harvard kennedy schools communications program where for many years i've been teaching a course on column and opinion writing in this video i'm going to walk you through the basics of how to write an opinion column one of the things i realized early on when i was teaching this course at a different university was the importance of giving the students or people i'm talking to an idea of what a column is so two weeks into the course a student asked me can you define what a column is i realize that's probably was something i should have done when the class first began so i start every class now by giving some basic characteristics of a column they're typically short 800 words or less they have a clearly defined point clearly defined point of view a clarity of thinking and a strong unique voice of the writer an opinion column is a column where it is important for the writer to have an opinion unlike a news article where they're reporting the facts an opinion column it's a place where it's not only permissible but expected that you will have a strong opinion when we talk about opinion columns often we'll interchange that with the the name op-ed and an op-ed column the name of an op-ed column comes from a unique place early on when op-ed columns were writing they actually got their name from a geographical thing where they appeared in the newspaper if you know a daily newspaper or print newspaper typically in the front section of the newspaper if you opened it up you would see that in the back spread on the one side there would be editorials from the newspaper itself and then on the opposite page there would be editorials from others so this is how the op-ed got its name opposite editorial page or short it would be listed as op-ed these days because not everything is on a linear fashion anymore because we're no longer reading the newspaper all the time in print and op-ed has become to stand in as any type of opinion column so it no longer has that geographical reference unless you're reading the print version of the newspaper this leads to the idea when you think of having a clear point there are three basic questions that i tell anybody when they are writing a column if you can answer these questions when you're writing a column you can basically know if you have a strong focused good column to write and these questions are do i have a point because in a column you basically in 800 words have space for one clear overarching point you want to make in a column and the whole column should support that overarching point that you make there's not a lot of room to write a thesis there's not a lot of room to write a book you have space for one point to make strongly so that's the first question i asked the second question i asked actually comes from the fact that i am married to the woman who was my first book editor and she's since gone on to become a psychotherapist which i still maintain has nothing to do with having been my editor for 20 years but she um she reads everything i write so when i write a week i now write a weekly ethics column um and i've been doing that for about 20 years and before i file it she always reads it for me and initially i would ask her do i have a point and then i learned it was important for me to ask that second question and ask her what she thinks that point is because often the point she thought i was making was not the point i intended to make and often it was better than the the point i intended to make but it required me to go back and make sure i supported that in that point as clearly as possible and the third question that's really important to answer when you're writing a column is who cares who what audience are you writing this column for um it drives students a little bit crazy that i always make them identify who their target publication or audience is for a column before they write it because how you write a piece is often defined by who the audience will be i mean your opinion on it won't change but the lift you have to do to to sort of convince that audience of what you're what you're trying to argue is different depending on who you're trying to target so if you're writing um a piece that covers a conservative issue for a liberal audience you might have more of a lift to do than if you're writing a conservative piece for a conservative publication and vice versa if you're writing a piece that goes to a professional journal they may be more knowledgeable about a particular topic than a general audience so keeping that audience in mind is really critical when you're writing it also helps you shape the article and gives you a way to think about where this piece might be placed so you don't end up with a beautifully written place with no home to go after you write it some things that become important for a column and this is actually one of the few things that are left over from like your fifth grade writing class and that writing instructor who beat home the the idea of a topic in the theme is to get clear on the difference between a topic and a theme so if you're trying to think about the difference between a topic and a theme you can think about the topic as the broad issue that you're writing about that's the broad like think about the environment as a broad issue if you're thinking about a theme that's another level to the meaning of that topic so it's the big overarching point you might want to make on the environment so for example um pranav reddy who was a student of mine was writing a piece on an environmental issue and he was talking about a new research that had come out that basically had shown that pollution had resulted in the premature deaths of nine million people around the world there was research from a scientific journal that showed that he was writing to a general audience saying that as a result of that new research policy makers needed to take action that was the point he was trying to make so that's an environmental issue the overarching point becomes the the theme the thing you want to get across in that point so pranav's whole piece was about this issue of pollution and how policymakers needed to respond based on this new research the overarching point needs to be established early on in the piece and something we call a nut graph if you go back to pranav's piece like two or three paragraphs in he wrote the pollution problem largely remains neglected by policy makers funding organizations and the media globally the pollution agenda draws only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars of annual funding that goes towards other public health threats like hiv aids and malaria why isn't pollution on our radar and then that's the nutcraft that's where he's establishing his overarching point and then he goes on in his piece to actually say why we should be focusing on that and why policymakers should be paying attention to it so establishing the overarching point early on in the piece is critical the things to remember again to repeat what's my topic what's my overarching point so topic and theme topic and theme the overarching point is what you're trying to do in this one column if you're thinking about who your audience is it sort of helps you think about how to make that overarching point so if you're writing for a general audience as pranov did he's trying to raise awareness that's one thing so he's trying to raise the issue if you're trying to raise it in a policy journal he's writing directly to the policy makers so it might be more specific on the actions specifically that the policy maker should take as opposed to the raising awareness so remember when you're writing that how you write the piece and how you sort of support that overarching point is driven a bit by who you're trying to address again you're not changing what your argument is based on who the audience is you just have a different kind of support you need to do to sort of reach that audience research is important this is sort of a question of how do you know what you know there's an old journalism expression that journalists tell each other that if your mother tells you she loves you check it out don't take anything for granted just because you read it online because you read it in somebody else's article or in some other report double check your facts make sure things are accurate so one of the exercises i often have students do is i show them this piece of wood which is a piece of wood you can see that it's not been tampered with and i asked them what it is and generally they recognize that it's something that's identified as a two by four go on to ask them why is it called a two by four invariably they somebody will say well it's because it's two inches by four inches i asked them how they know that generally it's because they just know that and then someone will say well that's two inches by four inches so they ask them well how can they how can they sort of support that it actually is two inches by four inches and they say to measure it so i get a tape measure and have them measure it and you will see actually i'll see if this works you will see that actually this is three and a quarter inches by one and a half inches so actually a two by four is actually one and a half inch by three and a quarter inches and you know everybody knows it's two by four they know what to ask for this becomes important to check the facts if you're a builder and you're framing a house those are differences they all know that framers of house know that but it's important to know that difference so your house can be sturdy you can have a sound structure but don't take anything for granted always check everything out make sure that if someone tells you a 2x4 you check it out research basically is acquiring facts quotations citations data from sources and personal observation if you can have sensory data in a piece touch taste smell and sound if you can describe something it brings it to life often when you're starting a column and you start with something called a hook to bring people in it often could be something from new research as i referenced back with pranav's piece on the environment and nine million premature deaths resulting from that based on a recent study that's a hook that you can use but often it's a story that you tell your painting is seen so you paint a scene by including sensory data and the way you do that is by going to the scene capturing that data often you can't do that so you find another way to do that through either an interesting new piece of research or telling a story from the past that you know telling a personal story something to engage the reader and hook them in two basic types of research field research going to the scene interviews or legwork there's also library or internet research which is using secondary materials those are the things you want to double check if it's somebody else's reporting or data always go to the original source if you can if you're doing field research and you're interviewing people one one quick tip to keep in mind when you are interviewing someone is that if you're interviewing someone there's often a sort of a a moment when there's a pause when you ask a question and you're waiting for the person to answer and there's a pause and there's often a pause in the discussion the temptation is that because of the discomfort of that that pause and that silence causes is for you as the interviewer to fill that void fight that urge um robert cairo who is a legendary biographer of robert moses and lyndon johnson in a recent book that he talks about in writing mentions that he does this and he used to do this when he was taking handwritten notes he would use the initials s-u when he was interviewing people and that stood for shut up and it taught it sort of was to tell himself don't talk don't talk let them talk because often when when there's that discomfort and the other person's feeling it that's often when the most unguarded and the most unslick and unpolished and the most honest response comes to the question that you're answering so let the person you're talking to answer the questions and that's basically so research becomes very important for what you're talking about openings become really important for a column for the hook if you're looking to write a piece you want to engage them so for example i mentioned the pranav piece where there's a new piece of research this also becomes important because often um students in particular will ask me well who am i to write this piece what standing do i have what expertise do i have in printop's case pranav was a joint student between harvard kennedy school and brown's medical school and he he was a student he wasn't an expert in environmental or pollution but he had come across this interesting research that had been done that showed there were nine million premature deaths as a result of pollution and that was an interesting piece of research and he was presenting it in a new way so that gave him the standing to write that that piece it was the interesting bit of information he had to present to people but often the standing you have to write for a piece has to do and you can open in the piece with um if it's not a piece of research you can open it with a story so you can tell a compelling story it can be from personal life something only you can tell and that gives you the standing a piece that uh another student named um marta hanson wrote a piece for wbop you are's cognoscenti she started her piece um that basically said my my grandmother died this morning we knew she was nearing the end as my family celebrated her 100th birthday last week on zoom she opened her eyes just twice each time at the cacophony of loving gibberish from 12 little boxes singing happy birthday the melody broken by virtual distance i didn't hug my grandmother my nana in the months before she died she lived in a state away behind layers of pandemic precautions too risky too far i didn't hug my mother either on the day her mother died that was unexpected my parents lived just 15 miles away and since moving home to aragon earlier this year i've helped them through the transition to virtual work a covet scare in the aftermath of a windstorm that fell the tree next to their house narrowly missing the roof and my mom that same windstorm spread the fires so she was talking marta was talking about the the fires that were going on in the pacific northwest at the time and using that story as a way to to write a piece about the the effects of the fires out there it was a compelling story um a way to sort of lay out what she was going to be writing about in her column so openings again become very important in the same tone endings become very important um there are basic requirements of an ending not all of these but if you think about them they will answer or or echo an introduction it's been foreshadowed you don't want something coming out of the blue at the ending of a piece it's the last and often most memorable piece of a timeline and it contains some kind of take away final takeaway for your reader if you if you think about it there's different types of endings you're going to choose one of these or a variation of these there's an answered argument where you started you sort of present an argument in the beginning of your column in pranav's case with the pollution it might be why aren't policymakers doing about this what should they be doing about this and then answering that argument at the end there's a humorous illusion just keep in mind that humor can be a very funny thing and hard to pull off um there's a resurrected symbol where you start out by talking about something in the beginning some imagery and it's slightly altered at the end based on everything that's come in between and you come back to that symbol at the end and there's a bookend moment which is a literary device where in a novel you'll often see a scene painted in the beginning and that same scene will come about at the end of the piece that's a book and moment every column will i have either an open ending or a closed ending by far the majority of columns will have a closed ending a closed ending states rather than suggest a conclusion it resolves the topic and theme neatly an open ending leaves more to the imagination it sort of leaves the reader pondering it suggests rather than states conclusion leaves the reader questioning open endings are much more challenging to pull off because you run the risk of leaving the reader thinking you don't really know what the answer to the question is you don't know what the argument is that you were trying to make in the piece so unless you sort of have presented enough information in the column to really want to leave the reader pondering go with the closed ending there are a couple of famous examples of of open endings um there's one in the the sun also rises a novel by ernest hemingway which is about miserable people in paris during the 1920s and it ends by uh the two main characters are jake and brett brett is the woman jake is the man and they um it ends with oh jake brett said we could have had such a damned good time together ahead was amount to policemen in khaki directing traffic he raised his baton the car slowed suddenly pressing bread against me yes i said isn't it pretty to think so so the whole novel ends in a question it leaves the reader pondering and i apologize for spoiling that novel for you if you haven't read it there actually is another example that i don't use that often it's actually from the new testament of the bible and for me growing up the new the bible ended with the old testament because that's the way my people did it um but in the in the new testament there are four gospels that that sort of uh talk about the the the christ story and the resurrection and the coming they're coming back and the um in the book of mark which is one of the gospels there's actually if you if you look at the at the bible depending on what which version you're looking at there are two endings to mark same story on the story of jesus coming back and resurrecting that all stays the same but there's a shorter ending of mark that simply says and all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around peter and after where jesus himself sent out through through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation that's it that first version was going to people who would have already presumably been familiar with the the story of the resurrection the second version of the ending is one is about six or seven paragraphs and it actually says it starts with now after he rose early on the first day of the week he appeared first to mary magdalene from whom he had cast out seven demons she went and told those who had seen him and it continues on and it's actually in very explicit detail explains the various people and various things that happened after the resurrection the audience for it might not have been as familiar with the resurrection story so the the the the source material for it was actually longer and kept audience in mind so the ending there kept in mind who the audience was for the piece so keep endings in mind and this is going to come in handy for what we're going to talk about in a few seconds after we talk about voice now voice is one of the most challenging things for any writer to to to establish people spend years trying to establish a unique voice a column should have a unique voice of the writer because it's you it's it's you presenting your opinion so uh most columns will be conversational and something else think about yourself having a conversation with the person you're writing this to you're having a conversation with them about this topic and these are just some of the types of voices that could be in a piece the list is endless but these are some of the types of voices you could establish in your piece one of the ways to check the voice for a piece and i urge students to do this all the time is after you've written a piece read it out loud the pieces are generally short it doesn't take it probably takes maybe four minutes to read it if it's two pages long read it out loud and doing this will accomplish a couple things one is it'll help you catch typos missed words which editors hate when they get copied with missed words or typos but it'll also help you get a sense of the voice you're trying to establish and the pacing for the piece if you're reading the piece out loud and you find yourself out of breath by the time you finish the sentence good chance that sentence is too long if the piece feels too staccato and too to to like rattata tat when you're reading it then then it's a good chance that there's too many short sentences and clip sentences together and you want to sort of vary them as you're going along but when you're reading the piece out loud see if it sounds like you see if it has a sense of the voice you want to try to get across and that's something that can be very useful to you in most anything that you write about to sort of that sense of voice so voice is important it's something to work on but reading aloud is a trick to use i had a student in the past at that old university i used to teach at a different student who just thought this was a terrible idea and he thought his roommates would think he was crazy and then he tried it found that it worked and then he ended up writing a piece about how important it was to read a piece out loud to capture the sense of your voice and he wrote a piece on that for the writer magazine so he was a convert this is the slide that if you want to just pause now and just take a take a picture of this take a screenshot this is this is the traditional structure of an op-ed piece of an opinion column there's nothing that says you have to do this no one's going to sort of drum you out of the op-ed writing core if you don't follow this structure but most op-ed pieces will most often follow a structure that's very similar to this and everything we've talked about up to now kind of builds to this so it's it's something to keep in mind i find that students who are driven by equations or or quantitative kind of things or need some kind of map really find this to be kind of a veil from the eyes kind of moment they can use this as the equation for how to structure a column a med student who was trying to write a piece several years ago came by to see me he wasn't a student of mine he just was visiting and he was struggling with how to write it i gave him this to look at he immediately was able to do this and went on to write several pieces that ended up finding good homes so the basic structure of a piece is the first two to three paragraphs are the hook why do i care remember marta's piece about the fire and her grandmother there's the setup what the piece is about and there's the nut graph remember pranav's piece about why aren't policy makers paying attention to this issue the nut graph is what's my overarching point you don't give everything away but you give the reader enough of a taste to know what the overarching point in the theme is again the hook can be some kind of compelling research that you find that gives you the reason for being the person to bring that to the reader or it could be a story or it can be painting a scene but it needs to be something that makes the reader care uh there's a set up to that sort of is a transition from the why do i care to the what's my overarching point and then the meat of your of your column is the next eight to ten paragraphs and that's the diagnosis and prescription that's where you're fleshing out the problem or the issue and you're providing the solution for that problem or issue in that piece so you can either do them you know four paragraphs of diagnosis four paragraphs of prescription most often they're going to be interspersed and they're going to basically that's the meat that's where you're supporting your overarching point then you get to what most columns have and that's a concession and that's where you acknowledge that there's another side to the argument there are topics where no concession is called for if you're writing a piece on the evils of genocide i think we're all agreed that genocide is bad and there's not really another side that can argue that it's good at least in my book but often there'll be another side to the argument there might be a different way to approach something there might be a different way to look at a policy issue there might be a different way to look at the argument you're trying to make at the piece you'll see often if you read a book review um let's say in the sunday new york times book review there'll be a glowing and a wonderful review of a book and then you get to that second to the last paragraph and they'll talk about some shortcomings of the book to let you recognize that no book is perfect and they often place it there and then they come out of it and come back to why the book is good you don't want to have the concession paragraph be a whole other column that argues the other side you just want to acknowledge that you're not not so naive that you don't know there's another side and you want your argument to be the strongest thing about the column so often what you'd want to do is just sort of tip your hat to the other side but be able to come out of it with a nevertheless but in spite of this but even recognizing that there's another side i still believe strongly that the overarching point i'm trying to make is the one to believe and that's what you get to in your final paragraph with a coda or repeat of the overarching point or a call to action where you're asking people to do something where it's going to a an event or it's donating blood or it's doing something you want them to do it can be one of those two things but it has to be definitive um if you can see this this is a piece that appeared in uh bloomberg opinion column on why there aren't more women at musical chairs and visually i want to give you a sense of how that structure works and if you look at this you need to read it very closely but you can see that basically the first highlighted section with the with the paragraph is is the is the three things we talked about it's the it's the hook then there's the setup and then there's the nut graph which comes about four paragraphs in and then for the next several paragraphs from the bottom of that first page until the three quarters down on the next page that's the diagnosis and prescription if you look at the second page you have a concession there and basically the writer's concession here was that it may take a while for the public to get used to having female conductors but um and but it ends that paragraph with but it will and that sort of is the way of coming out of the concession and then there's a close so again this is the structure that you want to look at for a strong opinion column and it's something that you can use over and over again and you can use this in your other writing as well this is actually a structure that works very well for a short argumentative essay a persuasive essay that you want to use but this is something if you look at columns like the one i just mentioned to you this is actually the structure that you will most often see or some variation of this so if you're at a loss this is a good place to start revisions becomes very important it's important to actually make sure that you get everything right in a piece and that the piece is as tightly written as possible and that it's it's simple with to grasp the point you're making that it's simple doesn't always mean easy but you don't want the read the writing to be so complex and so difficult to understand that the reader doesn't grasp what you're meaning you want the what you're writing to be accessible um you want to check direct quotations you want to make sure the facts in your piece are right remember to look things up be insatiably curious make sure that the piece is consistent that you don't find yourself contradicting yourself throughout and then generally um just as a rule i try to guide people when i'm talking to them about their writing is sort of applied the 25 rule get the piece as strongly written as possible as tightly written as possible and then cut it by 25 short is better tight is better when you're writing an opinion column they're short but you want to make sure that you do have absolutely no excess in a piece so if you apply the 25 rule and can get close to cutting it by 25 when you think it's absolutely done i'm pretty much guarantee you the piece will be stronger after the revisions are done you're going to want to know what do i do with this piece now often when you're writing a piece if you get in the habit of writing pieces you've established relationships you can start pitching opinion pieces before you write them when you have enough of an argument and enough research done to know you could write it if you have the piece already written um then you have a piece to pitch but this is the idea for a pitch letter that you would write to an editor of a publication who might be interested in the piece and these are some general things to remember remember to check the submission guidelines for a piece to to to look stuff up to double check all facts to make sure that you're clear that your piece is right for the audience you're pitching to make sure your point is clearly stated and if you're looking for a formula again for those of you who are formula oriented and want to know how to do this in a way that sort of works in the old days pitch letters would often be longer than the piece itself they'd be written by mail but now most pitch letters are written by by email and this is sort of a structure for a five paragraph strong pitch letter that can get results and get the attention of an editor who's being drawn in a lot of different directions and pitched a lot of different things at once so the first paragraph first of all start in the subject line by telling them why you're pitching them in the subject line say pitch for an op-ed piece on and then give the topic editors like to know why they're getting the email if you're including the column with the piece i only suggest including it if they ask to see it otherwise i'd hold back but if you're including it don't just include it as attachment but paste it into the file because there's some nervousness about opening files these days but the pitch letter itself tell the editor what you're pitching they want to know why they're getting this email then tell them who you are um and then um we'll come back to that in paragraph four tell them why this column is perfect for their audience they want to know that you're not just pitching this out of the blue to everybody and they're one of many people that you're pitching to while that may be true you want to pitch it to that publication and make sure that it's perfect to them in op-ed writing you generally pitch things serially so one at a time you don't want to pitch to 20 different publications at once you want to pitch to a publication wait for their response and then pitch to the next publication if they're not interested this risks burning bridges so you want to tell them why the column is perfect for that publication then you want to tell them why you're the ideal person to write this piece and again this gets to standing who am i to write this piece if i'm not like the leading expert on pollution and in pranav's case again he was the person to write this piece because he came across this data he had compelling data and a way to talk about it to a general audience that might be one way to do it you have a compelling story to tell your your hook sort of establishes the reason for the reader wanting to read this that gives you the standing to write this and you want to make sure that they know you can deliver on this and then i always suggest you end by telling them you'll follow up in a day and three days i think the new york times says if you don't hear from us in three business days we're not interested so three business days but to tell them you'll follow up that's sort of another nudge that you can use to to uh awaken the editor's interest so and if you say you're gonna follow up in three days follow up in three days and that leads back to the three questions i started with that if you can answer you probably might have a really strong opinion column in you and that's do i have a point what is it what's my overarching point and who cares who's my audience for that piece and that's it that's basically what i've got uh thank you the the um communications program at the the kennedy school is a great resource for you if you go to hkscomprog.org and click on the channel on the left that says resources and then in there there'll be a section on op-eds and there's a variety of resources there and basically i'll leave you with the idea that the best way to get good at this is to read voraciously and write voraciously and then write again and write more and write as much as you possibly can read as much as you possibly can and then repeat right right right that's the best way to become a better writer and that's why i use the hashtag abw which is always be writing so you'll see that on my window at the kennedy school you'll see it as a tag to various emails i write always be writing abw i think it's actually behind me here somewhere behind me you can see it abw always be writing so that's it i gotta go i gotta go right thank you