The Magazine Article: How to Think It, Plan It, Write It

Offers writers ideas and examples from award-winning magazine articles and reveals a four-step process to building an article

Journalism professor Jacobi focuses on article writing as a creative process as opposed to a way of making money. He notes that insight and deep feeling lead to the best writing, quoting poems and other fine work as examples. Articles are excerpted from varied publications to exemplify how such techniques as information gathering, structuring, exposition, and description have led to successful results. A chapter is devoted to close analysis of two articles, one an investigative expose on arson that appeared in Playboy , the other a major story in Restaurants & Institutions on combatting high labor turnover. A chapter also considers such near relatives of the article as the personal essay and the profile. Not concerned with manuscript mechanics or marketing, this is surely one of the more thoughtful books on magazine journalism. Highly recommended.
- William A. Donovan, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.