Basic Magazine Writing

A guide to researching and writing magazine articles includes advice on finding ideas, selecting markets, doing interviews, and dealing with controversial subjects

ea. vol: Writer's Digest. 1986.composition These two companion works provide excellent resources for writers serious about selling their stories to magazines. Basic Magazine Writing is the better of the pair. It offers practical tips on finding article ideas, targeting compatible magazine markets, soliciting assignments, and researching and writing for publication. Kevles's advice enables writers to neatly anticipate and handle the tricky fit of each angle of the "rhetorical triangle": subject matter, appropriate audience, and writer's persona. Even experienced writers would find the chapters on interviewing and pacing techniques invaluable. Because it overlaps with parts of Kevles's book and because it is so narrowly focused on the mechanics of self-merchandising, How To Sell is less apt to appeal to budding professional writers. However, any shelf containing these two works and book-ended by Donald Murray's Writing for Your Readers (Globe Pequot, 1983) and William Zinsser's On Writing Well (Harper, 1985. 3d ed.), would represent the ideal reference shelf for nonfiction writers. Thomas J. Reigstad, English Dept., SUNY Coll . at Buffalo
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.