How To Write Special Feature Articles - A Handbook for Reporters, Correspondents and Free-Lance Writers Who Desire to Contribute to Popular Magazines and Magazine Sections of Newspapers by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
page 60 of 544 (11%)
page 60 of 544 (11%)
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amusement, the public schools, determine, in no small degree, the
success and happiness of the home-maker. Since the dominant interests of men and women alike are their business and their home, the special writer should undertake to connect his subject as closely as possible with these interests. To show, for example, how the tariff, taxes, public utility rates, price-fixing, legislation, and similar matters affect the business and home affairs of the average reader, is to give to these political and economic problems an interest for both men and women far in excess of that resulting from a more general treatment of them. The surest way to get the reader's attention is to bring the subject home to him personally. Of the importance of presenting a subject in such a manner that the reader is led to see its application to himself and his own affairs, Mr. John M. Siddall, editor of the _American Magazine_, has said: Every human being likes to see himself in reading matter--just as he likes to see himself in a mirror. The reason so much reading matter is unpopular and never attracts a wide reading public lies in the fact that the reader sees nothing in it for himself. Take an article, we'll say, entitled "The Financial System of Canada." It looks dull, doesn't it? It looks dull because you can't quite see where it affects you. Now take an article entitled "Why it is easier to get rich in Canada than in the United States." That's different! Your interest is aroused. You wonder wherein the Canadian has an advantage over you. You look into the article to find out whether you can't get an idea from it. Yet the two articles may be basically alike, differing only in treatment. |
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