What makes a good columnist

I guarantee it. Writing columns is far more a skill than an art. It is 10 percent talent but 90 percent learnable craft. I always compare it to the profession of a cabinet maker. With sufficient devotion and a good mentor, everyone can produce a beautiful piece of furniture in the end. Nobody is a born carpenter. Nobody is a born master of art or a virtuoso musician. And nobody is a born writer or columnist. What really pays off will take a while. Look at mother nature. It takes a lot more than one day for a sunflower to grow from a little seed to an impressive seven-foot high stalk.

Writing columns — and gaining competence and proficiency — is a matter of patience and perseverance. Many columnists literally typed text into their computers night after night for more than ten years before they finally found success. How do those stellar columnists persevere? Easy: by loving what they do. You must want it, be eager. You should want nothing more than to write columns.

Search for subjects , scrape and shape your texts — do these things simply because your work can always be a little bit better. Writing columns requires practice. Ira Glass has talked about this, insisting that time years, not just months and experience are required to develop a body of work that makes you proud. Reading other columns is always a good thing.

Learn from the columnists you admire, from the ones that write in a way you like. Pay attention to their use of language. Try to find out what it is exactly that makes their columns so good. How did they structure the text? Where is the humor hidden? Is the magic in the details, or in the approach, or in something else? You can learn a lot from such an analysis. Dutchman Luuk Koelman recently launched his online course, Writing Columns that Editors Can't Resist , after serving as a columnist and writing coach for more than 15 years.

Koelman also teaches column writing at several schools of journalism. Luuk Koelman LuukKoelman. I dream to become a great columnist for renown publications and magazines like New York Post and Mew York times and Magazines. What must I do? Hi Luuk, I found the above piece very useful,great work right there i must admit. I wanna be a columnist but sometimes i get a bit lazy,but i trust i can make it when i really mean business.

I only write small news pieces as a journalist. Dear sir, thanks a lot for that piece. How can one access your online courses. Or is there a possibility that courses content can be sent to a student email, am living in areas where internet is a problem sometime.

Hello I am an architect who loves writing deeply. I hear so much discouragements even fro some experts that writing does not pay. Having left school at 16, I had gone to college in my mid-twenties and had a baby. I embarked on a PhD but was frustrated by the idea that only three people would read it.

The academic world seemed not to appreciate my popularising of the ideas that interested me but I started to get paid. My grant ran out so that mattered. For a while, I was an editor at Marxism Today, which taught me that I wanted to write rather than edit. Some people are brilliant at both but, once I had an idea, I wanted to hog it and pursue it myself so I realised I was very much a writer type.

The reaction I was getting showed me there was a gap opening up for women with strong opinions and also I loved doing polemical stuff.

But what really made me a columnist was being the film critic at the New Statesman. It had a weekly rhythm and was a fantastic job.

I also had a wonderful editor. It was clear that I was often just using a film to riff on all kinds of social affairs. From there, I went to newspapers. I was arguing then, and still do, for an understanding of cultural politics. How easy is it to have opinions all the time — and commit to them in print? What it means to be a columnist has changed and is changing. Social media is instant opinion all the time. That has a downside. Well, I think the same thing about columning. Define the words dictator, tyrant and totalitarian.

Explain how they can be applied to the story and the characters in it. Metzler —Shaw Heights Middle School, Even after Winston has been so brutally tortured,. Thinking and Writing in a Deeper Way. Similar presentations. Upload Log in. My presentations Profile Feedback Log out. Log in. Auth with social network: Registration Forgot your password?