How to Write an Article

The Best Approach for Writing a Successful Piece

Written and edited by Kelsey Spence - July 16th, 2023

The beginning of the writing process can seem overwhelming. It can sometimes be difficult to know how to organize each part of your article in an intelligent manner. This blog post aims to take you through the process of writing an article, from brainstorming to structuring your piece to actually writing it.

If you want to know how to write a quality piece of work, then dive in.

Brainstorming Ideas

As pointed out in a web article published by Indeed, it’s vital that you pinpoint who your target audience is for your article. Choosing your work's topic based on the target audience will ensure greater success when you publish your piece, and it will make it easier to market your writing to a certain group of people.

The next step is to jot down a list of ideas that you believe your target audience would be interested in learning about. After this, you need to go through your idea list and determine which topic is most appealing to you as well as most relatable to your target audience.

If you are having trouble whittling your list down to a single topic idea, try searching for your preferred topics on Google. It may be best for you to go with the subject that gets a lot of hits, though it would also be smart to put your own spin on the topic. Try to write about a specific niche within that topic that is being written about sparsely, if at all.

Structuring Your Piece

When structuring your work of writing, you need to think about both organization and format. You want your article to be broken up into easy-to-read sections with its ideas ordered in such a way that makes sense for the article as a whole.

As far as your article’s format goes, it’s best to use fonts or styles for your headers that help them to be clearly distinguishable from the body text. You can either make the header's font size larger or change the style of the text by making it bold, italicized or underlined to make it stand out from the rest of the text in your article.

When organizing your writing, first create an outline for your piece that includes every component of the article. Make section topics for your article, which will be related to each section’s heading, and organize every point of your article to fit into one of the section topics. After this, you can organize the sections in such a way that makes sense for the entire article to flow naturally.

You will also need to include an introduction for your article that briefly goes over the most important points of your piece. It’s best to keep your introduction short and sweet—preferably no longer than a paragraph, although sometimes a paragraph plus a sentence or two is acceptable for the introduction.

It's also smart to include a conclusion at the end of your work of writing. Similar to the introduction, it should touch on the main points of your article as a way to recap the information you delivered. Your conclusion should be short like your introduction, at the length of a paragraph, tops.

The Writing Process

Make sure that you keep your paragraphs on the shorter side during the writing process; this will help to improve the readability of your article. This means no more than three to four sentences in a single paragraph. You should also avoid making sections more than four or five paragraphs in length without expanding them into various subsections.

Additionally, avoid using run-on sentences, instead breaking up long-winded ideas into smaller portions by separating them with semicolons, em-dashes or simply by creating new sentences. Similar to long paragraphs, run-on sentences make your article harder for readers to easily comprehend.

Another important piece of a good article is smooth transitions. If you jump from one idea to the next without a gentle nudge leading your readers to the following point, it can leave them confused or less likely to see the connection between your ideas.

Lastly, try your best to utilize a wide variety of vocabulary within your article to keep it from becoming bland. It’s also a good idea to infuse some details into your writing that evoke emotion in your readers as well as descriptive language that conjures up imagery. This will result in your audience forging a stronger connection with and understanding of your article’s contents, and it will make your piece more entertaining to read.

The Final Step: Proofreading

One of the most important parts of writing an article is the final step: proofreading. If your article is full of grammatical, spelling and sentence structure errors, it is less likely to be successful among a vast market of online writers.

It’s in your best interest to make a sweep of your text at least twice prior to submitting it for publication or posting it to your blog. The second review of your article should be done 24 hours after your first review; it can be easy to miss a mistake if you proofread your writing back-to-back. Also, remain consistent in the way you use commas, dashes and certain spellings, as well as in other aspects of your personal writing style.

Being certain your writing is error-free will not only result in your image as a writer being portrayed in a more professional light but will also help your article rank higher in the search results. If you are in need of professional proofreading services, make sure to reach out to Spence Proofreading.