When you start writing, the first thing you need to have clear in your mind is, what are you writing and what will it accomplish? With fiction writing, this isn’t quite so important – you already know that you are writing a story or a book. With creative writing, it’s mostly free form – you start writing and let conscious thought take over. But with nonfiction, it’s a bit more important. For a start, forget writing nonfiction using the rules of creative writing – it won't work and you end up failing. Nonfiction has a structure of its own and much depends on what type of nonfiction writing you are producing as there are several types.

Articles

In general, there are two article types – short ones and long ones. You need to determine what you are writing before you start or, if you have already been hired, you need to know exactly what is expected of you. If you do not know who your buyer is, aim for long articles. This way, you have enough to get through a good strong edit. If you are not totally sure of your subject, stick with short articles so you can get sufficient information out of your research and it will look more succinct and professional.

Short Articles

These tend to be between 500 and 700 words and are written much like a blog post is. Mostly a short article has got a strong focus on a specific subject or point and each paragraph will be around three to five sentences long. If your paragraphs stretch to seven or more sentences, they do not belong in a short article.

Short articles have a few characteristics and one of them is that the content and the language used to write them is very simple. You don’t generally see short articles in law or medical journals, for example, because these require a lot of specialized information and plenty of detail. For short articles, the level of language used should not exceed fourth-grade level because that is what the average reader will read it at.

When you write your short article, you must put yourself in the place of someone who is explaining something quite complex to an eight-year-old. Try it; explain your article topic to a child and if they fully understand it, that’s your language level for your short article.

There is one very important thing to remember in a short article – you must stay focused and keep your subject matter quite simple. You are trying to explain something in a small article, there is no room for waffle; keep it to the point and use easy language – the last thing you want is your readers having to scrabble for a dictionary to understand what you mean! Also, don’t forget the three to five sentences per paragraph. Do not attempt to write one paragraph as one long sentence.

One final word on short articles – the art of writing is not necessary but articulation is.  Next, we look at how to write a long article.