You have very limited space to persuade readers who may be unfamiliar or dead set against your concerns. You can’t go over the words alloted to you. For one reason, if you write too much, you run the risk of having the newspaper or broadcasting editor cut your piece, and chances are they will cut in ways that will infuriate you or distort your argument. No, you have to write in a very tight manner, and you still want to entice your reader, explain the issue and why it’s urgent to address, and lay out your position. Out of all the complexities you encounter dealing with your issue, you need to focus it, streamline it so that you can argue one main point. You can only allude to complexity. You need to be pointed — there’s simply isn’t enough room. And at the same time you want to be vivid and speak to the level of your intended audience — which is, of course, not the academic audience that would read your research thesis.

Donald Kennedy is an emeritus biology professor, former president of Stanford, and, most important for this discussion, editor of Science magazine. During our How I Write conversation, he spoke about the difficulty of writing editorials. “You can’t ‘Bury the Lead, ’ as newspaper people say — you have to attract people. ” You need to get to the issue in a dramatic, direct way. “You can’t end with a problem, ” he also advised. “If you lead people through your argument, you’ve got to propose something, take them somewhere. ”

This is harder than it sounds. Op Eds are tough.