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8 The Five Commandments No Pro Forgets N OVICES WHO THINK THE LOGIC OF PUTTING TOgether a complete magazine article is self-evident ought to read the Constitution of the United States ofAmerica. Its copywriters, the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, didn't notice until it was already enacted that they'd left out all the important guarantees of personal freedom which led them to found the United States in the first place. They had the luxury of quickly drafting ten amendments. If you're that far offthe mark, no editor will allow you a rewrite. There are five commandments that every pro makes part of his consciousness in order to avoid a blooper like the one our foundering fathers made. They are: Make your point and prove it. Offer generalizations but avoid generalities. Separate fact from opinion. Locate universal images and experiences. Above all, entertain. Make Your Point-and Prove It We can't tell you how often we've polished offa first draft, beaming at how cleverly we'd uncovered an unknown fact and sketched in a breathtaking anecdote, only to be pulled up short, maybe days later, to realize that in our excitement we'd missed making thepoint of our article. Missing the point can kill article ideas as well as finished manuscripts. If you don't clearly identify what you want to write about when you first outline your article for an editor, you'll probably miss getting the assignment. Ifyou do get it, you may discover after weeks ofwork that the story won't hold together. Or, having found a point, you may turn it in-and have it tossed back because the editor thought you had a different point in mind. The main point of your article is usually in your topic sentence. It includes your focus and your slant. When you've finished writing the first draft, 113 114 The Article as Marketable Property check back to that topic sentence and make sure that what you've written after it backs up what you started out to write. Your ending, ofcourse, must be about your main point. But that's not all. All your evidence in the article's body-your quotes, anecdotes and exposition-must keep building up the validity ofyour main point. And your slant must never veer from its original point ofview. For some subjects, you will have to consider both the point and its counterpoint . But editors usually expect you to present a well-established case favoring one side or the other. The only exception is when you are specifically assigned to explore a controversial issue while remaining neutral. (This, by the way, is one of the trickiest pieces a pro can undertake. Ifyou think it's easy, just try it.) Let's look again at our CAT scanner story for Family Health (Ill. 5.7and Ill. 7.1). We were assigned to research the controversy over whether hospitals really needed CATs. The question, it turned out, had two aspects: medical value and cost. The only opposition we found to the CATs' medical value came from a lightweight, a technician trained in traditional X-ray methods. She told us dozens of things wrong with the scanners, but it turned out she worked at the other end ofthe hospital and knew less about scanners than we did. On a hunch that she was probably afraid of being displaced by the CAT, we left her opinion out of the finished article. We did present both sides as to whether CATs cost too much because both opinions were expressed by experts. However, our digging turned up information that convinced us that, in most instances, CATs were worth the cost. We weren't able to present all our technical backup data; as it was, the article ran longer than the assignment called for. But we did let readers know the decision we'd reached. And we designed the article to thrust home that positive viewpoint from beginning to end. The main point of Frank's article "The Nightmare ofNuclear Blackmail" (Ill. 7.2) was that the threat of somebody's building an A-bomb represented a genuine nightmare to nuclear security people and to concerned scientists. That was his working title; that was his lead; and his selection and placement ofdata and opinion relentlessly led the reader to that conclusion. Let's look at the beginning of that article. First Frank presented a former A-bomb designer's opinion...

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