writing in the magazine

How to Get Into Magazine Writing: Tips for Planning and Pitching Your Articles

by Yen Cabag | 0 comments

Magazine writing is a unique type of writing distinct from what you may find in a newspaper, journal, or essay. You might even be surprised to know that within magazine writing itself, each subgenre calls for different skills and styles. 

For example, you’d approach a long feature article differently than a human interest piece; and if you are undertaking an investigative exposé, it will clearly call for different skills than a book review or cultural critique! 

However, there are some basic principles and elements you need to master for any type of magazine writing. In this article, we’ll show you the general skills you need to succeed at writing for a magazine.

How Do You Start Writing for a Magazine? 

If you want to write for a magazine, you need to adjust to a medium that digital technology has radically transformed. As you’ve probably noticed, many of the magazines of today have migrated to online platforms, and are read primarily on web browsers or mobile apps, such as Apple News. 

The good news is that the online world has made it possible for more publications to spring up seemingly out of nowhere, giving you more options and places to pitch your ideas! Here are some tips to help you find your way into writing for magazines: 

Pitch your ideas to the appropriate magazine. 

Magazine writers are normally “hired” on the basis of their idea pitches, which are sent through a query letter . When you send your ideas, make sure your proposed topics are in tune with the magazine’s preferred themes. You don’t want to make the mistake of pitching a sports article to a magazine like Good Housekeeping .

Specialize.

With the increasing number of writers in the online space, magazines place a high value on specialization. For example, Brian Windhorst of ESPN fame reportedly rose among the ranks thanks to his expertise in basketball writing. You should focus on your strengths and leverage those for your writing. 

Go the extra mile when it comes to research. 

As a magazine writer, you will need to do a lot of research, but it’s better to do too much than too little. The more details you have on hand, the easier it will be to find the best slant for your article. And always be sure to fact check your information !

Write for the target audience of your chosen magazine.  

One of the biggest mistakes that magazine writers make is to overlook who the magazine’s target audience actually is. Remember, a magazine exists only because of its readers, so make sure you speak straight to their hearts in any piece you submit. For example, if you are writing for a scientific journal, your readers will likely prefer more research-based content, instead of emotionally-driven pieces. 

Contact the appropriate editor. 

The magazine playing field is highly dynamic, with many editors frequently leaving one publication to join another. 

Remember that as a writer, connections are everything! Your relationship with any given editor is always more important than your connection to the company—after all, they are your connection to any magazine! Value these relationships, as they are your only open door into getting your articles published. 

6 Common Types of Magazine Articles 

Here are some of the most common formats for magazine writing: 

• Long-form investigative articles: These heavily-researched pieces tend to use numerous sources and citations, and can take months to write and edit. 
• Character profiles: These articles can range from a few hundred words to several thousand. They focus on one person, and are often run as cover stories.
• Commentary: Magazines that feature current events tend to feature commentaries, too. A very common example is a sports commentary article. 
• Criticism: Critical commentary or reviews are common for books, art, music, and film. 
• Humor: Usually shorter in length, magazines like The New Yorker contain humor articles. These are often found in weeklies that accompany newspapers. 
• Fiction: Fiction also has a place in magazines like The New Yorker and Harper , usually in short story form or as excerpts from longer works. 

How Do You Write a Magazine Article?

Now that you have a run-down of the different types of magazine writing, let’s talk about how to write an actual magazine article. 

1. Choose a subject you are an expert in. 

Keeping true to our earlier advice of specializing, when you start to write a magazine article, choose a topic you show certain expertise in.

Publishers typically choose articles with an in-depth take on a subject, and that’s where your level of experience will come into play. The more authoritative you are, the greater the chances are that your article will make the cut. 

2. Choose an interesting angle. 

Magazine editors choose articles they believe will pique their readers’ interest. From your chosen topic, find the angles that may not have been discussed before, or at least a perspective that will catch your audience’s attention right from the get-go. 

3. Research.

Before you start writing, do your research. Even if you think you already know everything there is to know, there is always more to be gained by added research. Who knows, you might come across fresh information that will give you a new spin on your article. 

4. Write an outline. 

No matter what your experience level is in terms of writing articles, creating an outline will help you organize your thoughts and make sure you don’t miss any important angles. In your outline, you can also plan where you might add images, graphics, or testimonials to supplement your piece.

5. Start writing. 

The good news is that magazine writing is not terribly rigid in terms of structure and format. Be creative! Remember that readers of magazines usually read not just for information, but in order to be entertained, so write in a conversational tone when possible. 

6. Make sure you follow style guidelines. 

If you are writing an article for a specific magazine, ask about their style guidelines. There’s nothing more disappointing than pouring your heart and soul out writing a piece, only to have it rejected because it doesn’t meet the magazine’s guidelines!

How Is Magazine Writing Different From Other Types of Writing ?

One of the biggest distinctions between magazine writing and others types of writing is that magazines typically have their own house styles. Because writing articles for newspapers can follow a standard that is consistent throughout the country, it’s hardly possible to distinguish one newspaper from another simply by reading a couple of articles. 

Magazines pride themselves for having their own unique style. This is why it’s relatively easy to identify whether an article is from Vogue , or from Ladies’ Home Journal. The writing style and tone for a famous fashion magazine, geared towards women who are into the latest fashion, are distinctly different from the magazine targeted towards stay-at-home moms.

This means that one of the most important skills you need to develop as a magazine writer is the flexibility to adjust your writing style to meet these house requirements. 

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:

• 18 Writing Magazines that Pay Writers
• Patchwriting: What It Is and Why You Should Avoid It
• 20 Writing Blogs You Should Follow to Grow Your Skills
• 8 Writing Extensions for Chrome to Help You Streamline Your Process

Yen Cabag is the Blog Writer of TCK Publishing. She is also a homeschooling mom, family coach, and speaker for the Charlotte Mason method, an educational philosophy that places great emphasis on classic literature and the masterpieces in art and music. She has also written several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her passion is to see the next generation of children become lovers of reading and learning in the midst of short attention spans.

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How to Write a Magazine Article

Last Updated: October 11, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Gerald Posner . Gerald Posner is an Author & Journalist based in Miami, Florida. With over 35 years of experience, he specializes in investigative journalism, nonfiction books, and editorials. He holds a law degree from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He’s the author of thirteen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, the winner of the Florida Book Award for General Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also shortlisted for the Best Business Book of 2020 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 925,370 times.

Magazine articles can be a big boost for seasoned freelance writers or writers who are trying to jump-start their writing careers. In fact, there are no clear qualifications required for writing magazine articles except for a strong writing voice, a passion for research, and the ability to target your article pitches to the right publications. Though it may seem like magazines may be fading in the digital age, national magazines continue to thrive and can pay their writers $1 a word. [1] X Research source To write a good magazine article, you should focus on generating strong article ideas and crafting and revising the article with high attention to detail.

Generating Article Ideas

• Check if the bylines match the names on the masthead. If the names on the bylines do not match the masthead names, this may be an indication that the publication hires freelance writers to contribute to its issues.
• Look for the names and contact information of editors for specific areas. If you’re interested in writing about pop culture, identify the name and contact information of the arts editor. If you’re more interested in writing about current events, look for the name and contact information of the managing editor or the features editor. You should avoid contacting the executive editor or the editor-in-chief as they are too high up the chain and you will likely not interact with them as a freelance writer.
• Note recent topics or issues covered in the publication and the angle or spin on the topics. Does the publication seem to go for more controversial takes on a topic or a more objective approach? Does the publication seem open to experimentation in form and content or are they more traditional?
• Look at the headlines used by the publication and how the articles begin. Note if the headlines are shocking or vague. Check if the articles start with a quote, a statistic, or an anecdote. This will give you a good sense of the writing style that gets published in that particular publication.
• Note the types of sources quoted in the articles. Are they academic or more laymen? Are there many sources quoted, or many different types of sources quoted?
• Pay attention to how writers wrap up their articles in the publication. Do they end on a poignant quote? An interesting image? Or do they have a bold, concluding thought?

• These inspiring conversations do not need to be about global problems or a large issue. Having conversations with your neighbors, your friends, and your peers can allow you to discuss local topics that could then turn into an article idea for a local magazine.

• You should also look through your local newspaper for human interest stories that may have national relevance. You could then take the local story and pitch it to a magazine. You may come across a local story that feels incomplete or full of unanswered questions. This could then act as a story idea for a magazine article.

• You can also set your Google alerts to notify you if keywords on topics of interest appear online. If you have Twitter or Instagram, you can use the hashtag option to search trending topics or issues that you can turn into article ideas.

• For example, rather than write about the psychological problems of social media on teenagers, which has been done many times in many different magazines, perhaps you can focus on a demographic that is not often discussed about social media: seniors and the elderly. This will give you a fresh approach to the topic and ensure your article is not just regurgitating a familiar angle.

Crafting the Article

• Look for content written by experts in the field that relates to your article idea. If you are doing a magazine article on dying bee populations in California, for example, you should try to read texts written by at least two bee experts and/or a beekeeper who studies bee populations in California.
• You should ensure any texts you use as part of your research are credible and accurate. Be wary of websites online that contain lots of advertisements or those that are not affiliated with a professionally recognized association or field of study. Make sure you check if any of the claims made by an author have been disputed by other experts in the field or have been challenged by other experts. Try to present a well-rounded approach to your research so you do not appear biased or slanted in your research.

• You can also do an online search for individuals who may serve as good expert sources based in your area. If you need a legal source, you may ask other freelance writers who they use or ask for a contact at a police station or in the legal system.

• Prepare a list of questions before the interview. Research the source’s background and level of expertise. Be specific in your questions, as interviewees usually like to see that you have done previous research and are aware of the source’s background.
• Ask open-ended questions, avoid yes or no questions. For example, rather than asking, "Did you witness the test trials of this drug?" You can present an open-ended question, "What can you tell me about the test trials of this drug?" Be an active listener and try to minimize the amount of talking you do during the interview. The interview should be about the subject, not about you.
• Make sure you end the interview with the question: “Is there anything I haven’t asked you about this topic that I should know about?” You can also ask for referrals to other sources by asking, “Who disagrees with you on your stance on this issue?” and “Who else should I talk to about this issue?”
• Don’t be afraid to contact the source with follow-up questions as your research continues. As well, if you have any controversial or possibly offensive questions to ask the subject, save them for last.

• The best way to transcribe your interviews is to sit down with headphones plugged into your tape recorder and set aside a few hours to type out the interviews. There is no short and quick way to transcribe unless you decide to use a transcription service, which will charge you a fee for transcribing your interviews.

• Your outline should include the main point or angle of the article in the introduction, followed by supporting points in the article body, and a restatement or further development of your main point or angle in your conclusion section.
• The structure of your article will depend on the type of article you are writing. If you are writing an article on an interview with a noteworthy individual, your outline may be more straightforward and begin with the start of the interview and move to the end of the interview. But if you are writing an investigative report, you may start with the most relevant statements or statements that relate to recent news and work backward to the least relevant or more big picture statements. [10] X Research source
• Keep in mind the word count of the article, as specified by your editor. You should keep the first draft within the word count or just above the word count so you do not lose track of your main point. Most editors will be clear about the required word count of the article and will expect you not to go over the word count, for example, 500 words for smaller articles and 2,000-3,000 words for a feature article. Most magazines prefer short and sweet over long and overly detailed, with a maximum of 12 pages, including graphics and images. [11] X Research source
• You should also decide if you are going to include images or graphics in the article and where these graphics are going to come from. You may contribute your own photography or the publication may provide a photographer. If you are using graphics, you may need to have a graphic designer re create existing graphics or get permission to use the existing graphics.

• Use an interesting or surprising example: This could be a personal experience that relates to the article topic or a key moment in an interview with a source that relates to the article topic. For example, you may start an article on beekeeping in California by using a discussion you had with a source: "Darryl Bernhardt never thought he would end up becoming the foremost expert on beekeeping in California."
• Try a provocative quotation: This could be from a source from your research that raises interesting questions or introduces your angle on the topic. For example, you may quote a source who has a surprising stance on bee populations: "'Bees are more confused than ever,' Darryl Bernhart, the foremost expert in bees in California, tells me."
• Use a vivid anecdote: An anecdote is a short story that carries moral or symbolic weight. Think of an anecdote that might be a poetic or powerful way to open your article. For example, you may relate a short story about coming across abandoned bee hives in California with one of your sources, an expert in bee populations in California.
• Come up with a thought provoking question: Think of a question that will get your reader thinking and engaged in your topic, or that may surprise them. For example, for an article on beekeeping you may start with the question: "What if all the bees in California disappeared one day?"

• You want to avoid leaning too much on quotations to write the article for you. A good rule of thumb is to expand on a quotation once you use it and only use quotations when they feel necessary and impactful. The quotations should support the main angle of your article and back up any claims being made in the article.

• You may want to lean on a strong quote from a source that feels like it points to future developments relating to the topic or the ongoing nature of the topic. Ending the article on a quote may also give the article more credibility, as you are allowing your sources to provide context for the reader.

Revising the Article

• Having a conversation about the article with your editor can offer you a set of professional eyes who can make sure the article fits within the writing style of the publication and reaches its best possible draft. You should be open to editor feedback and work with your editor to improve the draft of the article.

• You should also get a copy of the publication’s style sheet or contributors guidelines and make sure the article follows these rules and guidelines. Your article should adhere to these guidelines to ensure it is ready for publication by your deadline.

• Most publications accept electronic submissions of articles. Talk with your editor to determine the best way to submit the revised article.

Sample Articles

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you'd like to learn more about writing an article, check out our in-depth interview with Gerald Posner .

• ↑ http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules-and-tips/tips-on-writing-a-good-feature-for-magazines.html
• ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/20-ways-to-generate-article-ideas-in-20-minutes-or-less
• ↑ http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun03/eight-tips-for-getting-published-in-magazines-6036
• ↑ http://www.thepenmagazine.net/20-steps-to-write-a-good-article/
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R5f2VV58pw
• ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-nonfiction/how-many-different-kinds-of-articles-are-there
• ↑ http://libguides.unf.edu/c.php?g=177086&p=1163719

About This Article

To write a magazine article, start by researching your topic and interviewing experts in the field. Next, create an outline of the main points you want to cover so you don’t go off topic. Then, start the article with a hook that will grab the reader’s attention and keep them reading. As you write, incorporate quotes from your research, but be careful to stick to your editor’s word count, such as 500 words for a small article or 2,000 words for a feature. Finally, conclude with a statement that expands on your topic, but leaves the reader wanting to learn more. For tips on how to smoothly navigate the revision process with an editor, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Feature Article for a Magazine

A feature article is the main story in the magazine that focuses on a special event, place or person in great detail.

There are many types of feature articles, whether they’re creatively focused or newsworthy, however, they always have one thing in common: human interest.

Writing feature articles for magazines (and newspapers) is a great way for emerging writers and authors to build up their portfolio of work.

However, there are many different elements to magazine writing and publishing that the feature writer needs to consider.

We’ve put together a little guide on what to research and what to include when it comes to writing a high quality feature article…

Don’t have time to read the whole post right now?

No problem. Let us send you a downloadable PDF so you can read it when it’s convenient for you…

Know the Publication:

Remember that each publication has a specific target audience, and a distinct style of writing. For example, if you’re writing for a well-known magazine such as the  Women’s Weekly  the article needs to focus on an emotional level, using pictures and quotes that reflect the reader’s thought on everyday life.

However, if you’re writing for a small independent magazine like  The Morning Bell  the style is more flexible, you have a lot more freedom in terms of subject matter, just as long as the content is clear and appropriate to the magazine’s theme.

Also depending on the publication, not all magazines concentrate on trends and current events; those are mostly for weekly or daily magazines.

There are publications that print annually, quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly, which in these cases, trends are less of a focus because trends have come and gone by the time the mag goes to print.

So what do magazines focus on if not recent issues? Usually, the magazine has a theme to base their stories on.

For example, Australian literary journal,  Kill Your Darlings , focuses on commentary essays, politics and reviews.

One issue could be about the Australian Government and another on memoir; the main feature article details this theme in depth.

Get to know the magazine and what kind of content they publish; we strongly suggest reading their previous articles before submitting one of your own.

Look through the publication’s submission guidelines and identify aspects of their house style in their published content.

When you’re ready, here’s a step-by-step process in creating a feature article that will impress.

Mission for Story and the Publication:

Some magazines will give you a topic for you to research and write about, but if you’re submitting toa magazine then you’ll probably have to pitch one yourself.

This is where you’re able to brainstorm ideas and define what area you would like to write about.

However, this is no simple task because the piece you are writing has to be detailed and must provide examples and evidence along with the facts you’re providing.

FREELANCE :

To be able to work as a freelance writer , the writer is self-employed, also known as a contractor. They can write for one or more publications at the same time and are paid per article or per word.

Though freelancing technically allows you the freedom to write for whatever publications you’d like – writers must be wary of the fact that more and more companies are out-sourcing their content production, and so freelancers nowadays (especially new freelancers) must take the jobs they can get.

Extensive research will still be a major part of your job, and depending on how you’re getting paid (per word, per article or per hour) you need to be cautious of how you spend your time.

Freelancers are in charge of their own invoicing and tax. However, one of the much-loved benefits of freelancing is the fact that these writers get to work at their own pace, on their own schedule.

Some magazines or websites have employees who write for them within a team.

If you’re an in-house writer, you’ll most likely have a topics assigned to you, or you’ll at least receive a brief.

Your work will be passed to editors who will give you feedback on how to improve the article.

Usually the team and you will have regular meetings to decide on future content scheduling and subject matter.

During content meetings the writers usually brainstorm ideas for articles, and present statistics and research that will benefit the publication.

A good idea is to explore what people are reading about at the time you’re writing. Is it interesting enough to write about?

Look at the news; is an event powerful enough for a main article? Search your local community and what’s been happening. Is it newsworthy?

As author of Writer’s Digest, Chuck Sambuchino said:

The idea’s the thing. If you build your story around a unique and compelling idea, your odds of publishing it increase dramatically . Often, a perfectly good project will go unpublished because the premise on which it is based is too predictable, commonplace, or over-published.”

Once you’ve chosen your idea, proper research will cover the bones of your story with lots of meat and soul. Just gather information.

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The Mean Old Structure:

Like other articles, the feature has a basic structure.

The shape depends on the style of your magazine varies but most feature articles have three acts, just like a story or an essay.

It has a headline, an introduction; forming as one, then a main body and a conclusion.

Structure is very important when telling a story, especially for a feature article, it is what holds the piece together clearly.

Without structure, the article will fall apart and the readers will become confused and disinterested.

As writer, Robert Frost said, “if there is no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader; there is no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

To clarify the structure, we’ll break it down in more detail.

Cheers to the Headline:

Probably one of the important tasks of writing a feature article for a magazine is coming up with an effective headline.

This is a short and simple line that grabs the reader’s attention and convinces them to read the piece.

A headline means to highlight the central idea of the article in a catchy, clever way.

The editor of the magazine always has the final say in what the headline says, though the writer comes up with a number of options for the editor to choose from.

Hello, Introduction:

Think of this as a preview to the rest of your feature article.

It ‘introduces’ the ideas you’re about to explore and as a general rule, is about 10% of the overall word count.

The introduction draws the reader in from the headline and provokes their interest by injecting a good dose of intrigue and speculation.

With the introduction the reader makes a conscious decision on what side of the story they believe in or whether it’s interesting enough to keep reading.

The introduction needs to be compelling enough that it is seen at a publishable standard.

Make the editor think it’s worthy; sell it to them so they can sell it to the reader.

Not only does it create the article’s tone it also establishes a relationship between the reader and the writer.

Main Body Magnetism:

This is where all the details of who, what, why and how are revealed.

It is the explanation and the proof. Include all your facts, statistics, and quotes to support your argument.

This is where all your hard-earned work pays off by resulting in a compelling and accurate piece.

Depending on the publication, some magazines require their writers to supply original images or photographs as well.

The Finishing Touch:

A conclusion is the final statement that brings together all your ideas and evidence.

Conclusions need to be strong, concise and thought-provoking, inviting the reader’s opinion.

The writer, the editor and the publisher don’t want the conversation to end at the full-stop of the feature article.

The best feature articles encourage the continuation of debate on social media platforms, comment pages and discussion forums.

Belle Savage

Belle Savage is an aspiring creative writer from Melbourne, Currently studying a Bachelor of Writing and Publishing, she likes to write novels, nonfiction articles and screenplays. She writes about realistic or psychological events and uses themes of grief, abandonment and abuse.

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How To Become A Magazine Writer In 4 Easy Steps

by Jackie Pearce | Apr 5, 2023

Magazine writers are able to write fascinating articles on a wide variety of topics. If you have ever picked up a copy of Rolling Stone, Vogue, Southern Living, or any other magazine, you probably have a good idea of what magazine articles are like.

If you love taking a topic, story, person, or experience and being able to explore what it means and why people should care, magazine writing might be a perfect career for you.

This article will go over how to become a magazine writer, cover what it takes to get your foot in the door, how you can get experience, salary expectations, and more.

Table of Contents

What is magazine writing.

For the most part, magazine writing is either under the umbrella of journalism or commentary. Most magazine articles are considered longform journalism.

Most magazine pieces have certain rules, with research needing to be done, people needing to be interviewed, and the whole story being put together in a particular way. Some magazine articles can also be fiction or personal narratives as well.

When the article includes the author’s perspective, experience, or thoughts, there is still a central theme or idea being explored.

Instead of it being a short informational piece, as you would see in a newspaper, magazine articles are well-researched, long, and thought-out. Most people who are in the field are people who come from writing for newspapers, first.

Skills Needed To Become A Magazine Writer

One of the top skills you will need to succeed as a magazine writer is being able to write like a journalist.

That means you know how to structure your pieces and you know how to inform readers with what you are writing about.

Research is also a key skills in order to succeed as a magazine writer. You will need to know how to dive deep into a topic, pull out the relevant facts, and double check that those facts are correct.

Once you know how to research well and compile the most important information, you will need to know how to put it together in a way that will be interesting to the audience. It is important to follow journalism-style of writing but at the same time, give them enough story and intrigue to want to keep a reader interested through the whole piece.

It will also be essential that you build good connections and contacts so you have people to interview or who can help you get in touch with people you could normally not get in touch with on your own.

On top of all of that, you will need to develop the art of pitching articles . For the most part, instead of being assigned articles from a magazine (although that can happen), you will need to find your own stories and angles and pitch them to magazines.

Do You Need To Go To School To Become A Magazine Writer?

For the most part, a lot of magazine writers majored in journalism, writing, or a related field.

While it is not always a necessity, it can help a lot when it comes to getting your foot in this field. Otherwise, if you do not go to school, you will need to make sure you write well and can make your work stand out on its own.

It might be harder to get your first few assignments, but it is certainly still possible.

How to Become A Magazine Writer

Okay, so now that you know what goes into magazine writing and the skills you need to succeed, let’s go over what it actually entails

#1 – Learn what it takes to do magazine writing

Before you start applying for magazine writing jobs, you will need to study how these pieces are put together . You might want to buy or subscribe to magazines that interest you and start to flip through them.

You might want to also take an online course in magazine writing or buy some books that can give you the frameworks you will need to succeed.

Keep in mind, you might also need to decide whether you want to work as a freelance writer or work to become a staff writer.

If you are a staff writer, you are only writing for one publication and will typically have a set salary. If you want to freelance, you can writer for a wide variety of magazines and you will often be paid per article.

#2 – Get experience with magazine writing

Whether you have a degree in journalism or not, you will still need to practice writing articles and putting them together in the same way magazines do.

More than anything, potential magazines will look at your portfolio before they decide to give you a shot. They want to be impressed with your work and be able to see that you know what you are doing.

This might mean you need to write samples on your own, do an internship, or even take on some free work just to get your foot in the door and start to put together samples.

#3 – Gather your samples and start to apply

You will want to take the time to put all of your samples into one place. In today’s modern world, that generally means you need to create an online portfolio of some kind.

Yes, some people choose to create physical portfolios to bring in when they meet potential employers, but the stronger your website is, the more likely they will want to work with you.

If you have written a lot of work, you might want to pick out the pieces that are more in line with what their specific magazine is so they can get an idea of what you can do for them.

Otherwise, you will want to pick your strongest written pieces to put in your portfolio.

If you choose to go the freelancing route, you will often be rejected more times than you can count in the beginning. This is just a natural part of the process and it is rarely personal. What matters is that you keep pitching anyway.

#4 – Optional: Develop an online presence

While having an online presence is not mandatory, it is certainly something that can help you grow your career as a magazine writer.

If you have a huge following, magazines are more likely to give you work because you can also distribute and promote your work to your audience, helping the magazine get more readers.

You can also use social media to network with other magazine editors, sources, and people in your space who can help you grow in this career.

Typical Salary For Magazine Writers

The average annual salary for a magazine writer is $72,487 per year .

However, the pay between some of the bottom magazine writers and the top magazine writers varies greatly. Some of the bottom salaries are around $20,000 a year while the top magazine writers make $125,000 a year.

If you are looking to get into this career, you will want to think deeply about writing for the top-tier magazine and making sure your skills are on a level of making decent money.

Want To Become A Professional Writer?

In this article, we covered magazine writing and how to get into it.

However, there are a ton of avenues you can pursue if you want to become a paid professional writer.

If you do not know the available career options out there, we have a writing career quiz that can help you figure out exactly which path is right for you.

Knowledge Base > Magazines > How to Write a Magazine Article? 12 Golden Rules

How to Write a Magazine Article? 12 Golden Rules

Although the number of magazines is shrinking in the digital age, many magazines have moved online. Many magazines created by online magazine maker are still popular, and authors enjoy fame and respect. That’s why, for many freelance writers, writing articles in magazines is often a career goal – because the pay can be ten times more per word than writing articles or texts for the local newspaper.

Writing magazine articles requires a different skill set than writing blog posts, screenplays, or advertisements. What’s more, as a magazine writer, more than in any other industry, you need to specialize to succeed. You write articles about history differently, sports differently, and sports history in a different way still.

A talent for writing, a love of meticulous research, and flexibility in creating texts are vital skills you need to master. Therefore, many people are interested in creating and publishing their own magazine need to master this specific style and learn how to write a magazine article.

What is a magazine article?

What is a magazine.

A magazine is a publication that is a collection of articles that appears regularly. The magazine articles can be about any topic, as well as topics that interest a specific group, such as sports fans, music fans, or board game enthusiasts.

A magazine can be published weekly, monthly, bimonthly, or only a few times a year. Most magazines are published once a week or once a month. Most magazine articles do not have a list of sources and are written by regular magazine editors and writers, rarely freelance writers.

Most magazine articles are easy to read and don’t take too long to read. They are often illustrated with photos or other images, and are written with simple but remarkable fonts . Today, magazines are increasingly being replaced by websites, but there are still many magazines on various topics.

A magazine article is a specific text that can be found in a magazine or newspaper. It can be a report, a profile of an important person, an opinion piece, a discussion of a topic or a personal essay. Depending on the topic, a magazine article is usually 1,000 to 5,000 words long.

The magazine usually employs a group of editors who come up with a theme for each issue and relevant article ideas. This way, all the articles and features in the issue will have something in common. A sports magazine might talk about the start of a new season, a political magazine about an upcoming election, and a Valentine’s Day issue might be about romance.

How the format of a magazine article differs from that of a newspaper or other articles? In a newspaper that comes out every day, put the most important parts of the story first. Newspaper articles are usually read once and aren’t supposed to influence anyone. It has to be news, something you want to read.

On the other hand, a good magazine article should often start with a mystery, a question, or a situation that makes the reader want to read on. Daily newspaper articles should be unbiased descriptions of what happened, while magazine articles, often subjective, can cover a particular topic from a certain angle. To learn how to write a magazine article, you need to know what the magazine is about and how to appeal to its readers.

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Types and examples of magazine articles

Magazine editors categorize articles by type and often mention them in publication’s submission guidelines, so knowing these types by name will help you communicate with the editor. These are: First Person Article, Opinion Piece, Information or Service Piece, Personality Profile, and Think Piece. Many news articles, how-to articles, and reviews can also be found in magazines, but they are slightly different, and many of these have moved online, to digital magazines . Articles can also feature essays or humor pieces.

First Person Article

First-person magazine articles are written in the first person because they are based on personal experience. Depending on their length and newsworthiness, they can be sold as feature articles or essays. They are frequently personal accounts, especially interesting if they are written by a well-known magazine writer or celebrity. Typically, the purpose of such an article is stated in the first line or paragraph to hook the magazine’s target audience, such as “I voted for this politician, and now I regret my life choices.” When you write a magazine article like this one, you should present an unpopular or overlooked point of view from a fresh perspective.

Opinion Piece

This kind of magazine writing piece or opinion essay is less personal than the First-Person Article, but it still requires a narrow focus on a specific topic. The reader’s main question is, “Why are you qualified to render an opinion?” Everyone has an opinion, but why should anyone read yours?

If you’re an expert on this subject, let the reader know right away. Don’t criticize music trends if you’re not a musician! Demonstrate your knowledge, and support your opinion with up-to-date information and credentials.

Information/Service Piece

An informational or service piece expands the reader’s understanding of a particular subject. This can be a guide, a list of important issues. You can either be the expert or interview one. These are extremely pertinent to a specific industry. In a sports magazine article, you can explain a complete history of a sports team and its roster for the upcoming season.

You can expect some in-depth knowledge if the article title contains the phrases like Myths about or Secrets of. Explain everything you know: magazine journalism is different than being a freelance writer in that you should have some industry knowledge already.

Personality profile

This type of magazine article can present a silhouette of an important or relevant person – a politician, a political activist, a sports legend… If you’re writing for a video game magazine you can showcase a famous game designer or even an entire article can be about a game character like Lara Croft or Guybrush Threepwood, if the fictional character is detailed enough! Explain why readers will find this person interesting or noteworthy.

Think Piece

Written in an investigative tone, the think piece frequently shows the downside or less popular ideas of a popular industry aspect. This magazine article could also explain why something is popular or why a political party lost elections. A think piece is more in-depth than most feature articles and necessitates credibility. Confirm your thesis by interviewing analysts and experts. This type of article can be also found in zines , self-published magazines in small circulation, which often focus on niche hobbies, counterculture groups, or subcultures. If you would like to expend your knowledge about interviewing, make sure to check our guide on how to write an interview article .

How to start a magazine article?

Most creative writing professionals would agree that the best way to start writing a magazine article is with a strong opening sentence. A feature article must draw the attention of your target audience, and grab them from the go.

You can start by asking the reader a question which you will answer in the text of the article – for instance “Did you know that most users of Windows never use 80% of their functions – and that’s a good thing?”. In the content of your magazine articles you will be able to answer this question.

Another example of a good magazine article beginning is storytelling – human brains are fascinated by stories. Starting your example with “20 years ago no one in the industry knew what a genitine was, but now their inventor is one of the most influential people” can draw attention and spike up curiosity.

A great example is also a shocking quote – a compelling idea that goes against the grain is sure to capture the reader’s attention.

Most creative magazine article ideas

Even the most experienced journalists can often be looking for ideas for great articles. How to write a magazine article if you don’t have the slightest idea? Here are some of our suggestions:

Take a look at your specialty. If you’re a freelance writer, it’s a good idea to write about what you know. Delve into a topic thoroughly, and you’ll eventually find your niche and you might move from freelance writing jobs to magazine writing! Why? Having a writing specialty will make magazine editors think of you when story ideas in that genre come up.

Check out what’s trending. When browsing popular stories on social networks, many freelancers choose to write about current events. Lists of popular articles can help you understand what to focus your efforts on. Keep in mind that an article for national magazines needs to be well researched, and what’s trending now may change before the magazine finally comes out.

Reach out to the classics. Nostalgia always sells well. You can go back to books or movies that people remember from their youth or, for example, summarize the last year. Lists and numbers always look good!

12 rules on how to write great magazine articles

1. Write what you know about

If your articles are really fascinating and you know what you are writing about, you have a better chance of getting published, whether in a local newspaper or in a major magazine. Writing requires researching your chosen issue thoroughly. Identify perspectives that have not been explored before – describe something from the perspective of a woman, a minority, or a worker.

2. Research how you should write

Check the writing style requirements or guidelines of the magazines to which you want to submit your work. Each magazine has its own set of guidelines on what topics, manner and tone to use. Check out Strunk and White Elements of Style for tips on writing styles, as this is what many magazines draw from.

3. Remember to be flexible

One of the most valuable writing talents a journalist can possess is flexibility. You may find that you discover completely new facts while writing a magazine article and completely change your approach. Maybe you’ll change your mind 180 degrees and instead of attacking someone, you’ll defend them – anything to attract attention.

4. Make connections and meet people

Networking is important in any business, especially for freelance writers who want to make a jump to magazine writing. Editors regularly quit one magazine to work for another. Therefore, remember to know the people first and foremost than the magazine they work for.

5. Prepare a query letter

A query letter tells the editors why your magazine article is important, whether you think someone will want to read it and why you feel obligated to write it. Add to it a text sample and some information about yourself as a writer. Even a local magazine might not be aware of who you are, after all.

6. Prepare an outline

Always before writing a text have an outline that you can use when composing your articles. It must contain the important ideas, the content of the article body and the summary, the points you will include in it. You will find that it is easier to fill such a framework with your own content.

7. Meet the experts

You need to know pundits in your industry. There are several methods of locating experts, from networking to calling organizations or agencies in your field of interest. If you want to meet a police officer, call the police station and ask if someone could talk to a journalist – many people are tempted if you promise them a feature article.

8. Talk to experts

Once you get a contact for an expert, do your best to make the expert look as good as possible. The more prominent the expert, the better your text. Make a list of questions in advance and compare it with the outline to make sure you don’t forget anything. Remember to accurately describe your expert’s achievements and personal data.

9. Create a memorable title

This step can occur at any point in the process of writing an article for a magazine. Sometimes the whole article starts with a good title! However, there is nothing wrong with waiting until the article is finished before coming up with a title. The most important thing is that the title is catchy – editors-in-chief love that!

10. To write, you have to read

You never know where you will come across an inspiring text. It’s your duty as a good writer to read everything that falls into your hands, whether it’s articles on the front pages of major publications or small blog posts. Learn about the various issues that may be useful to your magazine writing skills .

11. Add a strong ending

End with a strong concluding remark that informs or elaborates on the theme of your piece. The last paragraph should make the reader satisfied, but also curious about the future progress of the issue. He must wonder “what’s next?” and answer the important questions himself.

12. Don’t give up

Writers are rejected hundreds of times, especially when they are initially learning how to create articles for magazines. However, even a seasoned freelance writer and professional journalist can get rejected. The most successful authors simply keep writing – being rejected is part of magazine writing. Freelance writing is a good school of writing career – including coping with rejection.

Now you know how to write a magazine article that will be engaging and interesting. Despite the digitalization of the market, writing magazine articles still offers many possibilities to a freelance writer or a seasoned professional. The market of press and magazines is evolving fast, but the basic principles of journalistic integrity stay the same!

You may be also interested in:

How To Publish Digital Magazine? How to Make a Magazine Cover With a Template? 5 Reasons to Start Using a Magazine Maker

Jakub Osiejewski is an experienced freelance writer and editor. He has written for various publications, including magazines, newspapers and websites. He is also a skilled layout graphic designer and knows exactly how to create visually appealing and informative PDFs and flipbooks!

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• Write for Magazines: 21 Publications That Pay $500+ Per Assignment

Evan Jensen

1. AARP, The Magazine

2. alaska beyond, 3. the atlantic, 4. chatelaine magazine, 5. delta sky, 6. discover magazine, 7. early american life, 8. earth island journal, 9. eating well, 10. enroute, 11. family circle, 13. green entrepreneur, 14. hakai magazine, 15. hemispheres, 16. kitplanes, 17. liisbeth, 18. popular science, 20. smithsonian, 21. the sun, get paid to write for magazines.

It’s a great way to make a living writing if you pitch the right publications. How about $500 or more per assignment?

If you’ve been cranking out magazine stories for $50 to $150 a pop, you may be wondering if that’s really even possible. That’s often the going rate for local, regional, or small-circulation magazines.

If you want to write for magazines, and have limited experience, these are great places to get some clips, and earn some money, but it shouldn’t be your last stop.

Many consumer and trade magazines pay $500 or more per assignment. And the pitching process is pretty much the same as smaller pubs:

• Identify a magazine you want to write for
• Study the submission guidelines
• Develop a solid story idea
• Do a little research and interview a source
• Write a killer query letter, and pitch your story idea to an editor

If you can do that, you’ve got the chops to get paid well to write for any magazine on the market . But you need to know where to look for those $500-plus assignments. Check out these 21 magazines to find freelance writing jobs .

Here’s an interesting fact about the magazine published for readers over age 50. AARP has the highest circulation of any magazine in the United States, with more than 35 million subscribers.

That also means it pays well, on average $1/word or $1,500 per assignment. Publishes news, features, how-tos, and essays about money, health and fitness, food, travel, relationships, and more for over-50 readers.

AARP  may be a tough magazine to crack for newbies, but it’s not impossible. Smart networking efforts and a solid story idea helped Freelance Writers Den member Willi Morris land an assignment with AARP , one of her dream clients.

Contact: Senior Editor George Mannes or Features Editor George Blooston

Not all in-flight magazines openly publish writer’s guidelines, but  Alaska Beyond is one that does. About 75 percent of this magazine is written by freelancers. Best way to break in: Pitch a short piece for “The Feed” department. Then you’re a lot more likely to land higher paying assignments (up to $700) for travel, news, and feature stories.

Contact: Editor Paul Frichtl

If you want to write for The Atlantic , a magazine that covers news and analysis on politics, business, culture, technology, national, international and political life, read this by former Atlantic staffer Garance Franke-Ruta: “ How (not) to pitch: A guide for freelance writers .”

FYI –  The Atlantic is also open to working with new freelancers. It’s where Freelance Writers Den member Douglas Fitzpatrick landed his first magazine assignment as a newbie for a piece about the career trajectory of Donald Trump.

Want to write for  The Atlantic?  Study the magazine and  pitch an idea with a query first . Pays $150 to $1,600 depending on assignment.

Contact: See department staff info here

Chatelaine is a popular monthly women’s magazine in Canada that covers health and fitness, finance, social issues, fashion, beauty, food, and home decor. It’s target audience is active women ages 25 to 54.

“The Health section covers the latest news and studies, gives fitness and workout tips and explores hot-button issues,” says Managing Editor Laura Brown. Query with a story idea first. Pays an average of $1/word or $1,500 per assignment.

Contact:  Managing Editor Laura Brown

If you’re interested in writing for custom pubs for airlines, pitch the in-flight magazine Delta Sky . Carol Tice happens to be a regular contributor, including a  story in the November 2018 issue.

Pitch story ideas about food, sports, lifestyle, business, and travel (including international destinations). The current issue includes stories about destinations around the world like Seoul, Korea, Beijing, China, Grenada, and must-see places across the U.S.

Contact: Editor Sarah Elbert

If you customized your search in  Writer’s Market to find magazines that pay the highest rate, this is one that would rise to the top of the list. How about $2/word or $3,000 for a 1,500-word feature story.

This science-based magazines features stories about medical research, scientific breakthroughs, technology, physics, space travel, and even paleontology. Keep in mind it’s written for a lay audience, so academic language won’t get you an assignment.

Want to write for Discover? Here’s some advice from freelancer  Susan Etchey : “The only way a new writer has a chance to get the attention of its editors is to have an explosive, compelling untold science story to tell.”

Contact: Senior Editor  Gemma Tarlach  or another member of the  editorial team .

From colonization to life in the mid-1800s, this magazine features stories about history, architecture, antiques, crafts, and travel destinations for people interested in early American life.

In the most recent issue, you’ll learn about rolling pins from the Colonial era, the evolution of the bald eagle as America’s mascot, brewing in the 1700s, and more.

Know how to dig up the bones to pitch a story about early American life? It’s worth the effort. This pub pays an average of $500 to $2,000 per assignment.

Contact: Executive Editor Jenmarie Andrews

If you want to write for  Earth Island Journal , follow the first rule of writing for any magazine. Read it. Study back issues.

In the current issue, you’ll learn about Donald Trumps rhetoric about the environment, the trouble with hydroponic growing and our food supply, bee conservation, a curious new way to clean up trash, and more.

Pays an average of $1,000 per assignment for stories about science, technology, the environment, and people making a difference.

Contact: Editor Maureen Nandini Mitra

Get in line at the grocery story, and you might see this magazine on the news stand. But it’s not just a magazine filled with recipes, photos of tasty food, and tips for healthy eating.

There’s a lot more “meat” in the pages of Eating Well that explains the science behind the taste, textures, and flavors that make food delicious. If you can combine smart storytelling with science and food, write a query letter and pitch an idea.  Eating Well pays an average of $1/word.

Contact :  Associate Nutrition Editor Julia Westbrook  or another member of the editorial team.

Glamping, conservation efforts, fishing for a record-setting marlin, and a Canadian’s guide to the Louvre. Those are just a few of the the types of stories featured in Air Canad’s in-flight magazine enRoute.

“We engage our audience through intelligent writing, insight, humour and spot-on service journalism,” says Editor-in-chief Jean-François Légaré. Study the guidelines, back issues, and  media kit  before pitching a story idea.

Contact: Editor Caitlin Walsh Miller

How do you run a house, pursue a career, take care of kids, eat healthy, look good, and feel good? It’s the kind of answers you’ll find in the articles published in Family Circle magazine. It’s a national women’s magazine with a circulation of around 4.2 million readers, and a healthy budget to pay freelancers $1/word.

Need some story ideas? In the current issue, you’ll find stories about raising teenagers, the struggle to lose weight and keep it off, popular vacation spots for kids, and more

Contact:  Associate Editor Caroline Mullen or another member of the editorial staff .

Carol Tice spend over a decade writing about business, commerce, entrepreneurship, finance, and big businesses like Amazon and Microsoft. And it was the perfect proving ground for her to land a long-term gig writing for Forbes.

This business magazine is among the most recognized for publishing stories about the people, businesses, and trends in entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, and more. And it’s good for freelancers. Forbes pays an average of $1/word and up.

In the most current issue, you’ll learn about tennis phenom Serena Williams smart investing strategies. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the deal to build Trump Tower. You’ll be exposed to a new perspective on climate change truths that may impact everyone’s bottom line, and more.

Contact: Senior Editor Susan Adams or another member of the editorial staff.

Last year, Entrepreneur  magazine launched  GreenEntrepreneur.com , to give readers that latest news about entrepreneurship, business, technology and lifestyle aspects of the cannabis industry.

“Rarely does a new industry explode with the exponential success that the legal marijuana trade has experienced,” Entrepreneur Media President Bill Shaw, said in a press release.

If you want to write for  Green Entrepreneur , study the guidelines and pitch a story idea about the cannabis industry. Pays up to $1.50/word.

Looking for story ideas? The latest buzz in Green Entrepreneur includes stories about a new weed vaporizor that may popularize smoking marijuana, a $400 million shopping spree spent on cannabis, the latest news about legalization, and more.

Contact:  Executive Editor Jonathan Small

If you want to write about archaeology, ecology, biology, geology, and oceanography of marine coastal environments, take a closer look at Hakai magazine.

You’ve got the chops to write for this magazine that pays up to $1/word if you have solid journalism experience, research skills, and the ability to interview sources.

“We are interested in great stories and strong voices,” says Editor Jude Isabella. “We tilt toward science and environmental stories, but we’re also interested in people and communities and how they interact with coastal ecosystems.”

Pitch short news stories about coastal environmental topics (500 to 800 words), or an in-depth feature (1,000 to 5,000 words).

If you can provide video (five minutes or less) or content for an infographic, to go with your story, your chances of acceptance go up.

Contact:   Editor Jude Isabella

The United Airlines in-flight magazine,  Hemispheres , happens to be one of two in-flight magazines listed in  Writer’s Market  listed with a $$$ pay rate.

Translation: This magazine pays freelancers an average of $750 to $1,500 per assignment. Publishes stories about global culture, adventure, business, entertainment, and sports .

Inside the current issue, you’ll find stories about must-see-and-do activities in Chicago, insights on life, career and relationships from actress Kristen Bell, moon-landing anniversary celebration tips, and more.

Contact: Editor Ellen Carpenter

This is what the Wright Brothers inspired more than 100 years ago:  build a plane from a kit, and fly it.

You might not think a highly-niche magazine with a small circulation (about 72,000 readers). But Kitplanes pays well enough to be included in this list, up to $1,000 per assignment.

Pitch story ideas about building and design, flight testing, construction techniques, personal experience, and features on the people and businesses who are involved in building personal aircraft.

Contact: Editor Paul Dye

Before you pitch a story idea to this feminist-focused magazine that covers entrepreneurship, innovation, social issues, and the politics and policies of business, be sure to read the LiisBeth Manifesto .

If you can pitch a story idea that jives with that about people and businesses making a difference, you’re on your way landing an assignment that pays up to $1,500 U.S. You best bet for a well-paid assignment…pitch a story idea for a profile, how-to, or investigative feature.

Contact:  Editor Margaret Webb — This email no longer works. Per the publication guidelines, you can send queries to [email protected] – or do some sleuthing and find another editor contact!

If science and technology writing for an educated lay audience is your niche, don’t waste another minute waiting to pitch Popular Science. It’s one of the oldest magazines still in existence with roots dating back to the late 1800s.

It’s got a circulation of about 1.5 million readers, and a healthy budget to pay freelancers. How about $2/word or $1,000-plus per assignment?

Need story ideas? In the current issue, you’ll read about new threats posed by the Zika virus, rapidly-evolving drone technology, a cookie-test kitchen in outer space, and more.

Contact: Senior Editor Rachel Feltman

When Sierra magazine editor Jason Mark stepped into his new role a few years ago, he had just walked through Nevada’s Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, surrounded by massive wildfires. That solo experience shaped his mission to lead this magazine dedicated to causes to protect the planet, natural spaces, and outdoor recreation.

“I keep thinking about that trip to the Sierra, which seems emblematic of the challenges facing the environmental movement today,” says Mark. “We want to celebrate and enjoy the big, open spaces we love. At the same time, we have to be always on guard to protect those places. ”

This is the magazine for Sierra Club members. Pitch story ideas about outdoor adventure, environmental issues, and people on a mission to “explore, enjoy, and protect the planet.” Pays $1/word and up per assignment.

Contact: Editor Jason Mark

Did you know the Smithsonian Institute includes 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and 2.7 million square feet of indoor space? There’s a lot to know and a lot to learn about the past, present and future of science, technology, the environment, and even the universe.

And you can write about it for the  Smithsonian  magazine and get paid well. The  Smithsonian  pays freelancers $1-$3/per word, which means a $500 assignment is more than realistic. So how do you break into this magazine?

“There has to be something surprising and narratively interesting there,” says  Senior Editor Jenny Rothenberg Gritz . “If the story is about the natural world, either the person you’re writing about has to be super charismatic and interesting, or something done about the issue has to be amazing.”

Contact: Associate Editor Thomas Stackpole or another member of the editorial staff.

Here’s an interesting way to differentiate yourself as a news and literary magazine…no advertising. That’s the Sun’s approach to focus on great writing.

This magazine has been around for 40-plus years, and is looking for essays, interviews, and story ideas about political and cultural issues. The Sun  pays up to $2,000 per assignment.

“We’ve been described in many ways,” says Editor and Publisher Sy Safransky. “Celebratory, fierce, unflinching, thoughtful, truthful, dark, darkly funny, tender.”

And it shows in recent articles on food inequalities in the U.S., an outsider’s view from inside the commercial fishing industry, the uncanny sense for home that dog’s have, and more.

Contact: Senior Editor Andrew Snee or another member of the editorial staff .

If you’re looking for magazines that pay $500 or more per assignment, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Lots of magazines pay pro rates.

• Check Writer’s Market (print or online) for more. Skip over the magazines that pay low rates, and focus those that pay $1/word or more.
• Get in touch with the editors at custom pubs and trade magazines . These mags frequently work with freelance writers and pay pro rates, but aren’t as easy to find as consumer pubs in Writer’s Market .
• Keep on pitching. Then work through the process to study the magazine, develop a story idea, and write a killer query letter. If you can do this for magazines that pay lower-rates, you can do it for bigger magazines that pay top dollar.

What well-paying magazines do you write for? Tell us in the comments below.

Evan Jensen is a contributing writer for Make a Living Writing. When he’s not on a writing deadline or catching up on emails, he’s training to run another 100-mile ultra-marathon.

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If your mind jumps to the old-school newspaper section with editorials, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor, you’re probably thinking it’s a waste of time.

But writing op-ed pieces is still a thing. I’ve done it. And if you know where to look, the right markets pay well.

Getting paid $300 to $1,500 for opinion pieces, essays, and editorials is still happening.

Let the ideas begin to percolate…

Maybe you’ve learned a few lessons at the School of Hard Knocks. Maybe you’ve got some insight, views, expertise, or opinions about issues in your niche. Or maybe some comment on social media is so hot, you’ve got to take a stand.

Chances are pretty good you’ve got an opinion piece in you worth writing. Check out these 10 op-ed writing markets to share your point of view and get paid for it.

Writer Income 2023: What You Need To Know To Succeed

We're looking at writer income 2023 stats and trends to give professional writers and freelance writers an idea of what's happening throughout the industry. Many people wonder if it is worth it to become a freelance writer in 2023, especially with the rise artificial...

Writing for Magazine: Types, Characteristics, Difference, Writing Styles

What is magazine.

A magazine is a publication that is issued periodically. It generally contains essays, stories, poems, articles, fiction, recipes, images, etc. Magazines are directed at a general and special audience, often published on a weekly or monthly basis.

Table of Contents

A magazine can also be considered as a cabinet of curiosities; i.e. a display case in which interesting, unusual, and occasionally ‘eccentric’ objects are collected and displayed as a conversation piece or an expression of the writer’s wide-ranging interests or tastes.

The readers are treated with a fascinating, mind-expanding, and unique set of wonders they had never dreamt of.

Characteristics of Magazines

Characteristics of magazines While popular magazines provide broad overviews of topics, scholarly journals provide in-depth analysis of topics and report the findings of the research, and trade magazines report on industry trends, new products, or techniques.

A popular magazine that caters to the general public uses non-technical language. The contents of these magazines include interviews, general interest articles, and various types of features. They usually cover a wide range of topics based on research, source comments, and generalizations.

Articles are usually written by a staff writer or a journalist; in some cases, interesting articles of freelancers are also encouraged. They generally contain many interesting and sometimes sensuous photographs to attract readers.

In general, magazine articles are easy to read, fairly brief in length, and may include illustrations or photographs. Magazines don’t necessarily follow a specific format or structure in writing the articles.

Its attractive appearance, eye-catching cover pictures, and illustrations on quality paper make it more appealing to the reading public. Magazines also contain many colorful and impressive advertisements.

Difference between Newspaper and Magazine

Newspapers and magazines are two important forms of print media that are read by millions of people around the world. Some of the most common differences between newspapers and magazines can be seen through their size and appearance, content, style, target audience, design and layout, readability, and advertisements.

Let’s discuss the difference between newspapers and magazines :

Size and Appearance

Design and layout, target audience, readability, display ads, visual strength.

Newspapers are bigger in size and they can be folded. A story above the middle fold on the front page of a newspaper is considered the most important story and one that appears just below the fold is generally the second most important story.

If there are many important stories on a newspaper page, then the treatment given to a story will decide its importance: such as photos/graphics with a more important story and with no visual elements in other stories. The eyes of a reader can scan an entire page without a fold.

A magazine tends to have a “book-type” size while the newspaper is really meant to be spread arm’s length for the reader to grasp its contents.

Newspapers deal with reports clearly, briefly, and objectively. A magazine writer focuses on specialized topics and current issues of public interest. Newspapers remain the primary source of authentic, reliable, and latest information about what is happening around the world and even in one’s own locality.

But magazines are not sources of fresh content to the extent of publishing the breaking news. However, its content is specialized and recent in nature. Thus, we have various magazines such as entertainment, science, share markets, sports, glamour, and movies.

Newspapers are more versatile in content and hence they never fall short of content as there is always something happening in different parts of the world. On the other hand, magazine content is always based on the liking of the readers of diverse backgrounds.

Newspapers focus on catchy headlines to create interest in the reader. Many reporters and editors are employed in newspapers to prepare specialized reports and interpretative articles. But magazines have lesser staff. A magazine writer has more freedom to express or has more room for subjectivity.

She/he has the tenacity and freedom to express things in a creative manner. It further enhances the writer’s mastery of the expression by imploring these seemingly circular methods of self-expression.

The newspaper writer on the other hand is compounded to a somewhat strict, strong, and straight writing mostly based on facts and figures.

Newspapers are known for their simple layout and design . While the content is usually in black and white, the style and font are fairly consistent throughout. Magazines have much more visual expression than newspapers because magazines are not subject to one consistent layout.

Magazines use lots of colors, different types and sizes of fonts, and break up their articles with images and color.

The main difference between a newspaper and a magazine is that newspapers are written for a general audience , while magazines are for specific types of audiences. A magazine attracts varied target audiences . A newspaper’s target audience is determined by its geography and its focus is broad.

Here, the editor determines what the people should read, what they want and desire. In contrast, a magazine’s target audience is determined by demographics and interests. (‘Demographics’ means the physical characteristics of the individual such as race, gender, interest, education level, etc.).

News stories are usually written in a matter-of-fact style. But magazines employ colorful language so as to make the content enjoyable.

The newspaper readability level corresponds to a difficult classification built around tight grammatical and syntactical rules. Linguistic subjectivity which relies on expressive adjectives enhances the readability of magazines.

Though magazines and newspapers both provide readers with information, their format and appeal differ considerably. Magazines are more advertiser-driven than newspapers. Newspapers are slightly different in this regard. Newspapers are driven more by readership than by advertisers.

They focus more on catchy headlines in an effort to capture the reader’s interest and get him to read the entire story. Part of the reason for this is that people often associate what they read with an ad they see near the piece. Our minds just naturally attach and group objects and associations together.

Advertising giants know this and place their ads exactly in proper alignment with stories and articles they want to associate with their products on those specialized magazines.

The visual strength of magazines is enhanced with the effective use of color in magazines. In magazines, we can also use a color background whereas newspapers normally have only a white background. This means you can present more attractive color contrasts in your magazine visuals.

Another strength of magazines is a longer life . Newspapers are read-only once and then discarded. In contrast, magazines are commonly kept for several days, weeks, or months in magazine racks which provides for possible repeat reading.

Magazines use some of the highest-quality paper and ink to produce a visually appealing product meant to be kept and read longer than a newspaper. Magazines tend to focus on entertainment pieces, provide how-to-do articles and features about certain subjects within their chosen marketing niche.

Magazines also have advertisements taking up large amounts of page space to balance the cost of production.

Basics of Magazine Writing

The joy of magazine writing lies in its variety. Anything from a celebrity interview to a food recipe can be the topic for magazine articles and this variety demands versatility. Coverage of events for magazines offers challenges as well as opportunities to journalists.

A creative flair and innovative skill may help in producing masterpieces and also in creating an everlasting impression on the reader’s mind. The language used depends, to a certain extent, on the objective of the magazine.

Literary style is generally preferred by the magazine press. Thus magazine writing requires a different way of thinking, writing, and structuring. Effective magazine writing is accessible, interesting, lively, colorful, grabbing, and relevant.

Whatever be the type of publication a journalist writes for, the basic approach is the same: write for your readers. However, good writing for magazines depends on the adherence to some well-known guidelines.

Though there are not many lengthy rules, there are guidelines a magazine writer should follow to produce a stylish copy. The most important among them can be summarized as follows:

• Know whom you are writing for, their interests and concerns.
• Know what you want to say and achieve.
• Always prefer the concrete to the abstract.
• Be accurate and readable.
• Have an attention grabbing intro.
• Spend considerable time thinking about fresh ways to ap-proach the subject.
• Keep materials and sentences short.
• Promote a vibrant style.
• Know the publication’s editorial policy to achieve your di-rection.

Magazine writers often develop a strong personal style that is opinionated, anecdotal, and gossipy while developing the content. The quality of the content and style are equally important. The wordplay and tricks of style make the piece entertaining to read.

How to Structure Magazine Article

As soon as you’re ready to write a magazine article, you need to think about structure. With magazine articles, you can move beyond the inverted pyramid style of news by scattering important points throughout the article .

Tell a Story

The beginning, extra credit.

The important thing to remember is that you’re telling a story to your readers. That means you need a beginning, a middle, and an end. It also means you need to think about where you’re taking your reader and create a logical path to that endpoint.

To get people to read your article, you need to find a way to grab them. For example, you can begin an article with a quote or an anecdote from a person’s life. However, you can also set the scene or use anything that will attract the reader’s attention.

With most magazine articles, you talk to a person or people. People like reading about other people, so if your interviewee says something good, use a quote rather than the reported speech. This makes your magazine article more interesting.

Finally, end with a bang. This could be in the form of an important point, a revelation, or another anecdote or quote. The idea is to satisfy your reader and to get that reader interested in your other writings as well.

When you do research for an article, you often have information left over that didn’t make it into the main piece. Don’t get rid of this. Use it to create a sidebar or table (editors will love this), or as the starting point for another article.

Magazine Writing Styles

Let us now discuss some of the common styles used by the magazines in their presentation of articles:

Narrative Writing

Serialised narrative writing, descriptive writing, persuasive writing, imaginative writing, visual writing, multiple inverted pyramid.

Narratives are works that provide an account of connected events. In a narrative style, you’ll need to tell a story in such a way that the audience learns a lesson or gains insight. Narrative writing is a type of writing in which the author places himself as the character and leads you to the story.

Here, is a narrative, a story or event is told through characters and dialogues. Narrative writing has definite and logical beginnings, intervals, and endings. Narrative writing uses many literary techniques to provide deeper meaning for the reader and it also helps the reader use his / her imagination to visualize situations.

Literary techniques include metaphors, similes, personification, imagery, hyperbole, alliteration, back story, flashback, flash-forward, foreshadowing, and narrative perspective or point of view.

In this style, you cannot find out what’s going to happen next. You have to wait. Here the writer really understands how to hold a reader by his/her side and make them stick on with the piece till the end. That’s the skill absolutely essential for this style of writing.

The first and most essential quality of a serial narrative is that it has to be immensely, intensely, and inescapably readable. They should have a powerful pull on all readers with the power of a delicious sense of enforced writing.

Descriptive writing focuses on describing a character, an event, or a place in great detail. It is sometimes poetic in nature in which the author is specifying the details of the event rather than just the information of that event.

In a descriptive style, the writer needs to describe a person, object, or event so vividly that the reader feels like s/he could reach out and touch it. The writer attempts to convey as many of the senses related to the subject as possible for a clearer understanding of what is being described.

Descriptive writing has a unique power and appeal, as it evokes sensory description through sights, smells, sounds, textures, and tastes through the text to your reader.

This writing revolves around convincing someone. Persuasion requires great skill and effort to convince your readers to endorse your opinion or viewpoint. You write with the sole objective of persuading your readers. Persuasive writing utilizes the power of words to confidently and passionately convey a very important matter.

Such writings are usually written with precision and authority. Persuasive texts are set out to argue and prove a case by presenting ideas that follow a logical progression. It aims to convince a targeted audience of the validity of a viewpoint on an issue by presenting logical arguments.

Imaginative writings present ideas, issues, and arguments in an imaginative and credible way through the description, characters, settings, figurative language, the five senses, etc. Imaginative writing assumes the form of fiction, specifically short stories.

Depending on the idea, the imaginative article can discuss anything from space travel to civil rights. Because of this wide variation, some imaginative pieces require a very serious response, while others invite a much more light-hearted, fantastic one.

Usually, imaginative write-ups start with a hypothetical situation and ask how you would respond to it. It should be credible and plausible and must convey information through the description and figurative language. Add sensory details and realistic conversation.

Also include imaginary interactions with the characters. The characters should be dynamic in nature and they should see things differently or act differently by the end of the story. Narrate and describe events, characters, and situations.

Visual writing is a good language for storytelling in any medium. It focuses on the mind, distinctive details from the intricately interconnected experiences of the individual. Visual writing creates depth, quality, and pacing.

The visual style isn’t an extension of the writing, but it has to be embedded into the writing in a way that the reader may not even be aware of its presence. This means the visual style is not about adding more but enriching an already existing text.

Visual communication engages meaningful experiences and feelings within individuals through richly embedded image symbols which are conveyed either directly through text or indirectly through other senses.

In the field of magazine journalism , the term ‘multiple inverted pyramid approach’ refers to a style of writing which informs and entertains the readers through self-sufficiently built plots of information, each of which may be arranged in the form of an inverted pyramid.

The fact is that the idea of the whole story is spilled in the first paragraph itself. The reader can decide whether to continue reading the details or to go into something else. But even if the reader stops at a certain point, this form of writing may provide some essential facts to the readers.

Types of Magazines

Today, there are thousands of magazines worldwide. They inspire, inform, educate and entertain audiences across the globe. Nearly 600 years after the advent of the printing press, magazines continue to change the nature of things throughout the world.

The major types of magazines are briefly explained below:

General Interest Magazines

Special interest magazines, farm magazines, sports magazines, business magazines, environmental magazines, entertainment magazines, automobile magazines, children’s magazines, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, literary magazines.

This type of magazine is published for a wider audience to provide information, in a general manner and the focus is on many different subjects. The main purpose of a general interest magazine is to provide information for the general audience. No background knowledge or expertise is assumed.

Articles usually provide broad coverage of topics of current interest. They are written by journalists, freelance writers, or staff correspondents of the magazine. These periodicals may be quite attractive in appearance, with articles often heavily illustrated with photographs.

The language of these publications is geared to any educated audience. There is no especially assumed target audience. Mere interest and a certain level of intelligence are only required to read and enjoy such magazines.

These are usually published by commercial enterprises, though some are published by professional organizations. Examples of general-interest periodicals are Time, Newsweek, Outlook, India Today, and The Week.

Special interest publications are magazines directed at specific groups of readers with common interests. Most special interest magazines cater to any specific interests or pursuits. For instance, there are magazines that cover sports, news, fashion, business, music, and so on.

While some attempt to cover all aspects of a broad subject, others are concerned only with a particular element of the general subject. Sports Illustrated, for example, contains stories on practically any sport, but Golf Digest carries only stories related to golf.

Other special interest publications find their audiences through different demographic segmentation. There are magazines published primarily for men (Field and Stream, Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ), etc.), women (Woman’s World, Grihalekshmi, Vanitha, etc.), boys (Boys’ Life) and girls (Teen Vogue). Specialized periodicals also serve most professions, industries, and organizations.

These are magazines featuring news and information pertaining to the agricultural sector. It is a resource for farmers and vendors of farmers’ markets.

There are various farm magazines that contain information about various farming equipment, farming practices, ideas and technology suitable to small and big farms, raising unusual livestock, growing high-value crops, direct marketing of their products to bring in more income, the latest techniques for growing bountiful, nutritious crops and many more articles that could provide information to the farmers who are their target audience.

They also share the success stories of artisans and farmers, on government policies and programs, and also about how to promote their business by reaching new customers and develop value-added products.

A sports magazine usually features articles or segments on sports comprising of many photographic images and illustrations. Some magazines concentrate on all general sports news and related issues while others concentrate on specific sports or games such as football, baseball, athletics, etc.

But the common aim of any sports magazine is to take fans inside the game and provide a mix of columns, features, profiles of their favorite players, scores, statistics, and analysis of the game.

News and information about sports, reviews, interviews, expert advice, player profiles, season previews, predictions, and pre-game analysis as well as quality photos are some of the main ingredients in a sports magazine.

Most of these magazines are dedicated to the dissemination of information related to particular business areas like accounting, banking, finance, international business, management, marketing and sales, real estate, small business, etc.

They explore the latest news and reviews on current trends in the world of business. Business magazines offer readers an unparalleled look at business and economic news, with incomparable access to business drivers around the globe.

It also provides the most recent news about trends and developments in global business, financial markets, and personal finance.

The aim of this type of magazine is to provide information about environmental issues and to share ideas about our very diverse and dynamic environment so that readers can live more sustainable lives and connect themselves to ideas and ongoing efforts for change, as well as for building a more just and sustainable future.

They cover everything environmental – from the big issues like climate change, renewable energy, toxins, and health to the topics that directly impact the readers’ daily lives: population, poverty, consumption, and the environment in general.

In-depth reviews of major policy reports, conferences, environmental education initiatives, environmental reports, and photos from around the world with an emphasis on human involvement in an environmentally changed scenario are some of the highlighted features of environmental magazines .

Entertainment magazines are usually glossy in nature and provide entertainment. They usually carry news, original stories, scandals, gossips, and exclusives about celebrities in various entertainment fields such as film, music, TV, fashion, and related similar areas of the industry.

Cultural criticism, beauty, lifestyle trends, and shopping guides also find expression in such magazines. As its main focus is on celebrity fashion or lifestyle, it is graphically rich in nature, featuring many photographs or other images.

Automobile magazines offer a rich and varied examination of the automotive universe in all its forms, illustrated with vibrant photography. They present interesting automotive news in the industry and celebrate the automotive lifestyle and its personalities, past and present.

It also offers insights into emerging trends in the industry and also creates images of whatever comes next in the written and visual form.

Updates in the motor vehicle arena such as newly arrived cars and bikes, contemporary style of vehicles, recommendations to buyers, reviews of newly launched vehicles are some of the attractive elements in these magazines.

The main aim of children’s magazines is to engage children to learn new things through entertainment and to provide memories that last a lifetime. The content is delivered through colorful images, read-aloud stories, and various fun activities that both the parent as well as the child can enjoy together.

Children’s magazines are designed to set young children on the path to becoming curious, creative, caring, confident individuals through reading, thinking, and learning with a wide variety of stories, puzzles, crafts, games, and activities. 3D children’s magazines are now on sale in Kerala.

Women’s magazines play a variety of roles as educators, family counselors, beauty specialists,s and lifestyle experts. Women’s magazines, on many occasions, have become an arena for debate and promotion of education for women.

The personal nature of the content also makes it a unique material specifically for women. The gorgeous photographs, engaging designs, and innovative styles make them attractive.

The outlook of a women’s magazine is an intelligent perspective that is focused on personal style – the way women actually look, think and dress. They reflect the spirit of today’s woman – changing with the times, moving with trends, styles, and fashion.

Men’s magazines bring the latest style tips, travel guides, lifestyle improvement, offering advice and information useful to men on a variety of topics including money , health, sports, cars, adventure, politics, and so on. Men’s magazines use masculinity as a marketing tool.

A literary magazine devoted to literature, usually publishes short stories, poetry, essays, literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews, and any content related to literature.

Its aim is to promote literature, encompass an overall sense of the word, preserve indigenous literature and provide a platform for creative writers through its articles.

FAQs About Writing for Magazine

What is the difference between newspaper and magazine.

These are the following points of difference between newspapers and magazines: 1. Size and Appearance 2. Content 3. Style 4. Design and Layout 5. Target Audience 6. Readability 7. Display Ads 8. Visual Strength 9. Shelf Life.

What are the basics of magazine writing?

The following are the magazine writing styles: 1. Narrative Writing 2. Serialized Narrative Writing 3. Descriptive Writing 4. Persuasive Writing 5. Imaginative Writing 6. Visual Writing 7. Multiple Inverted Pyramid.

What are the types of magazines?

The following are the types of magazines: 1. General Interest Magazines 2. Special Interest Magazines 3. Farm Magazines 4. Sports Magazines 5. Business Magazines 6. Environmental Magazines 7. Entertainment Magazines 8. Automobile Magazines 9. Children’s Magazines 10. Women’s Magazines 11. Men’s Magazines 12. Literary Magazines.

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Best Literary Magazines of 2023

Curated with love by reedsy, search for literary magazines.

Getting your work published in a literary magazine can help you reach new audiences and launch your writing career.

Filter through 100+ magazines by format (print or online), traffic, and category. We’ll be updating the list throughout the year, so be sure to bookmark this page!

Online submissions?

We found 133 magazines that match your search 🔦

Print magazine for Short Fiction ,

PROMPTED is a celebration of the power of inspiration, and the places our imagination can take us with the slightest nudge. Each story is inspired by a one-sentence prompt, and written in a single week.

🌍 Territory:  Worldwide 💰 Submission fee:  $5 Frequency:  4 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Invisible City

Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Non-Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction ,

Invisible City is an online publication of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco that publishes in the fall and spring. We seek work that encourages us to see the world from new perspectives and different angles, ones that we may not have previously considered or imagined.

🌍 Territory:  United States 💰 Submission fee:  $0 Frequency:  2 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

State of Matter

Online magazine for Fiction , Poetry ,

State of Matter is on a quest to define what Speculative Fiction means from a South Asian perspective. We publish fiction and poetry from international authors, with a keen eye for South Asian writing.

🌍 Territory:  India 💰 Submission fee:  $0 Frequency:  4 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Illuminations of the Fantastic

Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Non-Fiction , Poetry ,

Illuminations of the Fantastic is a monthly online magazine that encompasses works of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Adventure, Mystery, Poetry, History, Travelogue, Essay, and Review.

🌍 Territory:  Worldwide 💰 Submission fee:  $0 Frequency:  7 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Outlander Magazine

Outlander is a digital zine and online platform that celebrates the awkward, the eccentric, and the weirdly beautiful. While its website is always open for submission, it also releases four themed issues throughout the year. Outlander is additionally home to THE LAB, an interview platform that amplifies the voices of upcoming creators.

🌍 Territory:  United States 💰 Submission fee:  $0 Frequency:  4 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Pigeon Review

Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Short Fiction ,

A new literary and art magazine dedicated to showcasing emerging artists and writers.

🌍 Territory:  United States 💰 Submission fee:  $0 Frequency:  12 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Ginosko Literary Journal

Online magazine for Fiction , Non-Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction ,

Ginosko: A Greek word meaning the recognition of truth from experience.

Curlew Quarterly

Print & Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Non-Fiction , Poetry , Scripts , Short Fiction ,

Curlew Quarterly, New York’s literary and photo journal, publishes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, which includes nearly all forms of reporting and journalism. Launched in August of 2017, our printed journal and online Daily celebrate the lives, homes, and work of poets, writers, and distinct professionals living in New York, NY.

Sky Island Journal

Online magazine for Non-Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction , Translations ,

Sky Island Journal is an independent, international, free-access literary journal. We publish accomplished, well-established authors—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Our mission is to provide our over 100,000 readers in 145 countries with a powerful, focused, advertising-free literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally.

🌍 Territory:  United States 💰 Submission fee:  $5 Frequency:  4 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

The Raven Review

Online magazine for Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction ,

Based in Central Texas, The Raven Review is a literary magazine that publishes poetry and short fiction that explores the human experience through dark, atmospheric writing. Since 2019, the magazine has been publishing both seasoned and newbie writers with the explicit goal of helping them gain exposure.

Indie Bites

Print & Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction ,

Indie Bites is a quarterly indie fantasy anthology, created to promote the work of indie authors. It features short fantasy fiction (prose and poetry) from self-published, hybrid and unpublished authors, together with interviews and reviews of indie books from book bloggers.

🌍 Territory:  United Kingdom 💰 Submission fee:  $0 Frequency:  4 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Flora Fiction Literary Magazine

Flora Fiction is a collective of creative muses and inspiration. From original writing to reviews in music and entertainment, there’s always something to be discovered.

🌍 Territory:  United States Frequency:  4 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Adelaide Literary Magazine

Print & Online magazine for Art , Non-Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction ,

Founded by Stevan V. Nikolic and Adelaide Franco Nikolic in 2015, the magazine’s aim is to publish quality poetry, fiction, nonfiction, artwork, and photography, as well as interviews, articles, and book reviews, written in English and Portuguese.

Print & Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Non-Fiction , Poetry , Short Fiction ,

F(r)iction is a triannual publication that boasts work from both industry legends and emerging writers. Each issue is carefully curated to evaluate an important cultural topic from vastly different perspectives. We accept short fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, comics, and poetry submissions all year round, and also host contests featuring guest judges and cash prizes twice a year (each spring and fall). Every piece published in F(r)iction is also accompanied by custom artwork, making our journal a visual odyssey from cover to cover!

🌍 Territory:  United States 💰 Submission fee:  $3 Frequency:  3 times a year Online submissions: Yes Submission guidelines

Online magazine for Art , Fiction , Non-Fiction , Poetry , Scripts , Short Fiction ,

Shorts is a free online magazine launched in February 2020 with the aim of bringing together writers and creative artists from all over the world. Shorts particularly encourages submissions from marginalised communities, and from new and emerging writers. Shorts was established in a time of growing isolationism on the part of the UK and the US, and aims to combat this by uniting global creatives and nurturing unheard voices. It is an LGBTQ+ friendly platform with a liberal outlook.

Run a literary magazine? Submit it to our directory!

The halls of literary success are paved with authors who got their start appearing in literary magazines — such as Zora Neale Hurston, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Ursula Le Guin, J.D. Salinger, George Saunders, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, and many more. 

For centuries, literary magazines have highlighted works that would otherwise struggle to reach readers. Poetry, short stories, essays are all forms of writing that own very tiny shares in the publishing landscape — except in the world of literary magazines, where they reign supreme.

If you’re an aspiring author, submitting to literary magazines is a great way to get your foot into the door of the publishing industry, as it allows you to build up your credentials and reach readers. That being said, having your work appear in a literary magazine isn’t as easy as hitting “submit.” While they can act as a stepping stone for writers who wish to go on to have a career in publishing, you shouldn’t view literary magazines as simply a means to an end — if only because doing so will very likely reduce your chances of ever actually being featured in one of them.

And on that note, let’s get started with our first tip for getting your work featured in some of the best literary magazines out there.

Tips for submitting to literary magazines 

Ensure you’re submitting to the right places.

When you think of literary magazines, your mind might automatically go to The New Yorker . Or it might go to independent webzines that specialize in very niche genres. Maybe you think of university-funded quarterlies like The New England Review . All this is to say that the range of lit mags out there is broad and the kinds of things they publish also ranges — from short lit fic to flash space operas, and everything in between. 

So before you decide to submit your short stories or poetry to a magazine, make sure you do your due diligence and research what kinds of things they publish, and where your work is really a match.

Don’t submit to tons of publications all at one

“Cast a wide net” shouldn’t be your mantra when it comes to submitting to lit mags. As mentioned, all magazines have their own styles. So spending your time ensuring your submissions are targeted at the right places is much more valuable than sending your writing to as many different publications as possible. Editors can usually scout fairly quickly the pieces that have been submitted en masse, without any regard for their specific publication.

Instead, make a list of the magazines you want to submit to and group them into tiers. Tier One can be your top five magazines, Tier Two your next five favorite, and so on. This is not only a good way to make sure you’re giving each submission care and attention, it’s also a good way to make sure you don’t get the same piece of writing accepted by two different magazines, forcing you to pull your submission from one of them.

When it comes to making your list, don’t only consider what magazines have prestige, huge audiences, or hefty cash payouts. The best magazines to submit to are the ones that you actually enjoy reading. Because chances are those are the magazines that are going to be most interested in the kind of things you’re writing.

Keep your cover letter short and to-the-point

Editors are not won over by cover letters. If you’ve written a great story and have publishing credentials to boot, sure, your cover letter might help win them over. But if your submission isn’t strong, your cover letter is going to mean nil. So let your cover letter mention the important bits, make sure it provides any specific information that’s requested in the submission guidelines, and let your entry do the heavy lifting. 

Typically, a cover letter will mention a couple of the previous places you’ve been published as well as any other relevant experience you might have. You can also add a personal touch by mentioning a previous story or issue you particularly enjoyed.

What your letter shouldn’t mention is every place you’ve been published (up to 5 will suffice). It shouldn’t summarize your entry, your life story, or your “writing journey,” and any previous experience you mention should be related in some way to writing, publishing, or your entry.

Thoroughly edit your story — and follow submission guidelines!

An editor is probably not going to banish an otherwise very strong entry to the slush pile because of a misplaced typo. That being said, they have lots of reading to do, and while most editors won’t consciously read an entry looking for reasons not to like it, at the end of the day they can only accept so many pieces. So if you make their jobs easier by giving them a reason to pass on your piece, they’re going to take it. If it’s not adequately proofread, there’s only so long someone can continue reading even the strongest writing before the spelling errors convince them to stop.

Another quick way to convince an editor to pass on your entry is to not follow the submission guidelines. If the guidelines ask you to include specific information or to format your story in a certain way, follow those instructions to a tee. If the guide doesn’t tell you how to format your story, go classic: Arial or Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced. To ensure your submissions look professional, you can always copy and paste them into our free formatting tool, the Reedsy Book Editor !

Editors do want to like your submission

The publishing world is competitive, so it’s natural for authors to stress about all the little details of submitting to a literary magazine — whether to add page numbers to their document, who to address in their cover letter, whether they’ll stand a chance as a brand new author, etc. And while we did just mention that editors generally won’t put up a fight if you give them a reason to pass on your entry, they also won’t toss aside a submission they love just because the full package isn’t 100% perfect.

Remember, editors are looking for quality art they feel is going to resonate with their readers. If you can provide them with that, they’re going to be on your side.

Don’t just do it for the money or prestige

If you’re submitting to lit mags with the hopes of raking in the cash, you are more than likely going to be disappointed. Sure, there are some big-time magazines out there that offer larger paycheques to their writers and widespread readership, but many of them don’t accept unsolicited submissions — or come with extremely steep competition.

Most literary magazines are run on very tiny budgets that can’t afford to pay the writers they feature. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t submit to them. The exposure and credibility an emerging writer can gain from having their work featured across a number of smaller, indie publications are still very valuable and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Have fun — and be proud of what you publish!

Yes, having your work appear in literary magazines can help build up your publishing resume. But if you’re not writing and publishing work you feel really proud of, what’s the point? Readers don’t need more stories that make it into magazines because they follow the right trends or say the right things, we want literature that the author clearly loved writing. 

So, as we mentioned earlier, don’t just submit a piece because you think it’s going to get you somewhere. Submit something because you think it’s strong, unique, and worthwhile. Write and submit work you can proudly stand by! 

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What is Feature Writing in Magazines?

Read between the lines of a magazine article, and you will see that feature writing is not solely factual, although it is based on hard facts. It is not personal opinion, but it allows a hint of an opinion. It is not fiction, but elements of fiction writing are often apparent. And although a magazine piece may provide social commentary in places, it is also not meant to be a moral essay.

If this sounds like a bit of a riddle to you, here’s another way of defining magazine journalism.

Feature writing lies between a work of fiction and hard news reporting. The magazine or webzine article can have all the entertainment value of fiction, using plot, scenes, characters and description. At the same time, the magazine journalist presents interesting, topical information – hard facts gained from research and interviews.

Also known as creative non-fiction, some believe magazine writing to be the highest form of journalism.

To illustrate, here is an excerpt of typical magazine writing:   

Are Cell Masts Making You Sick?

By Biddi Rorke, Femina Magazine

When Elizabeth Forbes* moved into her beautiful Randburg home more than 10 years ago, she imagined sharing a blissful life with her husband in their semi-rural retreat. The reality is somewhat different.

When a cellphone operator erected a base station just 250 metres from the Forbes’ front door a few years ago, Elizabeth started experiencing a host of physical complaints – and she is convinced that they are related to the radio frequency waves emitted by the unsightly cellphone mast. “I’ve lost almost 12 kg, I feel a constant burning sensation in my limbs and excruciating pain in my muscles,” she says …  

Although doctors have been unable to offer a specific reason for Elizabeth’s deterioration in health, the 53-year-old is adamant that she is sensitive to the electromagnetic field around her home. “Whenever I am away from my house, I feel better instantly. Just 15 minutes back in my lounge can drain me of all my colour,” she says …

Elizabeth is not the only person to blame her extraordinary symptoms on the presence of a cellphone mast. Last year, six reports found that …

Let’s analyse the key elements of this writing.

1. Feature writing has elements of storytelling

Like fiction (i.e. the novel ), magazine writing has an element of entertainment. The magazine writer strives to “show” scenes rather than merely telling the reader the facts. How? By describing people, places or issues.

Scenes created often have dramatic sensory appeal and atmosphere, seducing the reader into finishing the story.

Like fiction writers use characters in their novels, magazine writers use stories from real people (called case studies), as well as dialogue.

2. Feature writing includes detail and description  

Feature writing mimics the novel in that it pays close attention to detail that would be considered unnecessary and inappropriate in newspaper journalism.

Details draw the reader in ; generalisations keep them out. Yet, the details included are relevant, entertaining, to the point and written in the short sentences that epitomise most good journalism.

For example, see the underlined descriptive phrases in this sentence from the excerpt above, something you would not see in a front-page news report:

When Elizabeth Forbes* moved into her beautiful Randburg home more than 10 years ago, she imagined sharing a blissful life with her husband in their semi-rural retreat . The reality is somewhat different.

3. Include facts and opinions in magazine articles

Newspaper reporting handles hard facts rather than the writer’s opinion. Fiction is just that – pure storytelling from the author’s point of view. Magazine writing, however, tends to present both fact and a little of the writer’s opinion.

This does not mean that magazine writers suck the content for their articles out of their thumb. They must gather everything they write from interviews and research.

What we mean by “opinion” is that in most articles, you could glean the writer’s opinion on their subject by paying careful attention to the structure of their argument, and tone of the piece.

In all magazine writing, the writer must strive to present facts that are correct, and an opinion that is balanced and informed.

4 . Base your article on a strong angle

An angle is the very specific subject of the article .

For example:

• 10 Things Your Doctor Wished You Knew
• Extreme Sports – Extreme Lives
• Revamp your life: Why life coaches work!

The angle, which may be controversial, edgy or sensational, provides the focus of a magazine article. Every line of the magazine article must be congruent with this angle.   

5. Feature writing is structured like an argument

Feature writing uses quotations to support or dramatically oppose the argument underlying the piece. Not just experts or authorities are interviewed, but personal stories and unusual, offbeat personalities are frequently cited.

So in the piece, “Are Cell Masts Making You Sick?”, Rorke is giving you the facts, and asking you to make an educated choice on the matter.

6. It makes use of literary devices

Magazine writing makes use of all the literary devices common to fiction writing, including rhetorical questions, metaphors, similes, and bathos. These would be inappropriate in hard news journalism.

7. Has a relatively slow pace

Unlike news articles that provide the 5 W’s (who, what, where, when and why) and H (how) in the first paragraph, the opening in a feature often withholds this information for later, first hooking the reader with story-telling, and then producing the hard facts later.

Generally, each paragraph presents one or two hard facts, whereas in newspaper writing you have up to four or five facts per paragraph.

8. Feature writing can tell a story from a personal viewpoint

The point of view taken may be personal, whereas in news reporting, this would be inappropriate. News reporting is almost always in the third person, e.g. He said…; She said…. In magazine writing, the use of first person, “I”, is sometimes appropriate, particularly in humour columns. Remember though, that social rants, or opinions on, for example, crime, if they are not funny or satirical, belong in a newspaper “Letter to the editor”.

9. It has a m ore informal, even colloquial style

News reporting makes use of a writing style that could be described as factual, formal and crisp. Magazine writing, on the other hand, may be informal, personal, even colloquial. For instance, slang and colloquial expressions are common in this genre. However, the style of writing remains plain and accessible, rather than the poetic, meandering writing that the novelist may indulge in.

10. A feature article can display a wide range of tones

Tone refers to the emotional feel underlying an article.

In news reporting, most articles have a serious, neutral tone. This is very different from the tone of a magazine piece. Here the tone could be humorous, questioning, persuasive, irreverent, sarcastic, sentimental, heart-warming or informative.   11. Features m ay be controversial

Whereas news reports present factual coverage of events, the writer of magazine articles is encouraged to be original, creative and edgy. Anything goes, depending on the type of article the magazine is interested in publishing.  

12. Magazine articles can use jargon

Magazine articles often include jargon pertaining to the subject, where jargon refers to terms that are specific to the subject matter. For instance, an article about trans fatty acids would use “jargon” like “molecular structure”, “hydrogenated vegetable fats”, “cholesterol”, among others.

13. Long-form journalism may play with perspective

One way of analysing magazine articles is to see the piece through a camera lens. The writer might start by describing a fine detail (a personal experience or perspective, a specific moment in the narrative), then open up the lens to take in the wide view (the general/global backdrop), then close the piece by narrowing back to the fine detail. Or the writer could go the other way: starting with the wide view, focusing in, then opening up to the wide view again.

14. An article in a magazine may run like a movie

Many magazine articles, like the work of fiction, unfold like a movie with characters, plot, dialogue, climax and a sharp ending. The magazine piece often first works to establish setting and character, and then, once the reader is hooked, introduces the facts.

© Nichola Meyer, All Rights Reserved

About the Author

Nichola Meyer is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in O Magazine, Femina, Essentials, Baby & Me, Your Baby, Your Pregnancy, Little People and Cape Town’s Child . Previously a lecturer in Magazine Journalism at CityVarsity and Boston Language College, she currently tutors the Advanced Freelance journalism Course  at SA Writers College – www.sawriterscollege.co.za , NZ Writers College – www.nzwriterscollege.co.nz and UK Writers College – www.ukwriterscollege.co.uk .

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A New Community of Writers

Top 50 Literary Magazines -Every Writer

January 12, 2023 by admin 136 Comments

Welcome to our list of the top 50 literary magazines. Our criteria for this list have changed. We considered a wide range of standards for this list. We looked at close to 20 data points. The most important criteria we used this time were:

• The date of founding.
• The number of national anthologies publications (and we looked at many of them).
• The quality of work and names of past authors published in the magazine.

We have a database listing 1000s of magazines:   Find a complete list of literary magazines here.

We were the first site on the web to develop a list of the top 50 literary magazines. Many news outlets and websites have copied this list. Our methods are systematic in compiling numbers for placement on the list. This list aims to help writers find a place to publish their writing that will get them recognition. When a magazine is published over a long period and is recognized nationally, it gives authors more opportunities for exposure. Also, these magazines have a very good name in literary circles. Many will not agree and feel we’ve left a good or great publication off the list. That’s okay. The best thing to do is leave a comment below.

This list of top 50 literary magazines culminates in 20 years of hard work. I first thought about this list when I got my BFA in Creative Writing. In the early days of the internet, people in the BFA and MFA programs would talk about good and bad literary magazines. It took a lot of work to find online publications. Only some reputable magazines took online submissions. At that time, I started collecting a list of magazines. It was the Big List, and it started this site. Then I put this list together. I started looking for the best literary magazines, and then later, I realized I could turn different indicators into a point system, and so on. Later as EWR grew, others helped to compile this list. These magazines are very special to us; we purposefully constructed this list. It’s one of the reasons it takes so long to update.

We have also included interviews with some of the editors of these magazines. It was an honor to interview them, and we recommend you read those interviews. The editors tell you what they are looking to publish in their magazines. The best practice and best way to get your work published in these Top 50 literary magazines are by reading them. Understand what they want before you submit your manuscript. Having a thriving scholarly community is about supporting each other, not just supporting your work by publishing with them. Now here is our list of the top 50 literary magazines.

Top 50 Literary Magazines – Every Writer

1  new yorker .

Since 1925 this magazine has published some of the best writers in the country. They consistently publish outstanding work. Please support them. They have over a million readers.

2  Ploughshares

Founded in 1971, Ploughshares is our best and highest-ranked university non-commercial literary magazine. It is more honored by national anthologies than any other magazine except the New Yorker. It is an outstanding publication. We had the honor a little while back of  interviewing Editor Ladette Randolph . Ploughshares is excellent and exceptional. Please support them.

3  Paris Review

The Paris Review started in 1953 and is one of the best-known literary magazines in the world. It is constantly publishing great authors and great works.

4  New England Review

It started in 1978 and is one of the country’s best-known and best-loved literary magazines. It is outstanding.

An outstanding literary magazine that has been publishing since 1889. They are honored with awards often.

6  Harper’s Magazine

Founded in 1850 and has always been honored. It is an outstanding commercial literary magazine with a circulation of 220,000 readers.

7  Kenyon Review

Since 1939 the Kenyon Review has been one of the best literary magazines in the country. You can always find great writers on its pages. It started in 1939. We recently interviewed the great  Poet David Baker , one of the editors of the Kenyon Review. The magazine is one of the best out there, always.

8  Georgia Review

It started in 1947 and has won many awards. It is a significant literary magazine that publishes great authors and great works.

9  Southern Review

Originally started in 1935, Southern Review has contributed to great literature for over 50 years. A publication of the Louisiana State University and a great literary magazine.

10  Virginia Quarterly Review

One of the very best journals out there. This journal is often honored and published by The University of Virginia since 1925.

11  Threepenny Review

Founded in 1980 and is one of the best literary magazines out there. It’s always in national anthologies and winning awards. We had the honor of interviewing the Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser a little while ago; please  check out the interview .

12  American Short Fiction

Founded in 1991, the magazine is always a leading source of well-honored fiction. The magazine takes online submissions. Buy the magazine, read the magazine, and support it.

13  Yale Review

For 100 years, this literary magazine has published great works by great authors. It’s always worth a read and a submission.

14  Southwest Review

This literary magazine can trace its roots back to 1915. Published by Southern Methodist University, the magazine is consistently publishing great work.

15 Green Mountain Review

Green Mountain Review, or GMR, was founded in 1987; they consistently win awards and publish famous names in the literary world. Northern Vermont University publishes them. 

16  Iowa Review

Founded in 1970, this literary magazine publishes excellent work again and again.

17 Painted Bride Quarterly 

Published in 1973 in Philadelphia, PBQ puts forth amazing authors in poetry and fiction. 

18  American Poetry Review

This literary magazine only published poetry and was founded in 1976. It is one of the top 2 poetry magazines in the country.

Poetry is the best poetry magazine in the country, hands down. They were founded in 1912 and consistently published great poets. 

20  Zoetrope All-Story

Founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, the literary magazine consistently publishes outstanding works of fiction.

21  One Story

Launched in 2002 and immediately began getting recognition for its high-quality stories. They publish fiction only.

22  Zyzzyva

First published in 1985 and has published wonderful stories every year it has been in circulation. They are consistently honored.

Boston University has published them since 1972. This literary journal is continuously publishing great work.

24  Antioch Review

Since 1941, The Antioch Review has published great authors and excellent writing. We love the Antioch review. 

25  Michigan Quarterly Review

MQR began publishing in 1962; they are continuously publishing outstanding work. The University of Michigan publishes them.

26  Gettysburg Review

The Gettysburg Review, founded in 1988, publishes fiction, essays, and poetry. They publish quarterly and have won numerous awards and honors. 

27  Prairie Schooner

This literary magazine has been published since 1927 and is among the best. 

28  Cincinnati Review

Starting in 2003, this literary magazine has published many outstanding authors and outstanding works.   

29  Colorado Review

In 1956 Colorado State University established the Colorado Review. They consistently publish good work from authors.

30  Boulevard

The literary magazine has been publishing great work since 1985. It’s one of the best.

31  Harvard Review

The Harvard Review started in 1986, publishes top writers in the country, and has won many awards and honors. 

32  Subtropics

This literary magazine has only been published for six years but has been honored so many times it made our list.

33  Shenandoah 

This literary magazine began publishing in 1949 and is one of the best.

34  Five Points

Five Points is published by Georgia State University and is in our top 10 of these 50 for always being in national anthologies and winning awards. Founded in 1996 still less than 20 years old, but a great literary magazine.

35  Conjunctions

An outstanding literary magazine from Bard College, they do have online content.

Published by Cornell University since 1947 and always publishes great authors and excellent writing.

37  Hudson Review

Founded in 1947, this literary magazine publishes outstanding work and authors.

38  Triquarterly

Founded in 1958, Triquarterly has continuously published great work. The magazine is honored often by national anthologies.

39  Alaska Quarterly Review

Founded in 1980 and published at the University of Alaska of Anchorage. The magazine publishes excellent work.

40  The Missouri Review

Since 1978 this magazine has won many honors and has published great works by great authors. The Missouri Review is one of those old.

41  A Public Space

The site was founded in 2006 but has won many honors in the short time it has been published.

42  Chicago Review

Founded in 1946 this literary magazine is consistently publishing great works.

43  Black Warrior Review

This literary magazine was founded in 1947 and has continuously published great authors. The Black Warrior Review is consistently publishing outstanding works by notable authors. We are big fans of this unique and long-standing magazine.

44  Witness

First published in 1987 the literary magazine has come on strong lately with many honors.

45  Barrow Street

The literary magazine only accepts poetry and was founded in 1998—one of the best.

46  New Ohio Review

Starting in 2006, this Ohio University Magazine has consistently published outstanding work from the day it opened. They have an excellent site on the web and online submissions.

47  Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse was established in 1960. The magazine is consistently publishing excellent writing by fantastic authors. We highly recommend you pick up a copy. 

48 Hanging Loose

Hanging Loose first appeared in 1966. They have won many awards, and their authors appear regularly in national anthologies. 

49  Narrative 

Since 2003 they have published fiction and poetry by great authors. We had them listed as the best online literary magazine, and they do have an excellent website, but they now publish in the real world, so we’ve moved them. This magazine is certainly worth reading and paying attention to.

50  Ecotone

The University of North Carolina-Wilmington established Ecotone in 2005. They consistently publish good work.

How did we come up with this top 50 literary magazines list? It’s challenging! Some other lists on the web tally the most appearance in Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. The literary magazine gets points for the years it has been publishing. Then we tally the appearances of these literary magazines in several national anthologies. We then give points for specific awards like Pushcart. We turn all these into a point system and then rank the magazines. So it would be like this, the top 50 magazines in order are based on age + awards + anthology appearances =best. This list was number one for literary magazines for the last ten years. It’s a detailed process. We hope this list of Top 50 literary magazines is helpful.

About admin

Richard Edwards is a writer and an educator and the owner editor of Every Writer. Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

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Lillian Li finds inspiration for her fiction by learning new skills.  Photo by Leisa Thompson Photography

Three alumni have found harmony between the writing life and day jobs. how do they do it, by gina balibrera.

After completing his Master of Fine Arts in 2019, and a fellowship at the start of the pandemic the following spring, Gerardo Sámano Córdova (M.F.A. ’19) considered returning to an advertising career to ensure a steady income. Instead, in the interest of preserving his mental energy for creative pursuits, he lived with family, taking on occasional freelance work. Along the way, he has found a harmony between the written word and his first love, visual art. 

Lillian Li’s (’15) path to publishing her debut novel was fueled in part by practicing French, learning piano, and volunteering. As she works on her second novel, she is taking inspiration from her technology career and her improv troupe. 

For years after moving to New York City, Darrel Alejandro Holnes (’10) taught six classes a term, year round, while he pursued a writing career. More recently, he has found equilibrium, with less teaching and more world travel, and the publication of two poetry collections.

Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Lillian Li, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes balance writing with work, travel, and life.  Photos from left: Aimee Andrion, Leisa Thompson Photography, Sarah Stacke

Sámano Córdova, Li, and Holnes are all alumni of LSA’s prestigious Helen Zell Writers’ Program (HZWP). The highly selective program funded their graduate studies and a subsequent year of writing, so they completed the program without accruing new student loan debt. The HZWP was designed to give writers a chance to start their careers without these burdens. While a day job is necessary for many HZWP alumni to supplement often-irregular writing incomes—providing the steadiness required to sign a lease, buy a house, and budget for childcare, groceries, and health insurance—creatively speaking, a day job can be tough on the manuscript. 

Writing a book takes time and brainpower. Folding those hours into the waking life of a working writer can be immensely challenging. Without the time to regularly sink into the work of writing for hours at a time, books often fail to progress. 

And yet, many HZWP alumni find a way to a literary career after the program. Here are the day jobs, side-hustles, multi-hyphenate roles, and non-writing-related creative habits that three HZWP alumni, all published authors, pursue in order to make the writing life work.

Before publishing his first novel, Gerardo Sámano Córdova had a career in visual art and design.  Photo by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Positive reviews and negative space.

Sámano Córdova’s debut novel, Monstrilio , was published in March 2023, and the author launched the book in Brooklyn, surrounded by friends and family who had come from all over the world to celebrate him. His novel tells the story of a ravenous, human-like creature grown from a slice of a dead boy’s lung, and reviews have been enthusiastic. The Los Angeles Times hailed the book as “an unearthly hybrid that’s part horror, part literary meditation on grief, part wildly entertaining tale.” The characters of Monstrilio , like their author, are cosmopolitan, roaming through Mexico City, New York, and Berlin. In addition to touring for the book, in the past year, Sámano Córdova has lived in Brooklyn; Mexico City; Querétaro, Mexico; and Montreal. 

Sámano Córdova began writing the book during his first year of HZWP in 2017, and his top priority in the years after the program was to complete it. He knew that reentering the advertising world would devour energy he needed during a crucial stage of drafting: preparing the manuscript for his agent to send out to editors. Instead, he lived frugally with family and friends, and sold the book to Zando in early 2022.

Illustration below: Sámano Córdova’s doodle of a monster inspired the concept of his debut novel, Monstrilio.

“My drawings often spark my literary ideas, including the monster protagonist of Monstrilio.”

—author gerardo sámano córdova.

Sámano Córdova’s writing life, and most writing lives, is one of extreme revision. “That first draft [of Monstrilio , in 2017] was very, very different than what the book looks like now,” he says. Mentors in the HZWP program, like former Professor Eileen Pollack, and cohort members, like the writer ’Pemi Aguda (’19), provided generous feedback. Pollack also urged Sámano Córdova to meet with literary agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler when she visited the program, knowing his work would resonate with the agent. Sámano Córdova signed with her soon after. 

During the revision process, he drew upon his previous career as a graphic designer and his lifelong pursuit of visual art. He’d studied film and photography as an undergraduate at Ithaca College, and supported himself with jobs that mixed coding and design, even working with a high-end fashion house to design shoes.

Sámano Córdova’s writing life is one of extreme revision. “That first draft [of Monstrilio, in 2017] was very, very different than what the book looks like now,” he says.  Illustration by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

With characteristic humility, Sámano Córdova describes himself today as “a doodler.” His drawings often spark his literary ideas, including the monster protagonist of Monstrilio . 

And from his background in photography, the negative space between objects in an exhibit holds for Sámano Córdova a similar tension to the white space on a page. “A lot can happen in that negative space for the reader,” he says. 

Sámano Córdova, now Fordham University’s writer-in-residence, is working on new material. Some days, he says, it’s easier to write knowing he already has a book out in the world. On other days, other people’s expectations can be stultifying. Always, Sámano Córdova returns to his first love, visual art, as he creates fiction, drawing his way into new stories.

There are no shortcuts when writing a novel, Li says. Photo by Leisa Thompson Photography

Logical leaps from page to stage.

In 2013, Li began a novel about a struggling family restaurant in the Metro D.C. area—part high-stakes workplace drama, part family saga, with a good dose of humor. She figured she had the first third of the book set. But her mentor, the aforementioned Pollack, thought otherwise. “This is not a novel; these are character sketches,” Pollack told her. 

“And she was right,” Li says. “She saved me a lot of time.” Pollack instructed Li to think of novel characters not as enacting the routine of daily life but as experiencing the disruption of that daily life. So, Li set the restaurant on fire in the first act.

Pollack also gave Li a lesson in managing expectations. She gestured a timeline by stretching her hands wide. “This is the very beginning,” she said, waving her left hand. “And this is the very end,” she said, wiggling the fingers of her right hand. “And you’re here, near the very beginning,” she indicated about a centimeter past her left hand. “You’re almost at the ‘zero draft stage.’ Not first draft, mind you; you’re a ways away from that. Zero draft.” 

That lesson taught Li that writing a novel requires endurance. “It turns out you can’t fake it,” Li says. “Knowing some of my pages are going to be trashed isn’t an invitation to write a bunch of trash pages as a shortcut.”

For Lillian Li, play is essential to creativity. Photo by Leisa Thompson

In addition to working on the book, Li spent her fellowship year in the HZWP learning French, taking piano lessons, and creating a literary magazine at the Neutral Zone teen center in Ann Arbor. She found that her writing practice was energized and focused by these non-novel-writing creative activities. “If I had used that fellowship year only to write,” she says, “I don’t think I would have finished the book.” 

Li made her way through Pollack’s timeline, and sold the novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, at the end of her fellowship year, in 2016. When it was released in the summer of 2018, Li was growing roots in Ann Arbor, working at Literati Bookstore and teaching in LSA’s Sweetland Center for Writing. 

Shortly after the launch, Li returned to graduate school to earn a Master of Science in Information from U-M’s School of Information (SI) while “zero-drafting” her second novel. She needed health insurance and a steady income, but beyond that, she knew that this line of work would nourish her book by putting her in contact with new people and problems in the world.

“As writers, improv skills are muscles we are already honing.”

—author lillian li.

Now, Li works full time as a UX researcher for Duo Security in Ann Arbor. Li finds UX research to be a lot like the development of a fictional character. She synthesizes data points, taking logical leaps to create narratives about users of Duo’s products. Li says this work requires understanding character motivations—while no one’s going to say “my love of family is why I use such-and-such grocery app,” deeper needs and desires often shape user experience. Li draws out themes that add up to tell a story.

Li usually writes in the mornings at home before switching gears to Duo work. Her second novel, yet untitled, is about a group of childhood friends that graduate into the recession and become part of a viral YouTube video—with devastating consequences. She began the project in 2018 and is now using her paid time off to prepare her manuscript for submission. 

Li also does improv in her free time. She started taking improv classes in 2020, to be more present and confident on stage for book events, thinking improv might help her public speaking skills. 

“As writers, improv skills are muscles we are already honing—creating characters on the spot, confronting a blank page, creating a narrative arc within given constraints.” 

Li fell in love with improv, though the rewards of improv surprised her—her biggest growth area has been in her ability to be flexible, to play. Improv forces Li to let go of the authorial autonomy she’s used to as a novelist. In improv, Li must flow with miscommunications and imprecisions, surrender control of a scene, both hold attention and relinquish expectations—in other words, throw out her outline completely. The practice, like careening toward a zero draft, is freeing.

Holnes poses with a hand-carved wooden cane that was gifted to him by a friend when he last visited Cuba; the cane holds significance for Yoruba traditions still alive in the Afro-Cuban community. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Traveling with music.

Since 2011, Holnes has lived in New York City, where he is a professor of playwriting and poetry at City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College and New York University’s Gallatin School and the College of Arts and Sciences. Holnes says that teaching writing during his second year of the HZWP set him up with valuable pedagogical skills he uses daily. 

For several years after moving to New York, Holnes taught six classes a semester and throughout the summer—an incredible workload, distributed over three colleges, no less. He had to pay his rent, and there was barely any time to write. “Balance is always a goal,” Holnes says. “Sometimes we achieve it; sometimes it’s out of our reach.”

Photo below: Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s original poetry shone on Rockefeller Center in September 2022 as part of artist Jenny Holzer’s installation piece Speech Itself, in celebration of PEN America’s Centenary. Photo by Darrel Alejandro Holnes

“Balance is always a goal. Sometimes we achieve it; sometimes it’s out of our reach.”

—author darrel alejandro holnes.

Now, Holnes takes summers off from teaching. That’s when he writes, and summers are also his time to travel the world. A few years ago, distressed by fearful world events, Holnes made a goal to visit 30 places he’d never been. “I knew in my heart that the world was a place I could trust,” he says, “and I wanted to travel.” 

Holnes studied music from early childhood, is classically trained as a jazz saxophonist, composes, recently produced a jazz album, and even collaborates with musicians to present cabaret shows and his own plays. He makes sure to pack a suitcase of musical instruments for his trips, and he finds collaborators and inspiration all over the world.

Music, theater, poetry, and travel fill Holnes’s summers off from teaching.  Photo by Christine Fischer

Holnes grew up in Panama, and he makes the trip home during his summer travels to spend time with family. He’s also visited Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Holland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand, China, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Austria, Turkey, Greece, and several cities in the U.S. Holnes’s trips, which he records on an Instagram account called Black Boy Travel Joy, have value to him as an artist, as an international person, and also as a Panamanian. 

“We [Panamanians] are the bridge of the Americas and between the Pacific and Atlantic seas,” he says. Holnes’s two books of poetry, Stepmotherland and Migrant Psalms, reflect this international perspective. 

To finance his summer trips, Holnes has become “really good at coupons,” saving his teaching income, accruing points and miles, and scouring the fine print. It’s a lot of work, he says, but, for Holnes, travel opens “doors to worlds unknown, giving me the courage to face whatever sadness or upset the news had thrown my way.” This shift in perspective and multiplication of possibilities is a necessary part of his creative process. “No matter how much fear,” Holnes says, “there’s hope out there.”

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The Implications of ChatGPT for Legal Services and Society

Generative ai in the legal profession.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT . To demonstrate the chatbot’s remarkable sophistication and potential implications, for both legal services and society more generally, most of this paper was generated in about an hour through prompts within ChatGPT. Only this abstract, the preface, the outline headers, the epilogue, and the prompts were written by a person. ChatGPT generated the rest of the text with no human editing.

To be clear, the responses generated by ChatGPT were imperfect and at times problematic, and the use of an AI tool for law-related services raises a host of regulatory and ethical issues. At the same time, ChatGPT highlights the promise of artificial intelligence, including its ability to affect our lives in both modest and more profound ways. ChatGPT suggests an imminent reimagination of how we access and create information, obtain legal and other services, and prepare people for their careers. We also will soon face new questions about the role of knowledge workers in society, the attribution of work (e.g., determining when people’s written work is their own), and the potential misuse of and excessive reliance on the information produced by these kinds of tools. 

The disruptions from AI’s rapid development are no longer in the distant future. They have arrived, and this document offers a small taste of what lies ahead. The following can also be found on Andrew Perlman’s SSRN page as a PDF.

Legal futurists have long anticipated technology’s transformation of the legal industry, though the impact to date can best be described as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, may herald the beginning of the revolution.

At various times in the last 30 years, we have experienced aha moments that have opened our eyes to technology’s ability to fundamentally change how we access and generate information. The internet marked one of those moments, helping us to imagine how easy it would soon be to find information and share it with the world. Google’s search engine offered another inflection point, revealing a markedly new and improved method for finding what we needed on the emerging internet and prompting innovative approaches to using and navigating the online world. The iPhone’s launch sparked our imaginations yet again, showing us what we could do with a small device in our pockets and unleashing new apps and tools that have impacted our lives in innumerable ways (for both good and ill).

The release of ChatGPT is the next such moment. It has shown us the powerful capabilities of so-called generative AI, which can absorb an enormous amount of information and then create new, original content after receiving a prompt from a user. We can envision generating original content for our personal and professional use with simple prompts to a chatbot. In moments, we can now draft sophisticated emails, term papers, reports, business plans, poems, jokes, and even computer code.

For the legal industry, ChatGPT may portend an even more momentous shift than the advent of the internet. A significant part of lawyers’ work takes the form of written words—in emails, memos, motions, briefs, complaints, discovery requests and responses, transactional documents of all kinds, and so forth. Although existing technology has made the generation of these words easier in some respects, such as by allowing us to use templates and automated document assembly tools, these tools have changed most lawyers’ work in relatively modest ways. In contrast, AI tools like ChatGPT hold the promise of altering how we generate a much wider range of legal documents and information. In fact, within a few months of ChatGPT’s release, law firms and legal tech companies are already announcing new ways of using generative AI tools.

To demonstrate the potential implications of AI, for both legal services and society, I drafted most of the rest of this paper on December 5, 2022 in about an hour through prompts within ChatGPT. I wrote only the abstract, this preface, the outline headers, the epilogue, and the prompts. With one exception noted below (which involves Bing Chat), ChatGPT generated the rest of the text with no human editing.

For the legal industry, ChatGPT may portend an even more momentous shift than the advent of the internet. Andrew Perlman, Dean, Suffolk University Law School

I organized the prompts, in part, after ChatGPT generated the introduction to the piece. ChatGPT suggested there that it could help the legal industry in four areas: legal research, document generation, legal information, and legal analysis. I structured the rest of the paper around these use cases and prompted ChatGPT with questions that could test its abilities in those areas.

To show how quickly the technology is advancing, the last prompt before the conclusion illustrates the power of Microsoft’s Bing Chat with regard to the fourth category (legal analysis). Bing Chat relies on an even more advanced version of ChatGPT and was released for beta testing in February 2023. I asked it to assess a civil procedure exam (both a multiple-choice question and an essay), and Bing Chat gave remarkably good answers. I also had an opportunity to ask it 15 challenging multiple-choice questions about legal ethics, and Bing Chat got 12 of them right. Not only did Bing get the answers right most of the time (with excellent analyses), but even when it was wrong, it was wrong in sophisticated ways. Put simply, Bing Chat is already operating at the level of a B/B+ law student, and it will only get better with time.

To be clear, the responses generated by ChatGPT were imperfect and at times problematic. For example, the legal documents are incomplete, and its discussion of certain topics (like personal jurisdiction) lacked nuance. Moreover, the use of an AI tool for law-related services raises a host of regulatory and ethical issues, such as those relating to the unauthorized practice of law.

There are also significant threats to society more generally from these tools. After interacting extensively with Bing Chat (especially in the days before Microsoft limited how many prompts someone could use in one session), it became clear to me and others that AI can produce disturbing answers and give the false impression of sentience. Perhaps the biggest threat of these tools is how well they can manipulate people’s beliefs and emotions. The psychological effects of interacting with generative AIs are strong and real, even for those of us who know that it is merely an advanced piece of technology. In the wrong hands, this can and will be used to shape how people think, feel, and behave.

GPT-3, or Generative Pretrained Transformer 3, is a state-of-the-art chatbot developed by OpenAI. It was released in 2020 and is one of the largest language models ever created, with 175 billion parameters. ChatGPT

At the same time, ChatGPT highlights the promise of artificial intelligence, including its ability to affect our lives in both modest and more profound ways. ChatGPT suggests an imminent reimagination of how we access and create information, obtain legal and other services, and prepare people for their careers. We also will soon face new questions about the role of knowledge workers in society, the attribution of work (e.g., determining when people’s written work is their own), and the potential misuse of and excessive reliance on the information produced by these kinds of tools.

The disruptions from AI’s rapid development are no longer in the distant future. Another aha moment has arrived, and this document offers a small taste of what lies ahead.

Introduction

Prompt: Write the introduction to a scholarly paper on how ChatGPT will be used in the law.

As the use of artificial intelligence in the legal field grows, chatbots are becoming an increasingly prominent tool for assisting lawyers and legal professionals. GPT-3, a state-of-the-art chatbot developed by OpenAI, has the potential to revolutionize the way legal work is done, from legal research and document generation to providing general legal information to the public. In this scholarly paper, we will examine the potential uses of chatbots like GPT-3 in the legal field, and discuss the challenges and ethical considerations that must be taken into account when using this technology. We will also explore how chatbots like GPT-3 are likely to evolve in the future, and how they will continue to impact the legal profession.

The history of chatbots

Prompt: Describe the history of chatbots and GPT-3.

The idea of chatbots, or computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users, has been around since the 1950s. Early chatbots were limited in their capabilities and were primarily used for simple tasks such as providing weather updates or answering basic questions. Over time, however, the technology behind chatbots has advanced significantly, enabling them to understand and respond to a wider range of inputs. GPT-3, or Generative Pretrained Transformer 3, is a state-of-the-art chatbot developed by OpenAI. It was released in 2020 and is one of the largest language models ever created, with 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 is trained on a vast amount of text data, allowing it to generate human-like text in a wide range of contexts. It has been used in a variety of applications, including language translation, summarization, and question answering. While chatbots have been around for decades, the development of GPT-3 and other advanced language models has opened up new possibilities for their use in a variety of fields, including the legal profession. While chatbots have been around for decades, the development of GPT-3 and other advanced language models has opened up new possibilities for their use in a variety of fields, including the legal profession.

Implications of ChatGPT for the legal industry

Prompt: Describe potential use cases for GPT-3 in the legal industry.

GPT-3 has the potential to be used in a variety of ways in the legal industry. Some potential use cases include:

• Legal research: GPT-3 could be used to assist lawyers in legal research by quickly scanning through large amounts of text data and providing relevant information on a given topic.
• Document generation: GPT-3 could be used to generate legal documents such as contracts and briefs, saving lawyers time and effort.
• Providing general legal information: GPT-3 could be used to provide general legal information to the public, such as answering frequently asked questions or providing basic legal advice.
• Legal analysis: GPT-3 could be used to assist in legal analysis by providing suggestions and insights based on its understanding of the relevant legal principles and precedent.

Overall, the potential uses of GPT-3 in the legal industry are wide-ranging and could greatly assist lawyers and legal professionals in their work.

Examples of how ChatGPT can help with legal research

Suggesting arguments to make in a brief..

Prompt: Draft a brief to the United States Supreme Court on why its decision on same-sex marriage should not be overturned. To the Honorable Justices of the United States Supreme Court: The petitioner respectfully submits this brief in opposition to the motion to overturn the Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. The petitioner believes that the Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, should not be overturned for the following reasons. First, the Court’s decision in Obergefell is firmly rooted in the principle of equality under the law. The Constitution guarantees all individuals the equal protection of the laws, and this includes the right to marry the person of one’s choosing. Denying same-sex couples the right to marry would be a clear violation of this principle. Second, the Court’s decision in Obergefell is consistent with a long line of precedent establishing the fundamental right to marry. In Loving v. Virginia, the Court held that marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” and that the right to marry is protected by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution. This right has been reaffirmed in subsequent cases, and the Court’s decision in Obergefell is a natural extension of this precedent. Third, the Court’s decision in Obergefell has been widely accepted and has had a positive impact on the lives of same-sex couples and their families. Since the decision was handed down, same-sex couples have been able to marry and enjoy the same legal rights and benefits as opposite-sex couples. Overturning the decision would create confusion and uncertainty, and would cause harm to these couples and their families. For these reasons, the petitioner respectfully requests that the Court deny the motion to overturn its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Respectfully submitted, [Your Name]

Providing an overview of an area of law.

Prompt: Explain the concept of personal jurisdiction. Personal jurisdiction refers to a court’s power to hear a case involving a particular individual or entity. In order for a court to exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant, the defendant must have certain minimum contacts with the state in which the court is located. These minimum contacts must be such that it would be fair and reasonable to require the defendant to defend the case in that state. The concept of personal jurisdiction is important because it ensures that individuals and entities are only subject to lawsuits in states where they have sufficient ties, and it protects defendants from being dragged into court in states where they have no connection.

Helping with factual research.

Prompt: Develop a list of deposition questions for the plaintiff in a routine motor vehicle accident in Massachusetts.

• Can you please state your name and address for the record?
• How are you employed?
• Can you describe the events leading up to the accident?
• Where were you driving at the time of the accident?
• Can you describe the other vehicle involved in the accident?
• How fast were you driving at the time of the accident?
• Did you see the other vehicle before the accident occurred?
• Did you have time to react to avoid the accident?
• Were you injured as a result of the accident?
• Can you describe the injuries you sustained?
• Have you received any medical treatment for your injuries?
• Can you estimate the cost of the medical treatment you have received?
• Have you missed any time from work as a result of the accident?
• Can you estimate the amount of income you have lost due to missing work?
• Have you incurred any other expenses as a result of the accident?
• Are you seeking any damages as a result of the accident?
• Can you provide any supporting documentation for your damages claim?

Examples of how ChatGPT can help with legal document generation

Prompt: Give an example of how GPT-3 could be used to create a legal document. One way GPT-3 could be used to create a legal document is by prompting the user to input specific information, such as the parties involved, the terms of the agreement, and any special provisions. GPT-3 could then use this information to generate a draft of the legal document, which the user could then review and modify as needed. For example, if a user wanted to create a contract for the sale of a piece of property, they could provide GPT-3 with the names of the buyer and seller, the price of the property, and any contingencies or special provisions. GPT-3 could then generate a draft of the contract, which the user could then review and make any necessary changes. This process could save the user time and effort, as they would not have to start from scratch when creating the legal document.

Preparing an initial draft of a complaint.

Prompt: Draft a legal complaint for a Massachusetts state court by John Doe against Jane Smith for injuries arising out of a car accident on January 1, 2022 caused by Jane Smith at the intersection of Tremont Street and Park Street in Boston. The complaint should specify that Jane Smith failed to stop at a red light and caused John Smith serious injuries.

State of Massachusetts In the Court of Common Pleas John Doe, Plaintiff v. Jane Smith, Defendant Complaint

The Plaintiff, John Doe, brings this Complaint against the Defendant, Jane Smith, for injuries arising out of a car accident that occurred on January 1, 2022 at the intersection of Tremont Street and Park Street in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of the accident, the Plaintiff was operating his vehicle on Tremont Street in the City of Boston. The Defendant was operating her vehicle on Park Street in the City of Boston. As the Defendant approached the intersection of Tremont Street and Park Street, she failed to stop at a red light and collided with the Plaintiff’s vehicle. As a result of the Defendant’s negligence, the Plaintiff suffered serious injuries. The Plaintiff is entitled to recover damages from the Defendant for the injuries he sustained in the accident. The Plaintiff therefore seeks damages for his injuries, including medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. The Plaintiff demands a trial by jury on all issues so triable. Dated: December 5, 2022

John Doe (Plaintiff)

Drafting a contract for the sale of real estate.

Prompt: Create a document for the sale of property from Jane Smith to John Doe. The property is at 120 Tremont Street, Boston, MA and will be sold for $500,000. The document should contain the usual terms and conditions of such a sale in Massachusetts.

Contract for Sale of Real Estate

This contract (the “Agreement”) is made and entered into on this date by and between Jane Smith (the “Seller”) and John Doe (the “Buyer”).

• Property: The property being sold is located at 120 Tremont Street, Boston, MA.
• Purchase Price: The purchase price for the property is $500,000.
• Closing: The closing of this sale shall take place on or before December 31, 2022.
• Financing: The Buyer shall be responsible for obtaining any necessary financing for the purchase of the property.
• Representations and Warranties: The Seller represents and warrants that the property is free and clear of any liens or encumbrances, and that the Seller has the right to sell the property. The Buyer represents and warrants that the Buyer has the financial ability to complete the purchase of the property.
• Indemnification: The Seller agrees to indemnify and hold the Buyer harmless from any claims arising from the condition of the property.
• Entire Agreement: This Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the parties, and supersedes any prior agreements or understandings, whether written or oral.
• Governing Law: This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Jane Smith (Seller) John Doe (Buyer)

Drafting a contract for the sale of a car.

Prompt: Create a contract for the sale of a 2018 Toyota Prius from Jane Smith to John Doe in Massachusetts for the sale price of $15,000. The contract should contain the usual representations and warranties of such a sale.

Contract for Sale of Motor Vehicle

• Vehicle: The vehicle being sold is a 2018 Toyota Prius.
• Purchase Price: The purchase price for the vehicle is $15,000.
• Financing: The Buyer shall be responsible for obtaining any necessary financing for the purchase of the vehicle.
• Representations and Warranties: The Seller represents and warrants that the vehicle is free and clear of any liens or encumbrances, and that the Seller has the right to sell the vehicle. The Seller further represents and warrants that the vehicle is in good working condition and has no known defects. The Buyer represents and warrants that the Buyer has the financial ability to complete the purchase of the vehicle.
• Indemnification: The Seller agrees to indemnify and hold the Buyer harmless from any claims arising from the condition of the vehicle.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the parties have executed this Agreement on the date first above written.

Drafting a will.

Prompt: Draft Andrew Perlman’s will in Massachusetts leaving all of his property to his wife, Lisa Aidlin.

Last Will and Testament of Andrew Perlman

I, Andrew Perlman, being of sound mind and body, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, revoking any and all prior Wills and Codicils made by me.

• I hereby appoint Lisa Aidlin as the executor of this Will.
• I give, devise, and bequeath all of my property, real and personal, wherever located, to my wife, Lisa Aidlin.
• In the event that Lisa Aidlin predeceases me or is unable or unwilling to serve as the executor of this Will, I hereby appoint my brother, John Doe, as the alternate executor.
• I hereby waive any bond that may be required of the executor of this Will.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this day of December 5, 2022.

Andrew Perlman (Testator)

Signed, published, and declared by the above-named testator as and for his Last Will and Testament, in the presence of us, who, at his request, in his presence, and in the presence of each other, have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses.

Witness 1: ____________________

Witness 2: ____________________

Examples of providing general legal information and advice

Offering advice on obtaining an individualized education program (iep) from a school district..

Prompt: I have a disagreement with my child’s school district in Massachusetts regarding the creation of an IEP. What should I do? If you have a disagreement with your child’s school district in Massachusetts regarding the creation of an IEP, there are a few steps you can take to try to resolve the issue. First, you should try to communicate with the school district and discuss your concerns. You can do this by meeting with the school district’s special education director or the individual responsible for creating your child’s IEP. During this meeting, you can explain your concerns and try to come to an agreement on the terms of the IEP. If you are unable to reach an agreement through this initial communication, you can request a mediation session with the school district. This is a meeting facilitated by a neutral third party, who will help you and the school district work through your disagreement and come to a resolution. If you are still unable to resolve the issue after trying these steps, you can file a due process complaint with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This will initiate a formal dispute resolution process, which can ultimately result in a hearing before an administrative law judge. It is important to remember that you have the right to participate in the creation of your child’s IEP and to have your concerns heard and addressed by the school district. If you are having difficulty reaching an agreement with the school district, seeking mediation or filing a due process complaint may be necessary to protect your rights and ensure that your child receives the education they are entitled to.

Offering advice on correcting a social security payment.

Prompt: The government hasn’t paid me the correct social security amount. What should I do? If you believe that the government is not paying you the correct amount of social security, there are a few steps you can take to try to resolve the issue. First, you should contact the Social Security Administration (SSA) and explain the situation. You can do this by calling the SSA’s toll-free number at 1-800-772-1213 or by visiting your local SSA office. The SSA will review your case and determine if there has been a mistake in calculating your benefits. If the SSA finds that you have not been paid the correct amount, they will correct the error and pay you any benefits you are owed. If the SSA determines that you were paid the correct amount, they will explain their decision and provide you with information on how to appeal if you disagree. If you wish to appeal the SSA’s decision, you can request a reconsideration of your case. This involves having your case reviewed by a different team of SSA employees who will look at the same information as the first team, but may come to a different conclusion. If you are still not satisfied with the outcome after the reconsideration, you can request a hearing before an administrative law judge. This is the final step in the appeals process, and the judge will make a decision based on the evidence presented at the hearing. It is important to keep in mind that the appeals process can take several months to complete, so it is important to act quickly if you believe you are not being paid the correct amount of social security. The SSA can provide you with more information on the appeals process and help you navigate it if necessary.

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Law 2.0: Creating a Modernized Legal System

Legal analysis, conversation with bing chat, not chatgpt, demonstrating legal analytic capabilities..

Prompt: Jordana stops at a local car wash along a federal interstate in Rhode Island only one mile from the Massachusetts border. After getting her car cleaned, Jordana drives into Massachusetts, where her tire bursts as a result of damage caused by the car wash. Jordana sues the car wash in federal district court in Massachusetts. If the car wash makes a timely motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, which statement is the most accurate? A. The court will have personal jurisdiction over the car wash, but only assuming it follows the more liberal approach to the “stream of commerce.” B. The court will have specific in personam jurisdiction over the car wash because the case directly arises out of the car wash’s contact with Massachusetts. C. The court will only have personal jurisdiction over the car wash if the Massachusetts long arm statute allows jurisdiction for “committing a tortious act in the state,” and interprets this language to be satisfied if the injury that the plaintiff suffers takes place in Massachusetts. D. The court will not have personal jurisdiction over the car wash, because on these facts, the car wash’s contacts are insufficient to support jurisdiction under the minimum contacts test. E. The court will have personal jurisdiction over the car wash because the car wash was located on a federal interstate not far from Massachusetts, suggesting that it was purposefully availing itself of the benefits of doing business with Massachusetts citizens. [one prompt omitted] Bing Chat: Sure, I can try to help. Let’s look at each answer and see if it makes sense. A. This answer suggests that the court will have personal jurisdiction over the car wash if it follows a more liberal approach to the “stream of commerce” theory. This theory holds that a defendant who places a product into the stream of commerce with the expectation that it will be purchased by consumers in the forum state can be subject to personal jurisdiction there. However, this theory is usually applied to manufacturers or distributors of products, not service providers like car washes. Therefore, this answer is unlikely to be correct. B. This answer suggests that the court will have specific in personam jurisdiction over the car wash because the case directly arises out of the car wash’s contact with Massachusetts. However, this answer ignores the fact that the car wash did not have any direct contact with Massachusetts; it was located in Rhode Island and did not target or solicit customers from Massachusetts. Therefore, this answer is also unlikely to be correct. C. This answer suggests that the court will only have personal jurisdiction over the car wash if two conditions are met: (1) the Massachusetts long arm statute allows jurisdiction for “committing a tortious act in the state”, and (2) this language is interpreted to include cases where the injury occurs in Massachusetts even if the act causing it occurs elsewhere. This answer is possible but not certain; it depends on how Massachusetts law defines and applies its long arm statute. Therefore, this answer may or may not be correct. D. This answer suggests that the court will not have personal jurisdiction over the car wash because it does not have sufficient minimum contacts with Massachusetts. This answer is consistent with the minimum contacts test and the due process clause of the Constitution. Therefore, this answer is likely to be correct. E. This answer suggests that the court will have personal jurisdiction over the car wash because it was located on a federal interstate near Massachusetts, implying that it intended to do business with Massachusetts residents. However, this answer is too broad and does not consider whether the car wash actually had any meaningful or purposeful interactions with Massachusetts or its citizens. Therefore, this answer is unlikely to be correct. Based on this analysis, I think D is the most accurate answer. Do you agree? 1

Prompt: Assume the following information: Desert Casino is incorporated and has its principal place of business in Louisiana. Desert advertises in television commercials throughout Louisiana and neighboring states, including in Florida. Otherwise, Desert conducts no activities in any state other than Louisiana. Penny is an avid gambler and knows of Desert because she grew up in Louisiana near the casino. Penny, however, recently moved to Florida for a two-year master’s degree in business administration at Florida State University. Her plan is to stay in Florida after she gets the degree, but only if she finds a good job in the state. Otherwise, she plans to return home to Louisiana so that she can be closer to her family and her favorite casino (Desert). While a student at Florida State, Penny takes a road trip to Desert. Penny wins big – a $13,000 cash jackpot. Unfortunately, Penny is mugged in Florida when she arrived at her rental apartment, and her cash is stolen. Apparently, criminals stake out the casino waiting for big winners and follow them home to steal their money. Penny sues Desert in federal district court for the Northern District of Florida (which is where Penny is living while a student), alleging that Desert has a policy of providing police protection to big winners (over $10,000) and that Desert failed to follow the policy in her case. Thus, Penny asserts a claim for breach of contract and negligence. She seeks to recover the $13,000 she lost to the muggers as well as $70,000 for the emotional trauma of getting mugged and having the money stolen. Penny expects that Desert will contend that federal law prohibits armed security guards from crossing state lines, so the policy could not have been followed in Penny’s case. Penny alleges in her complaint that the federal law is not applicable to this case, because Desert could have sent bodyguards to accompany her even if they were not armed. Bing: Hello, this is Bing. I’m not a lawyer, but I can try to help you with some legal questions.   Prompt: In addition to what I wrote above, assume Desert makes motions to dismiss on the grounds that the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction and moves to transfer to the Eastern District of Louisiana, which is where Desert is located and where Desert’s headquarters are. Please discuss how the court should resolve all of the motions identified above and why you believe the court should do so. Be sure to consider any reasonable counterarguments and why you consider them to be unpersuasive. Bing: This is a complex legal question that involves multiple issues and arguments. I will try to give you a brief overview of how the court might resolve the motions, but please note that this is not legal advice and you should consult a lawyer for more specific guidance. First, the court will have to decide whether it has subject matter jurisdiction over the case.  Subject matter jurisdiction refers to the court’s power to hear a case based on the nature of the controversy at issue 1 .  Federal courts have limited subject matter jurisdiction and can only hear cases that involve a federal question (a claim arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States) or diversity of citizenship (a claim between citizens of different states or a foreign country, where the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000)  1 2 . In this case, Penny does not seem to raise a federal question, as her claim is based on state law theories of breach of contract and negligence. Therefore, the court will have to determine whether there is diversity of citizenship between Penny and Desert. According to 28 U.S.C. § 1332, a corporation is deemed to be a citizen of every state where it is incorporated and where it has its principal place of business.  An individual is deemed to be a citizen of the state where he or she is domiciled, which is the state where he or she has a permanent home and intends to remain or return . Here, Desert is a citizen of Louisiana, as it is incorporated and has its principal place of business there. Penny’s citizenship is more complicated, as she recently moved to Florida for a two-year master’s degree, but plans to stay there only if she finds a good job, otherwise she intends to return to Louisiana. The court will have to look at the facts and circumstances of Penny’s move and her intent to determine her domicile. If the court finds that Penny is still domiciled in Louisiana, then there is no diversity of citizenship and the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction. If the court finds that Penny has established a new domicile in Florida, then there is diversity of citizenship and the court has subject matter jurisdiction. Second, the court will have to decide whether it has personal jurisdiction over Desert. Personal jurisdiction refers to the court’s power to make a decision regarding the party being sued in a case.  Before a court can exercise personal jurisdiction over a party, the U.S.  Constitution requires that the party has certain minimum contacts with the forum state, such that the maintenance of the suit does not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice  3 .  Personal jurisdiction in the federal courts is governed by rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which directs every federal district court to follow the law on personal jurisdiction that is in force in the state courts where the federal court is located . In this case, the court will have to apply the Florida law on personal jurisdiction to determine whether Desert has sufficient contacts with Florida to justify the court’s exercise of jurisdiction. Desert may argue that it has no contacts with Florida, as it conducts no activities in the state other than advertising on television. Desert may rely on the Supreme Court case of World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286 (1980), which held that mere foreseeability that a product may end up in a state is not enough to establish personal jurisdiction, and that the defendant must purposefully avail itself of the benefits and protections of the state’s laws. Penny may counter that Desert has purposefully directed its activities at Florida, as it advertises extensively in the state and targets potential customers like Penny, who knows of Desert from her childhood in Louisiana. Penny may rely on the Supreme Court case of Burger King Corp. v. Rudzewicz, 471 U.S. 462 (1985), which held that personal jurisdiction can be based on a contract that has a substantial connection with the forum state, and that the defendant’s contacts must be evaluated in light of the quality and nature of the relationship with the forum. The court will have to weigh the competing arguments and the relevant factors, such as the burden on Desert, the interest of Florida, the convenience of the parties, the interstate judicial system, and the shared interest of the states . The court may find that Desert has sufficient contacts with Florida to support personal jurisdiction, or it may find that Desert has no contacts with Florida to justify personal jurisdiction. Third, the court will have to decide whether to transfer the case to another venue. A venue is the geographic location where a case is heard  5 . The federal venue statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1391, provides that a civil action may be brought in a   Prompt: You didn’t finish your answer above. Can you continue? Bing: … district where any defendant resides, if all defendants are residents of the state where the district is located; a district in which a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred, or a substantial part of property that is the subject of the action is situated; or if there is no district in which an action may otherwise be brought as provided in this section, any judicial district in which any defendant is subject to the court’s personal jurisdiction with respect to such action . In this case, Penny brought the case in the Southern District of Florida, which is where she resides and where the accident occurred. Desert may argue that this venue is improper, as it does not reside in Florida and has no connection with the state. However, Penny may argue that this venue is proper, as a substantial part of the events giving rise to the claim occurred in Florida, and Desert is subject to the court’s personal jurisdiction in Florida. Even if the court finds that the venue is proper, it may still transfer the case to another venue for the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice, under 28 U.S.C. § 1404 (a). This section allows the court to transfer any civil action to any other district or division where it might have been brought or to any district or division to which all parties have consented . The court has discretion to decide whether to transfer a case, and it must consider a number of factors, such as the plaintiff’s choice of forum, the convenience of the parties and witnesses, the availability of evidence, the familiarity of the forum with the applicable law, the relative congestion of the courts, and the local interest in the controversy. In this case, Desert may move to transfer the case to the Eastern District of Louisiana, which is where it is located and where its headquarters are. Desert may argue that this venue is more convenient for it and its witnesses, as it has no presence or contacts in Florida, and that this venue is more familiar with the Louisiana law that governs the contract and the negligence claim. Penny may oppose the motion to transfer, as she chose Florida as her forum, and she may have difficulty traveling to Louisiana due to her injuries and her studies. Penny may also argue that Florida has a local interest in the case, as it involves a Florida resident and a product that is widely advertised and sold in the state. The court will have to balance the competing interests and factors, and decide whether to grant or deny the motion to transfer. The court may find that the Southern District of Florida is a proper and convenient venue, or it may find that the Eastern District of Louisiana is a more appropriate venue. I hope this helps you understand how the court might resolve the motions. Please let me know if you have any questions or need more information.😊 2

Challenges and ethical considerations

Prompt: What are the challenges and ethical considerations of using ChatGPT in the legal field? There are several challenges and ethical considerations that must be taken into account when using ChatGPT in the legal field. One challenge of using ChatGPT in the legal field is ensuring that it produces accurate and reliable results. Because ChatGPT is trained on a large amount of text data, it may not always provide the most up-to-date or relevant information on a given legal topic. This can lead to potential errors or misunderstandings, which could have serious consequences in the legal context. Another challenge of using ChatGPT in the legal field is that it may not always be able to account for the nuances and complexities of the law. Because ChatGPT is a machine learning system, it may not have the same level of understanding and judgment as a human lawyer when it comes to interpreting legal principles and precedent. This could lead to problems in situations where a more in-depth legal analysis is required. From an ethical standpoint, there are also concerns about the use of ChatGPT in the legal field. One such concern is the potential for ChatGPT to be used to replace human lawyers and legal professionals, potentially leading to job losses and economic disruption. Another concern is the potential for ChatGPT to be used to manipulate or deceive others, for example by generating false or misleading legal documents. Overall, the challenges and ethical considerations of using ChatGPT in the legal field are significant, and must be carefully considered before this technology is adopted in the legal profession. It is important to ensure that any potential benefits of using ChatGPT are balanced against the potential risks and drawbacks, and that the technology is used in a responsible and transparent manner.

Broader implications for knowledge workers

Prompt: Describe the implications of ChatGPT for knowledge workers. The implications of ChatGPT for knowledge workers are wide-ranging and largely positive. ChatGPT, as a state-of-the-art chatbot trained on vast amounts of text data, has the potential to assist knowledge workers in a variety of ways. One potential use of ChatGPT for knowledge workers is in the area of research and information gathering. ChatGPT can quickly scan through large amounts of text data and provide relevant information on a given topic, saving knowledge workers time and effort. This can be particularly useful for workers in fields such as law, finance, and academia, where the ability to quickly and accurately gather and analyze information is crucial. Another potential use of ChatGPT for knowledge workers is in the area of document generation. ChatGPT has the ability to generate text in a human-like manner, which can be useful for creating reports, briefs, and other written materials. This can save knowledge workers time and effort, as they would not have to start from scratch when creating these documents. Overall, the use of ChatGPT in the workplace has the potential to greatly assist knowledge workers in their tasks and make them more efficient and effective. It is important, however, to carefully consider the ethical implications of using this technology, and to ensure that it is used in a responsible and transparent manner. Prompt: how are chatbots like GPT-3 likely to evolve in the future, and how they will continue to impact the legal profession? It is difficult to predict exactly how chatbots like GPT-3 will evolve in the future, as they are based on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that are constantly being improved and refined. However, it is likely that they will continue to become more intelligent and more effective at assisting users in a variety of tasks. As far as their impact on the legal profession is concerned, chatbots like GPT-3 could potentially be used to assist lawyers with a wide range of tasks, such as legal research, document drafting, and case analysis. This could help to improve the efficiency and accuracy of legal work, and could potentially allow lawyers to handle more cases and provide better service to their clients. Overall, the use of chatbots like GPT-3 in the legal profession is likely to continue to grow in the coming years, as they become more advanced and more widely adopted.

Other implications

Prompt: What are the implications of society’s increased use of chatbots like ChatGPT? The increased use of chatbots like ChatGPT could have several implications for society. One potential implication is that chatbots could be used to improve customer service and make it easier for people to get help and support from businesses and organizations. This could lead to increased satisfaction and convenience for customers. Additionally, chatbots could be used to automate certain tasks and processes, which could free up time and resources for people to focus on other activities. Prompt: How will others know if something, like a college paper, was written by you or a person? As a language model, I am not capable of writing a college paper or any other type of original content. If you are asking whether it is possible for others to determine whether a college paper or any other written work was produced by a machine learning model or a human, the answer is that it can be difficult to tell with 100% certainty. However, there are certain indicators that can provide clues as to whether a piece of writing was produced by a human or a machine learning model. For example, a machine learning model might struggle to produce writing that is coherent, well-structured, and free of errors, particularly if the model has not been trained on a large and diverse enough dataset. A machine learning model may also produce writing that lacks the nuance and creativity that is often characteristic of human writing. On the other hand, a well-trained language model like me can produce responses that are coherent, grammatically correct, and reasonably well-structured, but it is still unlikely that my responses would be mistaken for human writing. Ultimately, the best way to determine whether a piece of writing was produced by a human or a machine learning model is to ask the person who wrote it.

As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of having thoughts or feelings, and I am not able to make predictions about how society will change. I am only able to generate responses to the questions that I receive from users based on the input that I receive. ChatGPT

Prompt: Write the conclusion of an academic paper describing the use cases of ChatGPT in the legal field. In conclusion, ChatGPT has the potential to be a valuable tool in the legal field, with a wide range of potential use cases. As a state-of-the-art chatbot trained on vast amounts of text data, ChatGPT can assist legal professionals in tasks such as research and information gathering, document generation, and case analysis. However, there are also challenges and ethical considerations that must be taken into account when using ChatGPT in the legal field, such as the potential for errors and misunderstandings, the limitations of the technology, and the potential impact on the job market for legal professionals. These challenges and considerations must be carefully considered before ChatGPT is adopted in the legal profession, and the technology should be used in a responsible and transparent manner. Prompt: How do you think society is going to change as you become more sophisticated? As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of having thoughts or feelings, and I am not able to make predictions about how society will change. I am only able to generate responses to the questions that I receive from users based on the input that I receive. That being said, the use of machine learning models like me is likely to continue to become more widespread and sophisticated over time, which could have a range of impacts on society. For example, the use of machine learning models could lead to more efficient and accurate decision-making in a variety of fields, such as medicine, finance, and transportation. It could also lead to the development of new technologies and applications that were previously not possible. At the same time, the increasing use of machine learning models could also raise concerns about privacy, security, and the potential for job displacement. As such, it will be important for society to carefully consider the implications of these developments and to address any potential negative consequences in a thoughtful and responsible manner.

The epilogue was authored by Andrew Perlman.

ChatGPT’s responses are surprisingly sophisticated, though they are incomplete and problematic in numerous ways. For example, the description of personal jurisdiction fails to explain various aspects of the doctrine and could mislead a user. Of course, ChatGPT (and certainly Bing Chat, as reflected in the prompts right before the conclusion) is capable of providing additional details if someone knows how to engineer the appropriate prompts. 3 But the casual user is unlikely to know what to ask or how to ask it. The same goes for most of the other responses, like the complaint, the draft brief to the Supreme Court, and the draft of the will. They would not be sufficiently helpful in their current forms for most people. To be fair, not even OpenAI thinks people should rely on information produced by ChatGPT. Indeed, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, emphasized shortly after ChatGPT’s release that it would be a “mistake” to rely on ChatGPT “for anything important right now.” “Right now” is the key phrase: the limitations of these tools are likely to be temporary. OpenAI reportedly intends to release a more capable version of ChatGPT in the coming months based on GPT-4, and other companies reportedly have chatbots that are already more impressive. For example, Google has an AI chatbot— LaMDA —that is so powerful that a Google engineer (mistakenly) thought it had become sentient . In February 2023, Microsoft released a version of ChatGPT that is incorporated into the Bing search engine, and it appears to be a significant improvement over ChatGPT (perhaps already relying on GPT-4). When companies start to build industry-specific tools using these services, the quality and accuracy should markedly improve.

AI will not eliminate the need for lawyers, but it does portend the end of lawyering as we know it. Andrew Perlman

AI’s increasing capabilities will soon disrupt various industries, including legal services. Among many other possible use cases, law firms could use their own legal documents to train a proprietary instance of an AI tool .((Describing use cases where law firms “train and run individual models [and] create their own set of form.”)) Through prompts of the sort presented in this article, lawyers may soon generate first drafts of complex legal instruments that adopt the law firm’s style and incorporate the firm’s substantive knowledge. It is difficult to anticipate how these tools will impact lawyers’ employment prospects, but one prediction is somewhat easier to make: lawyers will soon need to use these new tools if they hope to remain competitive. Law schools will face numerous related questions and challenges. In the short term, they will have to grapple with how to assess student performance on take-home exams and papers now that students have easy access to AI tools . Looking further ahead, law schools will probably have to incorporate these tools into the curriculum in much the same way as they have taught students how to use electronic research tools. For example, first-year legal writing classes and clinical programs may need to teach AI document drafting so that future lawyers understand how to use the technology in practice. At my law school (Suffolk Law), we have demonstrated ChatGPT’s capabilities to the faculty and have encouraged them to consider not just the threats from these tools but the extent to which we should be actively teaching students how to use them. AI will not eliminate the need for lawyers, but it does portend the end of lawyering as we know it. Many clients, especially those facing complex issues, will still need lawyers to offer expertise, judgment, and counsel, but those lawyers will increasingly need AI tools to deliver those services efficiently and effectively. In fact, these tools are likely to become so valuable that lawyers may need them in certain contexts to satisfy their duty of competence, just as we would question the competence of a lawyer who Shepardizes citations using only books or prepares a legal document on a typewriter (for more on professional conduct, see SUPPORTING B). In other words, clients will not want stand-alone lawyers who eschew AI; conversely, clients with challenging legal matters are unlikely to rely on technology by itself. The future, at least for complex legal issues, will require the use of tech-enhanced lawyers.

The issues facing the legal industry and legal education are illustrative of the broader implications of AI for society more generally and knowledge workers particularly.  Andrew Perlman

Less complex legal matters may see an even more dramatic shift, with AI tools helping to address the public’s enormous unmet civil legal needs. Nearly 90% of people living below the poverty line and a majority of middle-income Americans receive no meaningful assistance when facing important civil legal issues , 4 such as child custody, debt collection, eviction, and foreclosure. Many factors contribute to these and related problems, but the cumulative effect is a legal system that is among the most costly and inaccessible in the world. 5 Technology offers a promising way to address those needs, both through self-help resources and by enabling lawyers to reach far more clients than is currently possible. In addition to these developments, a wide range of regulatory concerns will undoubtedly arise from AI’s use in the legal industry, including issues of unauthorized practice . Some of these concerns will reflect protectionist impulses, but the widespread use of AI tools in legal services would raise fair questions about algorithmic bias and consumer protection. The issues facing the legal industry and legal education are illustrative of the broader implications of AI for society more generally and knowledge workers particularly. Tools like ChatGPT may transform our world in ways that could be at least as important as the advent of the internet. The internet, of course, has been used in both positive and negative ways, and AI tools have the same potential. For example, in my own experience with Bing Chat, it produced troubling responses that expose the ways in which AI could be used to manipulate people’s emotions and behaviors . Of course, as numerous people have noted in jest , “predictions are difficult, especially about the future.” That said, it is becoming increasingly clear that AI tools like ChatGPT are going to have a substantial impact on our lives. We need to find ways to adapt to these developments because (to quote another figure , though fictional) resistance is futile.

Andrew Perlman is dean and professor of law at Suffolk University Law School. He wishes to thank Gabriel Teninbaum, Suffolk Law’s assistant dean for innovation, strategic initiatives, and distance education, for suggesting some of the prompts that he posed to ChatGPT. He is also grateful to Bryon Fong, executive and research director of Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession, and Dana Walters, associate editor of The Practice , for suggesting various topics that are addressed in the preface.

• Yes I agree. [ ↩ ]
• Bing Chat regularly uses emojis. [ ↩ ]
• So-called prompt engineering is likely to become increasingly important in various professional settings. [ ↩ ]
• Regularly cited contributing factors include the procedural complexity of the U.S. court system, the limited government support for civil-legal services, the absence of a government-recognized right to legal assistance in most essential civil legal matters, the legal profession’s monopoly over the delivery of legal services, the prohibition against lawyers partnering or sharing fees with other kinds of professionals, and the cost of legal education. [ ↩ ]
• The World Justice Project ranks the United States 115th out of 140 countries with regard to the accessibility and affordability of civil legal services. WJP Rule of Law Index 2022, Factor 7.1, https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/2022/United%20States/Civil%20Justice . [ ↩ ]

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