One hour to ask the long-term editor of the SNRD Africa website and newsletter anything communications. Pascal started off with an 18mins input on drafting articles:

• Easy steps to make your articles more attractive
• Structure: The inverted pyramid and front-loading
• How to feature people in your articles

For the remainder of the hour, Pascal answered a number of critical questions participants had with regard to their projects’ outreach work.

Why you should have a look at the recording

It’s rather difficult to determine how to write a good article for the SNRD website, or for any website or newsletter for that matter. For the obvious reason that there’re many good ways of doing it. And even if you broke all the non-existing rules, you’d still stand a good chance to launch off a great article.

However, there’re some things you can easily avoid to crank up the level of attention your articles get and substantially reduce the time of back-and-forth with the editor.

To get something out the way: The whole issue is not so much about writing style. Who would want to talk about that?! There’re loads of books and Youtube tutorials on that and most people wouldn’t care to spend their precious time on them.

And neither should you. You’re an advisor in some special field of development cooperation. Aiming at making you a semi-pro writer is … well, a semi-pro approach. You should focus on your field. So don’t worry about style. That part can and should be covered by the editor.

Additional information

• Presented slides, incl. some additional resources
• Transcript of the entire session (unformatted)
• Articles on communications by Pascal at corbecoms.com
• Online course on How to Set up a Communications Strategy in Development Cooperation 

Upcoming

A lot can be discussed and there is much, much more. However, remember these sessions are all about you getting an opportunity to ask your questions.

So it could be something like « Why was this part of the article I submitted changed like this? » or « how do I select better pics? » or « what is a more efficient workflow for this and that » YOU name it and we discuss it. Together!

We hope to see lots of our newsletter contributors in the next open office hours as well. Let us know if you have a particular subject that you wish to see covered.

Contact

Joy Heitlinger, joy.heitlinger@giz.de
Pascal Corbé, pascal.corbe@corbecoms.com