Article Development Process

From experience, we find it efficient to work a simple three stage process:

A. DEVELOP TOPICS. You/we come up with subject ideas for articles.

• We agree on a list of topics – ideally 2 or more at a time
• We agree the publication deadlines we need to meet

Notes:
1. We can help identify what we feel is priority, what we’ve already covered quite recently.
2. We can let you know if we have any material that might be useful (could be case material, photos, technical content).

B. ARTICLE OUTLINE. (kept brief - but can save editing time later on)

Before starting writing your main article, we suggest that you agree an article outline or specification with your section editor. This article specification can simply be a series of bullet points that might list:

• general angle and direction of the article (if not obvious from title)
• the likely main headings / content / additional material (e.g. case material)
• the expected size/length (ie 1 or 2 pages)

Click here to download an Article Specification Template

Click here to download an Example Article Specification

It can be useful to have a general discussion following the outline stage. This might identify further sub-topics or sources of information we are aware of, and people it might worth contacting for views or even a quotable opinion.

C. FINAL ARTICLE.

Please include, as appropriate:

• Information on any reference sources used
• Photographs (if applicable) or drawings (e.g. important for Building Briefings articles)
• Flow charts, bullet points, summary inset boxes are often helpful to enhance the main text