Researching your market – analyse the publication as a whole
You might buy a magazine to analyse because you have an idea for an article but don’t just analyse the articles. It’s a good idea to study the whole of the magazine. This will give you an idea of the readership of the publication and whether your article will suit its readers. Analysing the vocabulary used will help you to tailor your article to fit in with the style of the publication. Additionally, you may find other slots which invite work from writers which you were unaware of and can now also target.
As well as taking note of the lengths of the sentences used, check the lengths of the paragraphs. When you send your work out, it’s on A4 size paper. Your paragraphs may look short on a page that size but imagine them in a newspaper or magazine. You can fit about 16 words onto a single sentence of A4, but in a newspaper/magazine, this is often more than halved meaning your paragraphs will be much longer in the publication. Some newspapers use very short paragraphs, often only one sentence in length so research this carefully and bear it in mind when working on your full piece.
If you’re writing an article and plan to use ‘I’ e.g. ‘In my experience, I have found…’ check that the publication uses articles in this style. Many don’t add the writer in and prefer to stick to the facts and details.
Does the publication have specific slots that their articles fall into? E.g. some magazines which publish short stories are only looking for twist-in-the-tale stories so it’s no good sending them a romance. Similarly, some publications only accept articles for their ‘feature’ slot or readers’ true-life stories. You increase your chances of having work accepted if you tailor yours to fit in with the slots available.
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Esther Chilton 
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