Faculty Workshop on Writing Op-Ed and Commentary Articles

February 5, 2018

A faculty workshop focusing on how to write powerful op-eds and commentary pieces will be held on Friday, Feb. 16 from 9-11 a.m. in room 217 of Perkins Library. The workshop will be taught by Keith Lawrence, executive director of News and Communications.

Faculty who participate in the workshop will begin writing a commentary piece with feedback provided by the instructor and other attendees. If you are interested in attending, please email keith.lawrence@duke.edu.

Faculty who have gone through this workshop have been very successful:

A total of 337 Duke-authored op-eds were included in the daily clips report in 2017, but that is not a comprehensive number because not all op-eds get included in the report. Of that 337 total, 18 appeared in the New York Times and 41 were in The Hill.
17 op-eds were sent out through ONC’s op-ed service. Each op-ed, on average, was picked up by nearly 4 papers. The op-ed that did the best was written by Michael Newcity, who during the national debate about Confederate memorials took a different approach and wrote about the U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals. It got picked up by eight papers.
The papers in the op-ed service using the most submissions in the service were the News & Observer (10), the Cleveland Plain Dealer (8), Philadelphia Inquirer and Newsday (6), Richmond Times Dispatch and Charleston Post & Courier (5). Newsday and Richmond were added to the op-ed service this year.