How to write a letter to the editor
Last week, I wrote about five ways to advocate for renewable energy. This week, I’d like to focus on one: writing a letter to the editor. Letters to the editor are one of the most-read sections of any newspaper. For that reason, letters are one of the most effective ways to advocate for something in your community. Here’s how to write an effective letter.
Know the deadlines
Daily papers obviously publish every day, but your best bet for influencing projects in your community is a local paper. Local papers have lower circulations, so it’s easier to get published. Also, even though there’s a lower circulation, almost every reader will be a member of your target audience, so you may actually reach more people through the local media.
Local community papers usually publish once per week, and they can sometimes publish as little as once per month. For these papers, it’s important to know when your letter must be submitted to be published. Often, this is several days before publication, so it’s easy to unknowingly miss the deadline. If the paper doesn’t explicitly state when the deadline is, give them a call to find out.
Make it timely
It’s a lot easier to get published if you’re writing in response to a recent article in the paper you’re writing to. In fact, you may even want to reference the article in your letter. That doesn’t mean you won’t get published if you write about other subjects, but your odds will improve a lot if you’re responding to a recent article.
Keep it short and simple
Your local paper will usually give you some guidelines about length, but in general, the shorter the better. Anything over 250 words will rarely get published, and you should aim for 100 to 150 words. Take the time to read through it a few times and cut out anything that’s not crucial for explaining your point.
Keep yourself focused on a single point. You don’t really have space to explain more than one point, and a rambling letter that tries to cover multiple subjects will lose readers’ interest. State your argument right at the beginning of the letter, and use the rest of the letter to support your argument, rather than to introduce additional arguments.
Stick to your talking points
Using similar language and similar arguments as other advocates of a project will help to reinforce the message you’re trying to present. If letter after letter uses the same key words and phrases, those phrases will start to make their way into other people’s vocabularies. When you control the language being used, you will win every time.
Remember that you don’t need to re-state the talking points verbatim — in fact, you really shouldn’t do that. Rather than just repeating the talking points verbatim, paraphrase them, while keeping the most important words or phrases. Your letter should still be your own unique voice; the talking points just offer themes to base your letter on. It can be difficult to take a set of talking points and make them your own, but practice makes perfect.
Where do the talking points come from? That depends how organized you are. In a truly organized movement, there may be a person responsible for sending out short talking points memos to supporters. More often, you’ll have to wing it. Read other supporters’ letters to see what language they are using. Read through blogs like this one to get a sense of what arguments are being emphasized.
Include your contact information
The paper will usually want to verify your identity, and that you were the one who wrote the letter. Whenever you send a letter to the editor, include your name, phone number, address, and email. The paper won’t publish them, but they may call you to verify your information.
Get friends and neighbors to write letters, too
Even if you’re a great letter writer, you’re not going to get published every week. After a week or two, the paper is not going to want the same voices in the letters section day after day. That’s why major advocacy groups start letter-writing campaigns — to ensure that at least one letter from their point of view always make it into the paper. You may not have an entire organization at your disposal, but you do have friends and neighbors who feel the same way you do. Encourage them to write, too.
Why letters are important
It may not seem like a big deal, but writing letters to the editor can have a huge impact on the success of renewable energy projects in your community. Opponents of renewable energy projects usually win because they are loud, while supporters are quiet. Letters to the editor are a great way of making your voice heard and explaining to your community why renewable energy is a good thing. Without community support, we’ll never get past our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels.
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For more tips on writing a letter to the editor, here are some good resources from the ACLU and the Association of Washington Cities [PDF].
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