Voice and Presentation

A good voice is combination of word choice, tone (funny, serious, sentimental), and pacing. This is how you build an emotional connection to your readers. Your writing should sound natural. Don't over-slang things, but when people read your article they should know you wrote it. You aren't writing a legal document here - you are selling your personality. Anyone can get a good decklist. Anyone can have a great pick order. What you need to do is find a way to get people to read and enjoy your stuff first, and then let the content speak for itself.

If I took a random paragraph from articles from Zac Hill, Chapin, Menendian, Rizzo, ffej, and Gerry T, you could probably pick figure out who wrote which (assuming you've read a few of each of their articles). They each had very distinct voices, and that meant that their writing was something that was unique to each of them. When they wrote an article, the were the only one who could have written that article.

Presentation is about how you go about getting your ideas on the page. There are a million ways to present any given set of data (tournament report, decklist, pick orders, theory) - what you need to do is find one that is appealing to read. Personality alone can't carry text that is put on the page with no regards for its placement. Don't let things get too blocky and don't try and cram too much data into any given section. Find a pace that is both easy to read and gets the point across fast enough that people don't lose interest.

Did you know that people tend to actually rate TV shows higher when they watch them live? Those pesky commercial breaks give people a chance to relax and reflect on what they've just seen. You don't need commercial breaks in your work, but you should have some asides. After you've told people something complex, throw them a bone with either a quick story about what you've just talked about, or a bit of humor. Don't try and blow their mind with huge ideas over and over again in sequence. Your article will get muddled. This gives people a second to organize the thoughts in their head.It gives your work a sense of shape.

You start out with an idea. People don't mulligan well because they don't understand the math involved. Article done? Hardly. You need 1489 more words. How do you put that on the page so that people A) believe you and B) get through the whole article? You can fill it up with statistics, but people will read your chart and move on without taking anything from it. There is no emotional connection to the article, no easy take away for them that helps them solidify it in their mind.

You can throw in a lot of anecdotal evidence, but you haven't proven your point. You can throw in some information on human psychology, but that isn't Magic related. Figuring out which percentages your article needs to contain is hard, but figuring out the balance and placing is even harder.

I can't stress how important this presentation part is. It really is the difference between a master and a novice. Give me a bag of flower, a little bit of baking power/soda, a pound of sugar, a few cups of water, and two eggs, and I will produce a mass of inedible glop. I suck at baking. I can cook most things, I just never figured out the pastry end of it all. Give it to a Paula Dean, however, and she's going to give you a high-calorie treat you will be happy to clog your arteries with.

If you want the best example of this that I can think of - read Stuck in the Middle with Bruce by Rizzo. A lot of the article isn't Magic at all. But the story sucks you in, and so when you learn the lesson, it sticks with you. You have something to connect it to. When I peak at the top card of my deck after a mulligan, I don't think to myself "I shouldn't do that because it skews my view of statistics in the future." I think "FFFFFFFF-stop being Bruce."

None of this stuff can be learned overnight. It comes from lots of practice writing, and even more editing. Re-reading things, changing a bit around here or there, deleting whole sections that are interesting but end up distracting your larger point, and eventually finding what pleases you. First and foremost, you need to write something you would read. If you can do that, other people should enjoy it.