It is always very infuriating when editors reject your articles as a writer, journalist or an author.
Article rejection is always a pointer telling you that you need to bolster your writing skills to bring them at par with other veteran scribes.
Editors in newsrooms will always reject your articles for the following reasons:
Informal writing style
You can be the best English or Swahili writer who has published lots of books but when you replicate the composition-like writing formula in news writing, be sure of getting a ‘reject’ message.
Informal writing style is usually common with new scribes who have not mastered the art of writing whilst being guided by the inverted pyramid style.
The inverted pyramid style ensures that all important epithets of the story are conveyed within the Lead.
The information should include what happened, to Who, Why, where, When and How. It also doesn’t allow suspense which is a touted style in traditional composition/literature writing.
Poor angling
A story angle is the tone and taste a reader gets when he/she reads a piece.
Angling problem haunts both junior and senior writers since it is always not very easy to decide on the best angle.
Your editor will always reject your article if the angle doesn’t rhyme with the house policies.
For instance, a writer who writes a soft hitting story for hard critic media house risks his/her story being killed.
Plagiarism
This is copying another journalist/writer’s story and making it appear as if it’s yours without crediting the source.
Random content writers are likely to fall prey to this since the temptation is usually very high to lift information from a book, website or newspaper without crediting who wrote it first.
Editors will always reject such as publishing plagiarized content not only taints the image of the writer but also infringes Copyright Laws which may put the respective media house in trouble.
Story not local
Most writers have found their well-written articles rejected with the editor citing that the story is not local.
This means that the story is from a further country or place and if published may not be read by a Kenyan since they can’t relate to that country.
For instance, you will be interested to read a story on a one-man drowning in Kisumu but not that of 20 drowning in Kuwait.
Lack of sources
Editors will also reject a story without credible sources since news writing is all about reporting.
Telling what was said. When sources are not well quoted, an editor may think you are not conveying the right information or you are probably writing ‘fake news’.
It is only through thorough practice that one can minimize the instances of their stories being rejected.
All veteran writers make mistakes and those that don’t make mistakes are those that have never written.