How to Write Opinion Pieces

This is for all of you have something to say about what’s going on in the world or in your community. We’ll give you everything you need to write persuasively for multiple platforms: print, podcasts and digital magazines.

This workshop will give you the tools to immediately start writing opinion pieces based on your personal experience. After the class, you’ll get a recording, so you can listen to it again and again for training.

Op-eds are a terrific first step to writing memoir, even for complete beginners. They help you test out ideas, opinions and arguments in a shorter setting and practice writing to persuade — a key to good memoir.

Rex Smith was for 18 years Editor and Vice President of the Times Union, the metropolitan newspaper of New York’s Capital Region. A top graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Smith has been a Pulitzer Prize juror and TV news producer; he writes an award-winning weekly newspaper column and hosts a nationally syndicated public radio show.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of four books, including The Memoir Project, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. A former staffer at The New York Times, she has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and a talk show host on Sirius Satellite Radio. She currently runs a writing lab called The Memoir Project and teaches memoir worldwide at marionroach.com.