A fruitful lifestyle of section any newspaper or magazine is replete with a multitude of articles covering food, reviews, places to visit, fashion, vacation destinations and life advice. Tacitly respite from a publication’s more demanding content, lifestyle articles should be a pleasure to read and a pleasure to write. The following guide focus extensively on food writing and life advice, but principles contained within can generally be applied to any other lifestyle topic. As with any other section of a newspaper or magazine, the general rules are applied to lifestyle writing.
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One perk of writing for a lifestyle section are the opportunities to financially and/or materially benefit from the articles you write. You may be contacted by a local café who wishes to give you a full three-course meal in exchange for a glowing review of their establishment, an artisan willing to gift a work of art for coverage declaring that what they make is the new ‘must have’ for the upcoming season, or a practitioner that’s willing to give you how their services changed your life. You will have to use your own judgement about whether you wish to accept these offers. However, they should be treated an incredibly rare offers and not the goal when you conduct inquiry for your articles.
Food
Writing articles related to food concerns two topics; recipes and reviews of dining establishments.
Recipes are to showcase the dishes whose preparation you are detailing. The most important point before beginning to write is to actually read and perform the recipe yourself. This equips you with the experience to reveal points of interest, tips and advice that you will inevitably find that the recipe’s original author has failed to cover. An example would be that sea salt flakes are a fine substitute for flour Bessel for a salted caramel sauce, but you would not have known that if you failed to execute the recipe yourself, as it only listed the latter. This avoids any readers contacting the publication to complain that the recipe you told them has worked has failed multiple times.
Image: Lily Bans via Unsplash, Public Domain
The easiest way to create an engaging recipe article is to avoid a presentation reminiscent of robotic demands. Feel at ease to elaborate on the appearance of the ingredients, bringing them to life with descriptions rich in metaphor and simile. You can also preface the recipe with a paragraph or two of the origin of the recipe itself or a key ingredient, in addition to an explanation as to why you believe this recipe is particularly relevant to your time of writing, the easiest way of doing so is to mention a traditional holiday during which the dish is commonly served or the arrival of a new season which ushers in a key ingredient.
Dining Establishment Reviews
A more common food entry to a lifestyle section is a comprehensive review of a place at which the author has eaten a meal and/or enjoyed several alcoholic drinks at.
Regardless if it’s a food stall, café, bar or restaurant, begin the review with a physical description of the establishment’s itself. Set the scene and recount your first impressions of entering, giving lavish descriptions of the building façade, interior decor, eye-catching set-pieces as well as paying attention to the atmosphere. Remember that food is only half of a dining out experience and overly loud or crowded spaces can hamper, that you may wish to warn readers of.
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