{"id":143,"date":"2014-03-10T23:55:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T23:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writeherewritenowwriteon.wordpress.com\/?p=143"},"modified":"2016-02-04T13:23:27","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T19:23:27","slug":"writing-for-the-christian-science-periodicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/writing-for-the-christian-science-periodicals\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing for the Christian Science periodicals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Jeff Ward-Bailey<\/p>\n<p>Writing a testimony or an article for the <i>Christian Science Sentinel<\/i> or <i>Journal<\/i> can be a lot of fun &#8212; because you&#8217;re sharing a healing that really made a difference in your life, or a spiritual concept that has spoken to you deeply. But it can also be challenging to feel like you&#8217;re describing your inspiration accurately, and in a way that will be easily understood by other readers.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been working as a staff editor at the <i>Sentinel<\/i> for a little over four years, working with authors &#8212; everyone from long-time Christian Science teachers to new Christian Scientists writing their first articles &#8212; to publish in print and on the web. I do a lot of work with teen authors, as well, and as you might imagine I sometimes get submissions from Principians sharing their experiences! I&#8217;ve found there are a few elements that really make articles and testimonies sing. So if you&#8217;re struggling to write about a healing, you might find these points helpful:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>It&#8217;s okay to sound like you! <\/b>It&#8217;s easy to assume that &#8220;writing spiritually&#8221; means &#8220;writing in the style of Mary Baker Eddy&#8221; &#8212; using flowery language, liberally sprinkling phrases like &#8220;malicious animal magnetism,&#8221; and employing words like &#8220;illume&#8221; and &#8220;infinitude.&#8221; There&#8217;s nothing wrong with these conventions per se, but a testimony or article is often much clearer if it&#8217;s written in a more straightforward style. Think of the way you&#8217;d describe a healing to a friend who isn&#8217;t familiar with Christian Science. You probably wouldn&#8217;t drop a buzzword like &#8220;chemicalization&#8221; without explaining what it means, right? Simplifying your writing &#8212; and not feeling the need to conform to 1880s-era literary conventions &#8212; often makes for a stronger piece.<\/li>\n<li><b>There&#8217;s no quota on quotes.<\/b> Sometimes people assume that there need to be a certain number of quotes from the Bible and <i>Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures<\/i> in their piece. By all means, if a certain passage jumped off the page at you, you should talk about it in your article! But you should never feel pressured to shoehorn a quote in to your piece if it really doesn&#8217;t apply.<\/li>\n<li><b>Try to strike a balance.<\/b> Many successful articles and testimonies include both a narrative (a healing or experience) and solid metaphysics. If your piece has both these elements, think about using the narrative as a framework and weaving the spiritual details in &#8212; in other words, maybe you could talk a little bit about a healing or experience you had, then use the spiritual lesson you learned from that experience as a jumping-off point to make a broader metaphysical argument. Feel free to include whatever details you want to communicate with the audience!<\/li>\n<li><b>Don&#8217;t sweat it!<\/b> All the editors at the magazines are happy to hear from contributors. You shouldn&#8217;t feel nervous about sending in a piece, even if you don&#8217;t feel that it&#8217;s perfectly written. The editors are happy to work with authors one-on-one to get a piece sounding just right. And you wouldn&#8217;t believe how many strong pieces I&#8217;ve received from people who really didn&#8217;t think of themselves as writers!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The wonderful thing about <i>Sentinel<\/i> and <i>Journal <\/i>articles is that they&#8217;re all written because the author had an amazing experience or insight and wanted to communicate it with others. If you let that desire to share be your guide as you&#8217;re writing, you can&#8217;t go wrong.<\/p>\n<p><i>This <b>guest post<\/b> is from Jeff Ward-Bailey, who was a Principia College writing tutor before he became a staff editor at the <\/i>Christian Science Sentinel <i>about four years ago.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Jeff Ward-Bailey Writing a testimony or an article for the Christian Science Sentinel or Journal can be a lot of fun [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,58,109],"tags":[71,46,59,79,56],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-getting-started","category-guest-post","category-writeherewritenowwriteon","tag-christian-science","tag-organization","tag-prayer","tag-quote","tag-style"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5DI6r-2j","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}