Opinion still has to report

The Comment pieces that travel beyond the people who already agree with you have one thing in common. Someone did the reporting first.

It is tempting to treat opinion as the easy section. You have a take, you have a word count, you write until they meet. The results read like a group chat with better punctuation. They convince the converted and bounce off everyone else.

The features I wrote for Palatinate that I am still happy with started somewhere duller, with a question I could not yet answer. What does representation actually look like across a university, not in the prospectus but in who gets asked to speak? Why does the second-year housing rush begin in November? The opinion came after the looking, not before it.

Reporting an opinion piece does not mean burying your view. It means earning it. A specific detail, a real figure, one person’s account you actually chased down: any of these does more for an argument than another confident adjective.

It also changes the prose. Once you have reported, you stop reaching for the big claim, because you have something better, which is the small true one. The paragraphs get shorter. The verbs get plainer. You trust the material.

Readers feel the difference even when they cannot name it. A reported piece has weight. It reads like it cost the writer something, because it did.