Op-eds offer students an immediate means to communicate with a public audience, and, if published on an established platform, can offer the added benefit of editorial intervention by professional journalists.
Platforms include local newspapers in the op-ed or letter to the editor section, amateur digital platforms such as Medium, professional digital platforms like Ms. Magazine, or even national outlets like the HuffPost and The New York Times. Students can also submit to the op-ed section of Smith’s paper The Sophian as guest writers.
Methods
Op-eds can be stand-alone writing assignments focused on an area of interest within the course. Ideally, the assignment should capture an actual point of view held by the student, rather than one assigned by the professor. The op-ed assignment should therefore be broad enough for multiple perspectives to be possible.
For instance, students in Nancy Cohen’s section of WRT/ENG 136: Journalism: Principles and Practice write an op-ed on how news organizations can regain public trust. In the assignment, Cohen suggests that students address the question through one of five themes discussed earlier in the course: fairness, objectivity, bothsides-ism, fact checking, or choice of sources.
Another effective op-ed assignment asks students to adapt a previous academic essay (written earlier in the course) into an op-ed. This assignment encourages students to see the op-ed as a research and fact driven and dependent form.
Francine Kiefer of The Christian Science Monitor has taught an interterm course on op-ed writing at Smith and has generously provided her handouts for structuring an effective op-ed, included here as the “OP-ED TOOLBOX” and the “PERSONAL ESSAY TOOLBOX.”
Besides advancing a specific opinion, op-eds are driven by researched fact, a fact sometimes overlooked by students. While op-eds use journalistic attribution and not a works-cited list, students should be encouraged to create a works cited list for the purposes of the assignment, backing up their claims with facts, data and statistics.
Op-eds also capitalize on the writer’s “platform,” or personal and professional identity in the public sphere. Students should be encouraged to consider their own platform in relation to their topic of choice. Many publications are hungry for youth voices, so students should be encouraged not to consider their young age a liability, but instead explicitly center their youth perspective. A student writing about the medical system may have had a chronic illness or experienced a sports injury. A student writing about the environment may have participated in a program studying coral reefs, be a thesis student in the sciences, or be a member of an activist organization.
Learning Goals
- Consideration of interplay between venue, audience, and argument
- Connection of academic knowledge with public audience
- Clarify distinctions between academic and public writing, in terms of voice, style, structure, motivation, argument, use of evidence, etc.
Examples
Professional
Carrie Baker, ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.’ — 1984 in 2025,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 21, 2025 (cross-posted in the Greenfield Recorder and Ms. (open access)).
Aneesh Raman, ‘I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking,’ The New York Times, May 19, 2025.
Ann Darling, ‘Gov. Healey makes an undemocratic wrong turn,’ The Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 21, 2025
Student
Numerous students have developed and professionally published exemplary op-eds, often with editorial guidance from Smith faculty and Jacobson Center staff.
- Julia Garnett ’28, ‘Project 2025 Is Tennessee 2024’: Dispatches From the Front Lines, Ms. Magazine. The piece relies in part on Garnett’s platform as the 2024 youth honorary chair of National Banned Books Week. It’s also a good example of how, while a specific perspective is crucial, factual information rather than opinion drives a good op-ed.
- Ava Blanco, The Life of the Mother, The Grief of Her Child: What Abortion Bans Take From Us, Ms. Magazine.
- Minna Most ’27, Let’s Talk About Sex in School, Women’s Media Center.
- Bezuneh, Helen, The downfalls of finding national pride in Ethiopian beauty, Addis Standard.
- Alex McKinley ‘21, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is a call to arms for grassroots activists, Daily Hampshire Gazette
- Jacqueline Centeno ‘22, SGA should make PRISM a unity org, The Sophian.
Additional op-eds published by students are archived on Smith Public Voices, an archive collated by the Jacobson Center of student writing published in the mainstream press.
Students in all Calderwood seminars produce op-eds. Faculty teaching these seminars might be contacted for example student op-eds within specific disciplines.
Learning Goals
- Concise, accessible expression of information and findings.
- Consideration of audience and opportunity to reach outside the classroom.
- Development of a concept of personal and professional platform within students’ areas of academic interest.
Multimedia Expansion
Op-eds dovetail well with blogging (WORDPRESS BLOGS AND WEBSITES). Text-first broadcasts (view module here), or Instagram (view module here) can serve to encapsulate and bring public attention to the piece. More extended personal essays, which can resemble long-form op-eds, are discussed in RESEARCHED PERSONAL ESSAYS.
