One of my editors recently told me he loves me because I include a source list with my articles. Not many of his writers do this, he said — and this is a huge national magazine with well-published writers. The source list helps the fact checker, well, check your facts without having to hunt down your sources.

How to do it: After the article text, I drop down two spaces and write “SOURCES.” Under that I list URLs of any studies I cited in the article plus the names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of everyone I quoted in the piece. If it’s a magazine that’s not readily available on the stands, I include the sources’ mailing addresses so the editor can send them copies.

(Other writers type their source list on a separate page and send it in along with the article. Maybe I should try that…occasionally a fact checker will e-mail me in the middle of the night desperately needing my source list — which I had included at the end of the article but which the editor had stripped out before sending the piece along to the fact checker.) [LF]

If you liked that post, you might also like:

• I Finished My Article. Now What?
• How to Organize Your Sources
• You Ask, We Answer: Should the editor let sources use pseudonyms?
• Are You Making This Writing Mistake That Costs You Valuable Time?
• Getting the Writing Details Right