Write for the General Public.

The Pulse's mission is to make alternative medicine easy and practical for regular folks. By focusing on Chinese Medicine, we advance the Chinese Medicine profession in the U.S. and internationally.

• How will Pulse Writers Benefit?
• Commitment
• Column Topics
• Article Topics
• Writing Guidelines
• Editing
• What You Do, What We Do

How will Columnists Benefit?

1. Build Your Practice, Drive Your Career Forward. You will reach a large growing audience of the general public (GP). We get about 50,000 unique visitors per month as of October, 2004. Some of these people will become your patients. And, if you plan to write books to the general public, this is a great way to get started.
   
2. Become a PRO at Talking to the GP. The language we prefer at the Pulse is quite different from what you'll read in the professional journals. If you don't yet know how to write this way, you'll soon learn!
3. Writers will receive feature status in the Pulse's Practitioner Locating database. This locator receives more general public traffic than any other (patients not peers!), and featured acupuncturists (that's you) are more likely to get the patients. Everyone who lists here gets from a few prospect calls a month, to a few a week. I've found it a much better option than yellow pages, etc. We charge practitioners who don't write an article $95 a year to list with us. You can get in there just by writing a 1000 word article.
4. You Keep Your Copyright (some mags don't let you!). You are free to re-publish and distribute your work anywhere anytime.
5. Get in on the Ground Floor. Actually, I hope the PULSE is on the second or third floor by now...

Article Topics

You are free to choose any disease, condition, herb, modality, etc. that you want to focus on. Check the Pulse's existing articles to see if your topic is new (go to the main page and use the search box). Even if it isn't, you may have a new angle (e.g. if you want to cover vitamin and mineral treatments for schizophrenia; at the time of this writing, there is a schizophrenia article, but it does not include vitamin and mineral information). In that case, go ahead!

Writing Guidelines

• Word count per article: 1000-1500 words.
• Style: Use and develop your own voice within these parameters:
  i. Be personable, simple, fun, interesting, relevant, deep, and inspiring.
  ii. Keep the technical discussions of TCM pathomechanisms to a minimum or even to zero; if it requires more than a paragraph of background, don't go there! What interests acupuncturists and students is likely to get the 'back' button from the general public. Our goal is to give readers digestible soundbites to chew on, not to turn them into TCM practitioners. If they want more, they'll ask for it.
  iii. Since I've been writing about OM for the public for 3 years, I may have other unconscious and semiconscious wisdom in this regard that will not emerge until I'm editing your article. I will discuss these issues with you before we publish it. If you have ideas to add, or a good rationale for your approach, I will welcome your thoughts!
• Possible formats:
  i. Q&A - Answer a real patient question
  ii. Story - Tell your own, or a patient's story
  iii. Resource - Factually oriented info, a comprehensive article or set of articles
  iv. Suggest Another!
• Elements of any article
  i. Analogies, metaphors, similes - Keep the reader's attention and make yourself clear by using one of these devices.
  ii. Statistics, chinese pattern diagnosis, oriental medical treatment, basic western medical info, lifestyle, diet solutions, herbs, vitamins and minerals etc.
  iii. Comparison of western and eastern diagnosis and treatment
  iv. Always use the word 'you' instead of 'one' etc. - it's more personal that way.
  v. Provide links to any websites or resources you use in writing. If you copy text from somewhere else without quoting it, that's plagiarism and plagiarism is baaaaad.

		Editing Since the Pulse is a web-resource, our word-choice often is guided by what terms the public searches for most often. For example, I think 'Oriental Medicine' is a more accurate description of our medicine, but people
actually search for 'Chinese Medicine' 15 times as often! Since I found that out, I've been writing 'Chinese Medicine.' However, we can use both terms to meet them where they're at and take them where we want them to be. By the way, that's called edumucation. You are not responsible to choose words in this way; our editors will make this change for you (while of course preserving your article's style and strengths).

What you do:

• Email us your article in text only, MS Word, or HTML format one month ahead of time
• Email us any gif's or jpg's you want to include (sending them as part of a Word document is ok for reference, but we still need the gif or jpg sent as an email attachment).
• Keep in touch if you have a reasonable emergency or are running late. Missed deadlines without contact or too many late articles mean your writer spot opens up to someone who really wants to write for the Pulse.

What I do:

• Edit for grammar and audience.
• Put the article into Pulse's HTML format.
• Optimize the article and HTML for relevant Search Engine keywords and submit the article to the Search Engines.

Wanna do it?