I had a great idea for a column this week. Unfortunately, this isn’t it.

After about 20 minutes of deep soul-searching, it occurred to me that some of you might be wondering how I write these columns.

After all, they’re hilariously funny and not at all awful. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

So, being a great and incredibly humble person, I will dedicate this column to the art of column writing (or writing something, at any rate).

The best type of column starts with a zinger of an opening line, such as… uh… well…

Hey, I’m not the one looking for how to write a column here. You’re supposed to be doing the heavy lifting.

Usually, coming up with an opener takes so much effort that I take the rest of the day off.

But seeing as how I’m running up against a deadline here, I need to plow through the introduction.

It takes a lot of effort. And seeing as how I have to reach about 500 words, I have to repeat: it takes a lot of effort.

About the middle of the column is when I bring in new and interesting characters, such as my neighbor George (we can call him MNG for short).

MNG, as I have mentioned many times in previous 500-word columns, is a nuclear engineer.

To him, nothing about his job is funny. To me, he’s a real-life Homer Simpson.

He would help me write this column, if he wasn’t in the middle of a nuclear emergency.

Funny how those always crop up when I ask him for a little literary aid.

Then I try to bang out a few sentences in between tasks at my job. I’m an engineer, too, but of a less threatening variety.

I work in software engineering, which some people (I’m looking at you, MNG) say isn’t an engineering discipline. But as I’m neither a good engineer nor very disciplined, I generally don’t argue the point.

By the end of a workday, it’s a miracle if I’ve accomplished anything. Work-wise, that is. Column-wise, I usually get my column from “half-baked” to “well done.”

It’s a good thing my boss doesn’t read my columns, or she’d certainly give me the boot. And throw my laptop after me, just to make a point.

So if I had to sum it up, the steps to becoming a columnist are pretty simple.

One: write a column.

That’s it. I could spend another hundred words discussing it, and indeed, I think I will.

When you gracefully step into the conclusion of your story, and despite MNG’s protests that he deserves more literary attention, you generally want to leave the reader with a moral lesson.

After all, these feuilletons do not exist purely to amuse the proletariat. Heavens, no. The newspapers and journals and online publications of the world need to educate their readership!

I hope I’ve taught you here how to write a column, or at least showed you how I write mine.

If this inspires you to write something—a sentence, a poem, a letter to your congressman—feel free to email it to me. I’ll read it.

I can’t promise I’ll laugh (I especially won’t, if you write about something like tax law), but I can promise to give it a try.

Then I might send it to MNG, if his friendly neighborhood reactor hasn’t shut down.

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Copyright 2026 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.