Complete practical guide
The article-writing book about the statistic that was never true
37 chapters and 68 worksheets on researching and writing long-form for clients - why a 2,400-word piece took eleven hours, how a true finding became an untrue sentence with nobody lying, and why the quarter was judged on a page that had been retitled.
Look inside — read the first chapter freeOne payment, USD. Yours permanently — no subscription.
What this guide is
Marek wrote for three agencies and two direct clients at a per-word rate that had seemed reasonable when it was agreed. The 2,400-word piece took eleven hours - not because it was difficult, but because there was no outline. Four hours of research, five of writing, delivered, and then a note saying the client had expected a different angle. Not a different topic, a different angle - which meant most of the research had been for the wrong article. The rewrite was not billable, because nothing in the arrangement said what a rewrite was. Three other things were quieter. A piece under a doctor's byline carried a statistic about how long a condition takes to resolve, taken from a well-written article on a reputable health site, which had taken it from a press release, which had summarised a study - rounding the number and dropping the clause about which patients it applied to. By the time it reached Marek it was a clean, quotable sentence with no hedging in it at all, and it was not true of the people who would read it. It ran for a year under a real doctor's name, and the doctor had signed it off because doctors are busy and the writer is supposed to have checked. A piece delivered in March was published in July, retitled, with two paragraphs added by somebody who wanted a product mentioned - one of which made a claim the rest of the sourcing did not support. And at the end of the quarter an agency reported that the articles were not performing: ranking position at ninety days, on a site with four hundred other pages, half of them rewritten by somebody else in the same period, tracked by a tool disagreeing with the client's own analytics by about a third. Nobody behaved badly. The health site was reputable. The press release was written by somebody doing their job. Every part of it was ordinary, and all of it was expensive.
What you get out of it
Specifics, not promises.
- Why every sentence you write is a claim in somebody else's name
- The citation chain that turns a true finding into an untrue sentence
- The outline that bounds research and makes a rewrite billable
- How to know when to stop researching - five conditions, not a feeling
- The eleven-point fact-check, run as a separate pass on an exported copy
- The four honest options when a claim cannot be sourced
- Why per-word pricing punishes the writer who checks
- The delivery note that survives an editor who cannot see which words were load-bearing
- Why the verdict arrives months late on a page you may not recognise
- 148 AI prompts - and not one asks a model for a citation
Ideal for
People researching and writing long-form articles, guides and editorial content for small businesses, agencies, professionals, creators and remote teams as a side hustle - article commissions, retained programmes, topic strategy and content calendars, interview-based long-form, editing and fact-check passes, style guides and source libraries, and ghostwriting. Particularly four groups: somebody paid by the word for a job whose cost is research; somebody who has rewritten a piece because the angle was wrong and not charged for it; somebody who has cited a statistic found in an article rather than in the study; and anybody told their work is not performing by a figure measured three months late on a page edited after delivery.
- Anybody writing long-form articles for businesses, agencies or professionals
- Somebody paid by the word for a job whose cost is research
- Somebody who has rewritten a piece for free because the angle was wrong
- Anybody who has cited a statistic found in an article rather than in the study
What's inside
Format
- Digital download, delivered instantly after payment
- Formatted for letter paper — read on screen or print it
- Yours permanently, re-downloadable from your library any time
- Licensed for use in your own business
By the end you can
A reader finishes with a brief they wrote themselves from twelve questions rather than a title and a word count; a reader description in place of a keyword; an outline containing the reader, the angle stated as an argument somebody could disagree with, every section with what it establishes, every claim numbered with its intended source, what the piece deliberately does not cover, and the word range - signed off in writing and dated before any drafting, with a late sign-off moving the draft deadline rather than compressing the research; a research bound stated in hours in the brief with a rule for what happens when it is exhausted; five conditions for stopping research, including that the honest state on stopping is feeling slightly under-researched; a source library organised by subject rather than by client, recording what each source actually says, the group and conditions it applies to, and the qualifier that must survive; an eleven-point fact-check run after drafting on an exported copy and recorded; four honest options for a claim that cannot be sourced - cut, soften, attribute, or establish by interview - and the rule that writing it anyway is not one; a delivery note listing sourced claims, the wording that must not change without re-checking, time-sensitive sentences with dates, unsubstantiated client claims, three accurate titles and the fact-check date; a style guide built from what the client already published rather than from a questionnaire; payment on delivery rather than publication; a measurement clause agreed before the first piece naming one source of figures and what can honestly be assessed; capacity counted in research blocks; and six numbers on a single page reviewed monthly.
A complete working system for blog and article writing as a paid service - built on four rules covering the fact that every sentence is an assertion about the world published under a byline belonging to somebody who probably has not checked it, with each step in a citation chain stripping a qualifier so that the cleanest available version of a claim is the least accurate; the fact that research has no natural stopping point, since every source cites three more and nothing in the work itself says stop, which makes the end of research a decision that must be made in advance and attached to a numbered list of claims rather than to a topic; the fact that control ends at handover, where the piece is retitled, edited by somebody never spoken to, added to, delayed, split or shelved, and where the edit that breaks the sourcing is the most damaging and almost always accidental because nothing in the document says which words were load-bearing; and the fact that the verdict arrives months later, on a site containing everybody else's work, measured by tools that disagree, on a page that may no longer be the delivered one - with revenue per finished piece as the economic unit, research hours per thousand words as the leading indicator, the outline sign-off rate as the master variable, and the count of published unsourced claims as the risk indicator, plus four disciplines the trade cannot be run profitably or safely without: a signed-off outline listing every claim and its intended source before any drafting, a research bound stated in hours in the brief, an eleven-point fact-check run as a separate pass on an exported copy, and the rule that no citation enters the work that has not been opened.
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