Use a Quiz to Complement Your Next Article!

Be honest: How many times have you wasted valuable hours at the office taking ridiculous online quizzes like What type of South Park character are you? Women take the quizzes in Cosmo while men are more attracted to those in Men's Health and car magazines, but whatever the case, we enjoy competing against ourselves for the best possible score.

If you've been a freelance writer for long, then you know that your competition is prohibitively stiff. You have to write better articles, find more unique slants and develop keener observations than every other writer on the face of the planet. If all of that sounds just exhausting, you can improve your chances of selling your next article by complementing it with a quiz.

There are two basic types of quizzes that can help further develop the point of your article. The first is a quiz that evaluates your readers' knowledge of the subject matter. For example, if you are writing an article about veterinary care for dogs, you might include a quiz that asks about basic veterinary practices, such as how often you should take your dog to the vet and which vaccinations are necessary for your pet's survival.

The second type of quiz you can use to complement your article is a self-assessment quiz that helps the reader discover something important about him- or herself. Such quizzes are found in many women's and teen magazines and help the reader to make decisions or solve problems. For example, I once wrote an article about the growing trends in later marriages among today's youth. I included a quiz called "Are you ready to settle down?"

When you use a quiz to complement an article, it doesn't have to be an exhaustive study of the reader's knowledge or personal tendencies. Most article quizzes are between five and ten questions long and generally have either multiple choice or true/false answers. There is no way to evaluate the answers to an essay question in a magazine, so don't bother. If your quiz is too long, your readers will lose interests; if it's too short, they won't get anything out of it.