Write a letter to a newspaper

Writing to the papers may seem very outdated, and their circulations have fallen a lot recently. But politicians read them, and so do their own and other papers’ comment writers. So it’s a way to get your views in front of some influential people!

Not every letter sent to a paper gets printed. But in our experience, the chances of a letter getting printed are better than even. There is a group of people who write over and over again, so they probably like having new writers too.

You can send your letter by email. There are just a few things to bear in mind:

• Keep your letter polite – they won’t print anything that seems defamatory.
• Most papers have a maximum word limit. For the Scotsman it’s 300 words, for the Herald 500. The National prints some letters longer than that.
• Some papers, e.g. the National, will print letters written in Scots, but most letters that the papers print are fully or mostly in English. We think the West Highland Free Press would print a letter in Gaelic; perhaps the National would – we’re not sure.

The papers have some general formatting rules:

• If you’re responding or referring to something they’ve published, give the date and page number of that article (or the URL for an online article – they will take that out before printing the letter)
• You need to give your full physical address, but they don’t print it – they just print your nearest town or city
• You need to give a phone number, but it’s extremely rare for them to ring (less than 1 in 100 chance of that in our experience)
• Just put Dear Editor at the top – they don’t print that
• Don’t send your letter as an attachment to the email – put the text of the letter in the body of the email. Don’t send any attachment.
• The papers don’t like it if you make your email subject line something like “Letter for letters page” – they prefer you to put something that says what the letter is about, eg “Supreme Court trans ruling”

Once you have emailed your letter, don’t expect a reply – they don’t reply! If they decide to print your letter, it might appear the next day, or, in our experience, up to 3 or 4 days later (or, for a Sunday paper, the next Sunday).

The paper may edit your letter, e.g. to shorten it a bit, or sometimes because they think they can improve the grammar! But they will take care not to change the meaning.

You can email the same letter to more than one paper, but if it appears in more than one, they don’t like that, and possibly in future would be less likely to print another letter from you.

The email address to send your letter to is given on the letters page for each newspaper, together with any rules they have, for example max length. Here are some of them:

• The Herald: letters@theherald.co.uk 500 words max
• The Scotsman: lettersts@scotsman.com 300 words max
• The National (including Sunday National): letters@thenational.scot
• The Herald on Sunday: sunday-letters@theherald.co.uk
• The Courier:  letters@thecourier.co.uk  250 words max
• Press & Journal: pj.letters@ajl.co.uk  250 words max
• Inverness Courier: editor@inverness-courier.co.uk
• West Highland Free Press: editor@whfp.com