This particular post addresses the very issue that I have been learning about in my public relations writing course this summer. My professor continually stresses the importance of proper writing skills in any type of public relations or communications profession. As a young student, a year away from entering the workplace full-time, it is refreshing to learn about these types of issues before its too late.

Fortunately, my pr writing professor has been a working practitioner for over 35 years and knows what it takes to be successful. Using his knowledge and experience, he prepares assignments that teach us how to properly complete documents that any communication practitioner will be responsible for. Currently, we have learned proper formats for news releases, feature stories, radio and television spots, and much more. This type of knowledge allows students to enter the workforce with an advantage.

I also agree with Les Potter in his response to your post, concerning education in the K-12 grades being a determinate in the poor writing skills of students. Personally, it was eye opening to see how much more there was to writing once I attended college. It seems as though vital writing skills, such as grammar are left to the wayside in grade school. If schools presented proper writing skills in these grades, students would not have to waste time re-learning how to write. Instead, students could spend time refining their writing skills, further readying themselves for the workforce.

What I also find eye opening is that pr firms will sacrifice quality for time and price. So, even if students spend their entire college career learning how to write, their own employers will be a hindrance to their progress.

Thank for you bringing these issues to the plate. They are all very important knowing that I will soon face each of these issues.

From discussions we had in the past, I know you saw firsthand the difference between students who worked hard at improving their writing and those who didn’t. There is definitely an opportunity for college students to greatly improve their writing skills if they are willing to work hard enough.

Thanks for your insightful comments. Say “hello” to DC for me.

I agree that much of the challenge we face starts in the K-12 environment…and probably even before that in the home. However, I think that students themselves shoulder much of the blame. Our PR majors are really the cream of the crop at USF, supposedly some of the top students at the school. In many instances, they just aren’t willing to work hard enough to improve. And, they are in college, so one assumes that they excelled in high school, etc.

Thanks for the “heads-up” on the book. I’ll check it out.

I don’t think great writing is a god-given talent, like so many do. I tell them it’s like plumbing, the more one practices and reads, the better one becomes. Good writing is good writing, whether it’s a love letter, novel, memo, or press release. Good writers have the ability to apply the skill, regardless of vehicle.

In the corporate world, a colleague and I (10-year vet of AP) clandestinely began changing releases to make them focused on the customer benefit and eliminate jargon. We didn’t ask for permission, we just figured we’d do it until someone told us to stop. No one did. That is one of my fondest memories of working in Corporate America.

Thanks again for bringing this critical issue to light.

P.S. I urge my students to use Ragan resources and learn from the fantastic information you all provide. Thanks.

My best advice is to encourage students to supplement PR writing classes with creative writing and literature courses. This helped me because it showed me how to write for different audiences using varying language (like the literary, sophisticated type), a vital tool in the PR field.

Of course, because I’m so new to agency life, I don’t know how this issue can be addressed at that level, but I’m very interested to see how those in the industry respond.

Take care!

One book that helps my students is “Made to Stick.” It is about simple, concrete writing. In one exercise, students take abstract writing like Mark’s “leveraging synergies” example and make it concrete.

Everyone who can take responsibility for this problem should: teachers, the writers themselves, and managers.

Thank you for addressing this important subject. I have very strong feelings about the need for both the working professional and the graduating Mass Comm/PR major to be able to write really well. Call me old school, but I believe that writing clear, concise, accurate, and compelling copy is the fundamental skill that people in the communication/PR/IMC profession simply must have. This skill begins to develop in college, in our departments, if we do it right.

I believe that the problem is mostly due to changes in the way English is taught in K-12 grades. My colleagues and I at Towson are continually dismayed at the poor knowledge of the English language evident in students. It is doubly distressing when such students declare as PR Majors.

You asked: “What do you think we can do to improve PR writing both while students are students and then once they get out into the professional world?”

I can’t speak for PR agencies, but I’d like to address our role as educators. I teach two sections of PR Writing every semester, plus one section in summer session. My students, about 40 total in fall and spring semesters and about 25 in summer session, have 18 assignments that cover all the types of writing tasks that any typical practitioner will ever have to write, whether working for an agency, corporation, nonprofit, or government entity.

My motivation for developing these assignments is my 35 years of earning a good living as an organizational communication/PR/IMC professional and consultant. These assignments are, to me, the underpinning of skill that must be evident if a practitioner is to call him or herself a “writer”.

My instruction and subsequent assignments range from traditional news releases, backgrounders, and fact sheets for print/broadcast media to social media news releases to blogging and Websites. I cover every specific type of writing and format that working professionals must be able to handle.

Of course, a certain amount of theory on which effective communication/PR/IMC is built has to be taught. But, my course work is very much “applied” in nature. My goal is to prepare students for career success in communication/PR/IMC. That means teaching them to write a wide variety of typical assignments really well.

Thanks for your leadership on this, Bob.

Les

I can’t tell you how good it is to read a blog by a PR educator who CAN write and who appreciates good writing in his students.

My daughter is a communication major at an American college in Europe. I have been teaching her how to write as she plunges into her coursework, often coaching her sentence by sentence.

During our first lesson, I taught her the importance of simplicity and clarity. All good writing is clear and simple, I said, choosing to ignore Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and Henry James (at least for now). We went through a recent book review she wrote for her political science class and converted passive sentences to active ones. We omitted needless words. Finally, we brought every sentence “down the abstraction ladder,” making sure it was a model of conversational simplicity.

Her grade for that book review was a B-. Her teacher explained that her essay was not “sophisticated enough”.

You can see this happening in PR agencies all over the country. “We can’t send this out, it’s too simple. It doesn’t make us sound important enough. Put in a sentence about how we’re ‘leveraging our synergies.’”

It’s very depressing, but thanks to people like you it WILL get better.