This is a blog written in the voice of professor Phyllis Bennett, on any topic related to Public Relations writing. This was part of the course requirement for Writing for PR Practitioners II (CCM702) of the Public Relations-Corporate Communications Program at Seneca College.
How do you make a cookie newsworthy?
Is it by telling how it was baked? Or what it is made of, like fair-trade chocolate or trans fat-free? Tee hee, but no.
It’s got to hook to be written. That's the art of public relations writing.
There are many ways to write about a chocolate chip cookie. But what hooks and sticks will make the story. The journalist will write to inform, the marketer, to sell. But writing for PR will give that cookie a story for both the journalist and the marketer to see.
Writing for PR is to earn media. It functions to create messages that influence attitudes and behaviors. PR writing, most often than not, targets journalists, who are writers themselves. And to hook a writer, you must be one.
If communication is at the core of public relations, then that makes writing its foundation. However, it’s not an “if” and “then” situation, writing really holds the crown in public relations.
PR writing strategically uses ideas crafted in words, shaped as messages, all designed to hook and translate to media results. To underline the importance of PR writing is to also understand what it is not. Here are three basic points PR writing does not do - in three words: discombobulate, kerfuffle, and doofus.
Writing for PR does not push information through a winding path, twisting and turning to discombobulate a fact. Where the intent is to hook, PR writing gets the message straight to whom it matters, and when it matters.
A kerfuffle may be caused by or an effect of earned media, but not PR’s way to earn media. And if at all that is an unintended consequence, managing that is another job for PR writing to hack.
There’s no place for doofuses in public relations. Effective writing is correct writing. Beyond correcting typos and sticking to stylistic conventions, PR writing gets and feeds the right facts. All the best writing in the world will fall flat on wrong facts.
In all the discombobulation, kerfuffle, and doofuses in a crowded media environment, PR writing skill rises to the occasion. It becomes a strategic necessity to keep communications discipline of good writing where there is a multi-platform delivery of information at the speed of a mouse click. And by the way, with its long-held traditions of translating jargon to simple plain language, PR writing knows where terms like “discombobulation, kerfuffle and doofus” fit, if at all they will be used. Creative writing minus a truckload of adjectives is a PR writing skill.
In this era of tech convergence and dizzying array of media tools, PR writing creates new vistas in which it can function. The chocolate chip cookie story can be told in many different platforms but requires a storytelling technique for all the tech savvy in the world to move the copy to where it needs to go.
So, when writing about the chocolate chip cookie, it’s no longer just a battle of wordsmiths. PR writing involves strategy to influence the way the chocolate chip cookie story is communicated and consumed.
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