Writing For Public Relations

Janet Mizrahi

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781631573057
• eBook ISBN: 9781631573064
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Employers consider communication as one of the most critical skills for workers today. Writing for the Workplace: Business Communication for Professionals is an easy-to-follow guide that provides strategies for effective professional communication. Written to address the needs of both students entering the workforce and business professionals looking to improve their written communication, the book offers guides to compose typical workplace documents, from effective e-mails and convincing reports to winning presentations and engaging resumes. This concise book offers busy readers concrete strategies to improve their workplace writing.

CHAPTER 1

Writing as a Public Relations Professional

Whether you are a student about to step into your first job in public relations or a more seasoned employee with years of experience, you must be able to communicate effectively to advance your career. Employers consistently rank good communication skills—speaking with customers and colleagues, presenting information, and writing—in the top tier of desired skills for both new hires and current employees. The ability to concisely and accurately convey meaning to different people is a prerequisite in today’s fast-paced world, especially in a field such as public relations, which relies on communication.

Writing well as a professional whether the document is printed or on the screen is best taken on as a process, with careful attention paid to detail. This chapter will describe how to break down all writing tasks into a series of steps to streamline the process as well as describe the characteristics that all professional writing should embody.

Writing as a Process

Many people think that good writing flows out of the brain, into the fingers, and onto the page or screen. Nothing could be further from the truth. People who write professionally know that writing, like any acquired skill, requires patience and persistence. Whatever we are composing—anything from an e-mail message to a proposal for new business—the key to writing well is to consider writing a process rather than a one-shot deal. Your prose will be better and will take you less time to compose if you look at writing as a series of tasks. For those who suffer from writer’s block or who shudder at the thought of writing, I can promise that if you break down writing into several component parts, the result will be better and you will feel less anxious.

The task of writing can be broken down into three separate steps, for which I have developed an acronym: AWE, short for Assess, Write, Edit. These three steps should be completed for every piece of writing that will be seen by another person. The only writing that doesn’t require this process is personal writing.

Step 1: Assess. Before you ever put your fingers on the keyboard or put pen to paper, begin by assessing the writing situation and define your audience and purpose. I advise making this step formal: write down your answers.

Knowing the audience—your reader—is imperative for successful writing. Writers need to be very clear about the end user because the language and style we use depend upon who will read what we write. In essence, we have to psych out the reader to accomplish our writing goal. We cannot do that unless we analyze the reader accurately.

Define the characteristics of your reader as in Table 1.1. Begin the audience analysis portion of the first stage of the writing process (assessing) by completing an audience profile template, using the criteria in Table 1.1.

The next part of assessing the writing situation is defining your purpose. The reason or purpose for writing in the professional world falls into three basic categories: informing, persuading, or requesting. Informative writing is a large category that includes generalized information, instructions, notifications, warnings, or clarifications. Persuasive writing makes an impression, influences decisions, gains acceptance, sells, or recommends. Requests are written to gain information or rights and to stimulate action.

Unless you define the desired outcome of the written task, you cannot possibly achieve that task’s objective. Are you writing an e-mail in response to a customer complaint? Are you using social media to generate traffic to a website selling nutritional supplements? You must be clear about what you want your words to accomplish before you write.

Sometimes you do not have all the information in hand that you need to write your document. Once you have defined for whom you are writing and what you want to accomplish, continue your analysis of the writing situation by gathering the information to produce the document. That may entail conducting research. Sometimes you may just need to download information from your exper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• Content
• Acknowledgment
• Chapter 1: Writing as a Public Relations Professional
• Chapter 2: Routine Communication
• Chapter 3: Writing News Releases
• Chapter 4: Newsletters
• Chapter 5: Brochures
• Chapter 6: Media Kits
• Chapter 7: Website Content
• Chapter 8: Social Media
• Appendix: Sample Documents
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Adpage
• Backcover