"Liven Up Your PR Writing" Webinar
For yesterday's class, we watched a webinar featuring Michael Smart, a PR professional. There was a lot of good information and helpful tips that I took away from the video, but one thing in particular that stood out to me was the overall subject of breaking away from academic writing.
Breaking "bad" habits from university writing training is an odd task to take on. In high school and university, we are praised for writing long, complicated sentences with big words, but in PR and social media, being short and sweet is the name of the game. In my experience, I'd always find myself with a short and sweet essay, but nowhere near the word requirement. I would go through my essays and try to replace words with either longer words, or words that could be broken into two. Meeting a word count or a page limit was always a struggle.
In PR and social media writing, conciseness is key. Using sentence fragments is welcomed. Losing the university/corporate stiffness is the best way to open the door to creative writing. This writing style is going to be a learning curve to undo the doings of academia. Cutting the frills of academic writing is a way to get a point across without all of the long-windedness.
Now, lengthy writing Isn't always a bad thing, it has its place in certain worlds. But in the world of PR, that's not the case. This webinar opened my eyes to a whole new way of writing and has helped me not feel as bad for my usual concise writing style.
Sounds like an interesting webinar! I'm with you when it comes to having a hard time meeting those expectations provided by school. When it comes to content creation on social media I like to think "concise is nice and long is wrong" or "brevity brings longevity and with length you lose strength". All of which holds true, unless someone is able to effectively implement a longer piece. Which is much harder to do, but not impossible!
ReplyDeleteI also thought this subject was very interesting! It amazes me that for many years we are taught to write such lengthy and wordy articles but he told us to do the exact opposite on our career fields. It kind of makes me excited for the future in a way haha. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI agree that with you that this webinar was perspective-changing. In high school, teachers would tell me that my writing was concise, but as I got older and entered college, I learned how to stretch out my writing in order to reach word counts. It's interesting how he recommends we go back to the basics and unlearn what we've been taught so far!
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