A couple of weeks’ ago a colleague and I attended a course on ‘How to Write Perfect Copy’. It was an informative and helpful day but we were conspicuous as the only pure PR practitioners in the room. Surrounded by contemporaries from marketing departments, I began to question why there weren’t more ‘PRs’ around the table; do we, as PRs, just assume we can all write well as it’s one of the skills we use on a daily basis?
If you’ve ended up in a PR job the chances are you can write but there’s a difference between being able to write and being able to write the right way. This difference is something the PR sector is failing to recognise all too often; perhaps because writing is something we do a lot of or, maybe, because a lot of PR practitioners are strong verbal communicators and assume this skill automatically translates to the page.
There’s no doubt that writing comes with the PR territory; news releases, editorial pieces, social media posts – I spend a lot of my day tapping away on a keyboard communicating different attitudes, opinions and sentiments.
This is where being able to write well comes in handy. More often than not I’m representing the chosen voice, style and tone of three or four different clients on the same day. Being able to consciously switch between them is a skill that requires practice and nuance.
Writing style is therefore a key part of shaping the personality of a brand and expressing the voice that the consultancy and the client have agreed is appropriate. Increasingly PRs are using channels under their own control to communicate external messages; writing well is an authentic way to own these channels and harness their full potential.
Finally, a key part of writing well is learning to edit your own work. This is an essential skill in the modern PR landscape as any mistake is instantly identified and magnified. If we want PR to grow as a strategic, board-level function we need to be confident that we are in complete control over the accurate and dynamic voices that characterise the clients’ written communications.
If the PR industry is not currently taking the art of writing seriously enough, and a room with two PRs out of nine people suggests it is not, then it’s high time it did; the pen (and the keyboard) are, indeed, mightier than the sword in the battle to convince executives that the PR function is an essential one.