As parental communications counselors prepare to ship their kids back to school next month, some may well be considering sending their staff and agency teams along for the ride
- to sixth grade English class. If PR hiring managers' grumblings are any indication, this is the approximate level at which many of today's practitioners' writing skills hit a
wall.
No doubt, typos and spelling errors - once fireable offenses in PR circles - have become common misdemeanors in the frenetic world of digital communication. Far too many
practitioners rely on "spell check" as a panacea, yielding unfortunate, albeit snort-worthy, accidents (omitting the "l" from the word "public" in a press release headline is a
favorite example).
But the writing problem plaguing the biz runs deeper, according to Patti Lowery, an account supervisor at Porter Novelli's DC office, who doubles as the resident editorial cop.
Passive voice, grammatical snafus and poor word choices abound. "People don't know the difference between 'affect' and 'effect.' Then there's language that gets to be popular,
such as [use of] the word "impact" [as a verb], which makes me think of people who can't have bowel movements," she observes. "It sounds so petty, but I don't think it is. The
bottom line in PR is the bottom line." At its extreme, bad writing poses a major threat to an industry that lives and breathes by its ability to communicate clearly and
effectively.
Liabilities and Insurance
The ongoing labor shortage isn't helping matters, either. "Because of the job market today, we are having to recruit people from other fields who perhaps haven't had training
in writing," says Gwin Johnston, president and CEO of JohnstonWells, a mid-sized agency in Denver.
In its effort to find fresh talent, JohnstonWells casts its net into non-traditional fields such as teaching, healthcare administration and law. And, like most PR employers,
the agency asks for writing samples, and requires applicants to take a writing test. The agency also has an insurance plan to protect itself from potential wordsmithing disasters:
Joan White, a former features editor for the Denver Post. Like Lowery, White serves as a staff editor and grammatical gatekeeper for all client projects. She also teaches
a monthly, in-house writing workshop, and provides one-on-one tutoring to staffers whose command of the English language is, shall we say, less than Shakespearean.
Indeed, editorial staff positions are popping up on agency payrolls in greater numbers, as further evidenced by Publicis Dialog's recent hiring of Mort Sheinman - a 40-year
journalism veteran from Women's Wear Daily - to serve as editorial director in its New York office (PRN, March 6). But not all corporate clients are reassured by
this practice.
"If we have a project that requires agency involvement, we'll often write the material ourselves and then use the agency to help pitch it," says the senior U.S. media relations
manager at one major retailer, who asked not to be named. Fact sheets, news releases, media Q&As and other promotional materials are penned in-house or outsourced to freelance
writers, he says. "Hopefully this trend will shift and we'll see the pendulum swing back as more clients get frustrated with the quality of writing out there."
Other corporate officers, however, are less inclined to pinpoint agencies as the only culprits behind diminishing editorial standards in corporate communication. Ford Motor
Co. global news manager Ron Iori (a former Wall Street Journal news desk editor and one-time agency man) recalls a delicate instance in which he was asked to give writing
lessons to the senior communications VP at a Fortune 500 company. "He was a great PR person otherwise - strong on ideas and relationships. But grammar was an issue."
Old School vs. New Math
Iori concedes that the writing panache of PR grads ain't what it used to be, and attributes the trend to a variety of factors. "It's a bit of the video/TV/computer
generation...and the lost art of letter writing," he says. "Plus, there's a different focus inside schools. People used to go for liberal arts degrees, but now the disciplines
have proliferated and segmented." Today's PR majors - and even J-school students - are passing on poetry to bone up on required courses in marketing and finance.
"The biggest weakness of young PR people is that they can't write. The biggest weakness of old PR people is they don't know business," concurs James Hutton, head of the
masters program in corporate communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. But academicians can offer little more than a Band-Aid in tackling the epidemic that's crippling
today's PR talent pool, he says. "When I try to explain the object of a preposition to students, they don't know what I mean. Do we try to compensate for the things they should
have learned in middle school?"
Laurie Mitchell, a Cleveland-based PR recruiter, agrees that the "self-esteem" movement now en vogue in secondary schools has led English teachers to impose fewer rules on
their students, for fear of inhibiting creativity. Ironically, she says, this practice has yielded a crop of PR practitioners who are less able to express their ideas on paper
due to a weakened command of the English language.
Exactly where to draw the line between grammatical zealotry and clear, compelling PR copy in the age of high-speed communication is subject to broad interpretation.
"The fact is, businesses are spending a tremendous amount of money on remedial training and rigorous screening tests for job applicants," Hutton observes. "But we have to separate
the fuddy-duddies from those whose main concern is getting the job done. There are a lot of old-line journalists working in corporate PR today who worry too much about being prim
and proper. I violate the rules all the time - but you do have to know the rules to break the rules."
Consider that Picasso began his career as a realist, but gained the most - dare we say it? - brand notoriety as an artist when he broke tradition and waxed abstract. Of
all the prosaic deficiencies tainting the PR market today, the worst is a sheer lack of imagination, Lowery concludes.
"There are plenty of new recruits who are turning out stuff that's workman-like. It's not hideously ungrammatical or rife with poor spelling, but it doesn't have any life,"
she says. "Yes, an ordinary cinder block house will keep you dry and safe, but wouldn't it be more interesting if it were stucco?"
(Hutton, 201/692-7241; Iori, 313/322-1524; Johnston, 303/623-3366; Lowery, 202/973-1368; Mitchell, 216/292-6001)
Schools of Thought
Most PR counselors agree that writing aptitude is a muscle that must be developed over time. The question is whether to invest in green staffers who need nurturing, or pay a
higher price tag for experienced, "pumped-up" wordsmiths. Got an opinion on the matter? Email your perspective to [email protected] or fax Jenny Sullivan at 301/340-1451. We'll run your comments in next week's issue.
Farming System
Atlanta-based Duffey Communications is one PR firm that believes in growing skilled practitioners from the ground up. The agency sponsors a writing lab for PR majors at
University of Georgia, and offers summer fellowship and internship programs. Candidates for both internships and entry-level jobs at the agency are required to take a writing
test. "We give them a scenario for which they have to write a press release and a pitch letter in two hours or less," says COO Jenny Duffey. "In the scenario, refrigeration is
being introduced for the first time on the planet Worlin. They don't receive any background information [e.g., about refrigeration], but they do have Internet access while
completing the assignment."
Duffey eschews the agency trend toward hiring fulltime wordsmiths, because having a writer on staff puts other members of the account team at a disadvantage. "You miss the
opportunity to learn about a client's business [if you don't do the writing]," she says. As a safeguard, any project that will cost more than $1,000 to print is usually farmed
out to a freelance copyeditor/proofreader. Freelance editors charge about $50 per hour.
(Duffey, 404/266-2600)