3 Ways to Fail at Public Relations

The course I took in public relations in my professional writing program was called Introduction to Damage Control, where we looked at case studies about companies or individuals that ran into difficulty and how they responded to keep their image clean. Damage control is a proper term to use in public relations because when a company makes a mistake and hurts others, the company is damaged. There were many ways to repair the damage, such as admitting the error or paying compensation. Maple Leaf Foods handled an outbreak of listeria in their products wonderfully well. But there are 3 big ways that a public relations officer can cause even more damage when communicating their response to a crisis.

• Avoid responsibility
• Lie
• Keep out of the public eye

The first of these three ways to cause more damage is to keep directing the responsibility onto others. This is not always a bad thing, but only if the company truly is without fault. To put the blame on others can make the company look irresponsible even if the crisis was not their fault. What is worse is to avoid responsibility when responsibility was on the company. This form of dishonesty can cause terrible damage to a brand.

There are no white lies in public relations. Do not ever be dishonest, even if to do so would help the company in the short term. Being caught in the lie is too damning a scandal for a company to take the risk. The most emphasized, ironclad lesson in public relations was to tell the truth, always and always.

Keeping out of the public eye is a sign of irresponsibility or a lack of will to make amends. The company might look it is trying to hide something and when no proper information is released during a crisis, false facts may begin to spread. It may be hard to confront the public in times of crisis, but a little courage pays off. This can be seen when comparing the responses NASA gave to the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Our case study on NASA showed how just being in the public eye after the Columbia disaster helped NASA’s image when, following the Challenger’s disaster, they had harmed themselves by remaining behind closed doors and kept information from the press.

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4 Secrets to Giving a Speech

Learning to give a speech is a category of professional writing since most people must write and present their own speeches. It happens in business and it is part of communication. In a class on producing and delivering speeches at York, I learned a number of useful things.

• Have confidence you will succeed
• Practice endlessly
• Get a good sleep prior to the speech
• Speak clearly

It might seem that practice and clear speaking are elementary bits of advice for giving a speech. But it can be difficult to get enough practice in if you have a busy life. The advice should be not just to practice enough but to not be too lazy to ignore the need to practice. But endless practice should not be taken literally. There must still be time to sleep. I know from experience how a lack of sleep can cloud the mind.

Confidence

The most important lesson from the speech course was the importance of confidence in speeches and how it alone can determine how well a speech goes. Everyone knows how important confidence is . and I found out that when I did not properly practice and feel prepared for the speeches I gave in class then I felt doomed to failure. Without confidence, it was hard to speak clearly, which made the endless practice less important. It did not matter if I knew a speech’s words if I could not say them properly.

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7 Ways to Write like a Scholar

In the research in writing course I took in my first year at York, I learned not only how to properly locate and identify scholarly articles but I also learned how to talk (or write) like a scholar. Scholar in this context refers to anyone who has work published in a peer-reviewed journal. These publications could contain the results of studies or the product of other research. In their works, a scholars cement their reputations through careful use of their facts and wording of their language to appear responsible. When writing as a scholar there is a list of directions to follow.

• Cite sources
• Avoid statements of certainty
• Present credentials
• Do not dismiss others
• Present both sides of a point
• Anticipate rebuttals
• Admit limitations

Citing sources is a must in all scholarly work. Every fact must have proof that a reader can check on to see for themselves where a detail comes from. Statements of certainty are statements affirming something to be absolutely true.

When speaking as a scholar, say “I believe” instead of “I know.” What this does is it leaves room for correction if the scholar is later shown to be wrong.

Credentials show why a scholar is a source to be trusted. What other things has the scholar done to be a source of authority here?

When arguing against another idea, do not dismiss it. State what it says and why others hold that view. It shows that a scholar understands the other point of view and makes their opinion on it more valuable. This falls in with presenting both sides of a point, where a scholar explains opposing views and shows them to be untrue.

A good scholar will anticipate objections others will have to their findings and work to explain why their findings are correct by first presenting evidence against their own argument and then explaining why the evidence does not show their findings to be wrong.

Finally, a scholar must acknowledge limitations to their own work. A scholar might find the cancer rate of elderly people in Africa but cannot then imply that they know the cancer rate of all people in Africa. That scholar would have to say that their findings leave questions unanswered.

What research class taught me was that writing as a scholar was about being honest rather than about being right. You are selling your ideas, but must not make yourself look greater than you are. Being a scholar is about being humble and letting your ideas succeed or fail based on fact and not marketing.

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3 Things Not to do in Poetry

It is a bit difficult to think creative writing can have any rules in it. But York’s poetry program left me with a list of three simple things to not do in poetry.

• Avoid clichés 
• Avoid flowery language
• Avoid strong rhythms

What you quickly learn in any creative writing class is that clichés are overused to the point where the use of one has no impact. George Orwell says in his famous essay Politics in the English Language that “there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing the phrases themselves”. This is the reason why clichés must be avoided if a poet is to produce good poetry.

Flowery language is used by inexperienced poets who want to sound literate or sophisticated. It always ends up sounding wordy, confused and unclear. To those who know what to look for, the use of flowery language shows the poet is not confident in what they are doing and is resorting to a cheap trick to try and bolster their prose.

Strong rhythm will make a poem sound like a song. Although poetry and songs do share much in common, they are not the same thing. A poem is not meant to be sung because it will have no music attached to it. A good rhythm needs a good accompaniment and a poem does not have that. There is no reason to try and overlap into another category of prose when writing poetry. Do not have a strong rhythm to your poetry.

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6 Technical Writing Must-Haves

Technical writing is not poetry, but a method putting the proper tools into the hands of the consumer. My experience at York with technical writing taught me how technical writing differs from normal prose. It is a very utilitarian form of dialogue that serves a practical function of conveying instructions to the consumer. The most enduring lesson from technical writing is that it is writing the reader does not want to read. They do not want to be consulting instructions, they want to be moving on. Other helpful tips on technical writing can be found here, but in my own notes I recorded that technical writing must be..

• Correct
• Precise
• Relevant
• Brief
• Unemotional
• Non-Anthropomorphic

By following the above commandments of technical writing a technical writer can be effective. But technical writing as a practical profession requires the writer not only to be good at the instructional writing itself but also proficient in the subject that is being written on. A technical writer must have an understanding of the process or product that is being clarified to the reader. A technical writer needs to have an intimate understanding of their subject. In this way, a technical writer must be versatile or have a deep knowledge basis in a specialty with a high demand for technical writing. Writing instructions in the proper brief, informative way is one part of technical writing.

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