When 57 words can be reduced to 43, nearly 25 per cent – and mean the same thing – then there is clearly something careless about the original. As it’s also about job losses and other crucial information, then it’s particularly heedless to bury the news.
In this news release, definitely for a good cause, there are several instructive writing tips that shorten the headline and lead, but also add clarity.
My exploration into the U.S. PR Newswire has proved to be very fruitful. Its news releases display many examples begging for changes and editing, and this one from DroneDek is a doozy.
This company commits among the most widely occurring PR writing mistakes, and that is: corporations, organizations and institutions are an ‘it’ in a second reference. ‘They’ refers to people. The college raised its tuition; the students voiced their displeasure.
As a news release maven, it makes it all worthwhile to find that even PR firms have bad days and produce ill-conceived news releases.
Somehow, the cannabis industry commits the most egregious grammar and style errors in paid press releases distributed over PR newswires.
It’s always astonishing how simple releases are distributed with so many costly extra words. Yet they are; here’s one that really could have benefited from reviewing How to be a better online writer.
Lowering word count by nearly 20 per cent and improving the meaning Original VANCOUVER, Sept. 24,…
In this news release from the Israeli EMS organization @unitedhatzalah, there is missing clarity and befuddling structure as well as grammatical and punctuation mistakes.
This news release displays several significant errors: it bases the story on the Jets’ local whiteout tradition but fails to explain to outsiders that it means dressing in white to support the team; there are also many unnecessary extra words, especially ‘for, in and of.’ The headline indicates that there is white involved but the subhead and lead do not.