n this edition of PR Tools, once again, you need not look long and hard to find press releases crying out for basic edits and reduced word counts. Easy-to-correct mistakes abound in these two news releases, one from Canada’s newswire.ca today and the other from prnewswire.com in the U.S. in the next post.
A new look at improving press release leads; part II. Previous part covered headlines.
Headline style, cliches, capitalization, it vs. they, all in a day’s work for the Better PR Writer.
n today’s story #prfail, @castingworkbook.com misses some key news release basics and also lets its own ego get in the way of a news story. Here are some edits:
Even Harry Potter’s people can write a news release with redundancies, unnecessary words and with flabby sentences.
In this press release, there are some textbook examples of basic mistakes, both in copy and emphasis, not to mention capitalization and headline style. The lead was reduced from 142 word to 109, around 23 per cent.
Word repetitions are easy to catch: don’t repeat the same word in the same sentence or in an adjacent phrase. Even avoid repeating a word elsewhere in a news release.
t always astonishes me that PR departments and agencies pay top dollar to release news electronically and make such basic mistakes. Here are a few from recent news releases.
In this story, from the world’s premier news release distributor, with basic attention to simple Better PR Writer techniques, more than 20 per cent of the copy can be removed from the headline, lead and second paragraph.
This PR Tools news release demonstrates that by locating ‘Of Is and By,’ the key target words described in How to Be a Better Online Writer Overnight, the lead can be compressed significantly, reducing the word count from 75 to 65 words.