Public Relations & Language

Public Relations is a management tool to establish beneficial relationships (Vivian 2008). These relationships look different for each PR practitioner depending on what type of company they work for. No matter what job you work in as a PR practitioner you most likely use the media as a means of communicating to the public. The media is the most efficient way for people to communicate when your audience is so large and general. This idea of a person representing your company to the public requires someone who is well educated in communication and language. What I mean by this is that ones view of communicating must have the central focus that your language and word choice are the most important factors to persuasion. Not only must you be educated on how to use language but also you must be educated on your audience and how they perceive language. As a Public Relations practitioner your job is to create relationships between the client (or the public) and the company (or a team) and these relationships will only be started if one is able to communicate persuasively and clearly why they should even care about the business.

Jobs within PR can be anything from publicity, promotion, lobbying or fund-raising. One’s language working with publicity and promotion within athletics may look very different from another working with lobbying to the Government for a company. Also the language of issuing news releases for companies to get their information out to the public requires more varying language barriers. As far as lobbyists, they tend to work with legislators and government regulators to advise their clients (Vivian 2008). When working with the government you will run into more problems about what words you use and are those words “politically correct”. You have to make sure that while lobbying, you are being persuasive and attractive to your specific audience. Within all jobs as a Public Relations practitioner one must be informed about the local customs and know how to affect the policy. Image consulting is a branch of public relations that relates more to a spokesperson. As a spokesperson for a company, the PR practitioner must have educated language. They must present themselves with a professional approach so that the audience views them as a legitimate source of information. Another job within PR is financial public relations and this has to do with promoting sales and working with new issues and stock splits. Fund- raising with public relations is more about mailings and telephone soliciting therefore the verbal language is a necessity. In this job one must be able to communicate clearly through language because a lot of fund-raising is not face-to-face communication. The other jobs such as contingency planning and events coordination use public relations people more in a management job. These practitioners focus more on interpersonal communication and people skills.

Although there are many opportunities within Public Relations there are two main points where people’s views on PR differ. Many public relations people who are new to the field or have not yet worked in the field think that all they need are people skills to advertise and persuade others. On the other hand people working in the field recognize that the most important type of communication is written. They notice that one must be well-educated in writing, English, and language in order to succeed in PR. Someone’s initial thought about a PR person is that they go out and talk to the public and their job is solely to establish relationships. While that is a major point of PR, in order to establish those relationships good writing is mandatory. As Steward’s article says “Good writing is good Public Relations”.

When Steward describes good writing he goes into the details of employing action verbs, concrete nouns, keeping adjectives at a minimum, and even giving your reader a break every now and then. Steward also says, “If you can’t write clearly, concisely, and interestingly, how can you communicate the message you want you’re public to grasp and understand?” The answer is you cannot. In order to be a successful PR practitioner you need to be able to give all the information you have about that product, or that company in the simplest terms for the given audience. This implies that one must not use any jargon and if an unfamiliar word is used, it must be explained (Steward 2005). As the importance of writing seems to be stressed a common question would be “Isn’t the electronic age going to take over the newspaper age?” While that’s a good question many, many Communication professors have noted that there will always be print news and it will never die out. Steward goes as far to say that good writing is the most vital element in human communication. With that being said, it is obvious that your language and understanding of language can make the world of a difference as a PR person.

“There is no doubt writing is an essential public relations skill” (Wise 2005). This claim of writing being a necessity is all over the PR world. Kurt Wise’s article talks about how writing within PR can be different depending on what you’re doing. He quotes a man saying writing for the web should be shorter and more conversational as opposed to writing press releases where you have more space. The language use is obviously different here; while one PR practitioner may be writing a short enticing article to capture athletes attention, another is writing a long press release capturing more of the media world, Knowing this importance, Wise says many PR people focus on objective and persuasive writing skills. This is because you must persuade the public to be interested in your product or in whatever you are selling. Your language being persuasive can allow some people to run into more problems with ethics.

Public Relations has established something called the Code of Ethics. This code touches on how communicating with good ethics is very important to a PR person because they have to be persuasive yet truthful (Al-Khaja 2005). You naturally think of PR’s as a professional job working with companies and working in the media but you wouldn’t think they would have a reputation of dishonesty. Sadly many people do not like PR people because they persuade you in a greedy, deceitful way. Because of this problem the PRSA developed the Code of Ethics and has stressed truthful practitioners.

Wise notes that after a survey was conducted on members of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) they drew the conclusion that nearly 71% of their work was constituted by writing alone. As we have established the relevance of writing in PR we must not forget about the other key skills that have much to do with language. McCleneghan ranks 11 PR communication skills: active listening, coordination, critical thinking, judgment and decision-making, persuasion, reading comprehension, social perceptiveness, speaking, technology, time management, and writing competency. If one cannot grasp the language within the culture they are working with how can they actively listen to them? How can they begin to draw conclusions on persuading them? If one does not have a hold on how the media’s language, then how can they comprehend the readings or technology? It is crystal clear that language is all around the field of public relations.