This post was originally written in 2008, hence the mention of Blackberrys. It’s just as relevant in 2026.
Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact.
Writing one that fails means work. There are people who have mastered the art.
As an editor I’ve seen some great efforts over the years. I’d like to share them with you.
Here are my top ten tips for making sure press releases get minimum attention:
1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists
Everyone can read plain text messages in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberrys, iPhones and Palm Pilots.
To reach less than 100 per cent of your potential audience, try putting some of these clever barriers in the way.
Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices have trouble reading them. Spam filters treat them with suspicion and if you’re lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes or some other arcane technology as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.
Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.
Attachments are also great for bulking up the size of your release so it won’t squeeze through email gateways. If you’re clever, use high-resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments. These add nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.
A further reason for sending a press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist finally decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be difficult to find.
2. Minimise relevance
One way to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor’s recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.
3. Send your press release out whenever
Timeliness is everything. So send releases out when you feel like it to boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications, wait until the story has already broken elsewhere. Editors love that.
4. Organise schedules so contacts are unavailable for interview
Good journalists are annoying creatures. Rather than printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases.
A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn’t good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.
5. Use poor writing skills
Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can’t understand your message you kill two birds with one stone.
First, you’ll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.
Second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn’t worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.
6. Try bullying
Sadly this powerful technique is underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist’s editor, or an editor’s boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).
Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising in the publication thus triggering their professional editorial independence.
7. Don’t bother with press release photographs
Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you’ll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as useless.
If you think that’s taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around an unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.
8. Send it to everyone regardless
This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.
9. Keep your press release as dull as possible
Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.
In-house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you’re worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.
10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message
Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant, timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.
The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that’s too simple try **important press release **or important press release from Company Name.
A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here. Going straight to spam is the most efficient way of making sure your press release fails.
Want to guarantee journalists ignore your follow-up emails? Start them with “Good morning” so your message looks thoughtless when it arrives at 3pm, or worse, when they read it at 11pm while catching up on email.
Use time-appropriate greetings if you want to look professional. Or don’t, if your goal is to signal that you haven’t thought about the person on the receiving end.
A blog post, article or other piece of copy is what journalists call a story. Here’s how to write one.
You start a story by telling the reader what it is about. You do this briefly in the headline. Then again in the introduction or intro, which is a stop press paragraph.
Ask yourself:
what is this story about
what information am I trying to get across
what points must I make to do this?
Sum up the story in your mind in one simple sentence. This is your intro.
Its purpose is to tell the reader what the article is about and draw the reader in. As a rule, readers prefer brief intros.
Write so a reader who only samples your intro still has a basic grasp of your story.
Newspapers teach journalists — on both tabloid and quality papers — to start with a single sentence of between 15 and 21 words. This is what you should strive for, although at times you’ll need to use more words.
As an aside, proper nouns made up of multiple words only count as a single word when you’re calculating the ideal intro length.
Your first paragraph can be one sentence or three but keep it short and crisp.
Next comes the how: how did it happen or, more usually in your case, what happens next?
This is background information or explanation.
After the explanation comes amplification. You amplify the point or points following on from the intro.
Make these points one by one and in descending order of importance.
Last, after making all the main points, tie up any loose ends — that is add any extra or background information deemed necessary but of lesser importance.
Follow a few simple rules and you’ll be able to write decent, readable articles or stories about technology for any audience.
Good technology writing doesn’t come easy. Not at first
Most people can write simple, straightforward text even if they’ve little formal writing experience.
That is the best place to start.
Next you need to learn to put your readers first. Understand what they need to know and the barriers they might face getting to the information.
After that, good technology writing is about understanding your subject matter and clear thinking — then turning your thoughts into words.
If you can do this in a logical way, the shape of your story will lead the reader through the key points.
Step one: Start simple
Start by sticking to basic words and simple sentence structures. Don’t worry if this feels like plodding. You can experiment with language when you feel more confident.
Inexperienced technology writers often have one of four faults:
A pompous and overbearing style. Avoid this by being friendly, although not chatty. And use active language, it is easier to understand and unambiguous.
Too technical. In other words the writer does not explain the technical aspects clearly enough to non-experts. Fix the problem by keeping jargon to a minimum and explaining tricky ideas in simple terms. You can’t assume your readers know all the basics, so make as much of this as clear as possible. Don’t worry if this makes your writing longer.
Never worry if geeks tell you your technical writing is too simplistic. They are not the target reader and anyway they probably think they know everything about the subject already.
Trying to be cute. There’s nothing wrong with making jokes or using everyday speech, but beginning writers can take this too far, to the point where it is hard to understand their meaning. Think of how jokes often don’t work in emails or text messages.
Being non-specific. Avoid vague jargon like calling everything a ‘platform’ when you mean operating system, software or hardware. These days that word can mean just about anything.
Hitting the right note
Pitching your copy at the right level is the hardest part of technology writing.
Experienced technology writers know no one ever succeeds by overestimating the reader’s intelligence. They also know no one succeeds by underestimating readers.
Remember people who are expert in one area of technology, may not understand other areas. And a technically literate readership does not give one a licence for sloppy explanations of complex technical matters.
If you find this difficult, imagine you are writing for an intelligent colleague working in another area of your organisation.
Picture that person reading your words.
What questions would they ask if you were in the room with them? Make sure your text answers these questions.
Have you written something they would find patronising? Hit the delete button and make that point again.
Lastly, if you can, always get someone to proofread your copy.
Ask them to point out what doesn’t make sense and to see if you’ve made any obvious errors. Don’t take offence if they find things that need changing. Your pride will be more wounded if the rest of the world saw your mistakes.
Apply good writing to all your communications
Technology writers spend significant time communicating via email with sources, PR representatives and editors. The same principles of clear, thoughtful writing apply here.
One seemingly small detail matters: avoid starting emails with time-specific greetings like “good morning.” Your message might arrive when it’s not morning, making you look thoughtless. Use greetings that work at any time.
All you need to know about web writing in under 300 words. From my 2010 Wordcamp NZ presentation.
Start straight away. Don’t waste time warming up.
Reduce barriers between your ideas and your audience.
Write clearly. Use readily understandable language. Be unambiguous.
Learn grammar. Forget what teachers said about long words making you look smart. It isn’t true.
Instead use simple words, grammar and sentences. It is harder to go wrong.
Go easy on adjectives and adverbs.
Spellcheck.
Try to imagine your reader – an ordinary bloke or woman. Write for that person.
Use ‘be’ verbs sparingly to make your writing more interesting. Use them even less in headlines.
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” Most people think it was Mark Twain; it was Blaise Pascal, a French Mathematician.
Keep sentences short; up to 20 words. A 15 word sentence limit is better.
Keep paragraphs short; usually one to four sentences. Only use more if you need to.
Use plenty of full stops and line breaks. Use lists and bullet points. Be generous with crossheads (secondary headings).
Highlight keywords with bold or italics.
Writing is story telling.
Summarise your story in the headline.
If you write an introduction use it to tell readers what your story is about. Expand on your ideas in the following paragraphs.
Write so you can cut the story at any point yet readers have the maximum information.
Aim for short and crisp. Online readers tire after 200 words and start dropping out at around 300. Keep most stories below this length although you can write longer pieces.
You can find longer explanations of all these points elsewhere on this site.
While all this remains true in 2026, there are good reasons to write more than 300 words. Google favours longer posts and readers are less scared of scrolling down than they were in the past.
Writing good morning at the start of an emai seems a good idea. The words sound friendly and upbeat.
It’s not as good as kia ora.
You don’t know for sure when your message will arrive at the other end. Nor do you know when the reader opens it. There’s a good chance it won’t be in the morning.
At best good morning when it isn’t morning doesn’t make sense. At worst, it looks rude. It says the writer hasn’t thought about the person at the other end.
This matters if you are in business. An out-of-place good morning might be interpreted as “I’m happy to take your money, but I’m too lazy to think about how you might read my email”.
Writers have no control over when people read their emails, so it is best not to start communications that way even when you’re in the same time zone as the reader. And if you are not in the same time zone, it only serves to underline the fact.
Assumptions
Good morning makes an assumption. If it’s the wrong assumption it can come across as arrogant.
If you want to seem polite or friendly, just start the email with hi or hello followed by the person’s name. Use the first name if you know them. Use the first and second name if you don’t or if you are uncertain.
Nothing signals the person at the other end is not paying attention more than getting this wrong. If I get an email that starts “Hello Bennett”, I know something odd is going on.
Kia ora
New Zealanders have two better options.
Kia ora is a Māori language – we call it te reo – phrase everyone should know. Strictly speaking it means “good health” but it is widely used as an alternative to “hi”. Kia ora is a great way to start an email.
The other possibility is g’day – a term we share with Australia. It’s seen as a little old-fashioned these days, but serviceable.
Hi, kia ora and g’day have the advantage of working at any time of the day or night. They don’t make presumptions about what is going on at the other end of the communication.
Both will set you apart from locals when you communicate with people in other parts of the world. It is is the best ice-breaker.
Good morning, g’day, kia ora, how are you? was originally posted on July 13, 2010 at billbennett.co.nz.
A handful of technology brands insist their names are written entirely in capital letters. In the past brands like Asus and Gigabyte pushed this idea. Today the Oppo phone brand likes to see its name appear in lights… sorry all capitals. There are other examples.
The jibe about ‘appear in lights’ is no accident. That’s exactly the effect companies who do this want.
Of course companies can write their names however they want
They don’t need to worry about being literate, sensible or easy to read. Although all of those things might help them.
Journalists should not write company names in capital letters. Their goal is to make information easy to understand.
This means ignoring demands to spell company names in capitals unless there are good, practical reasons to do otherwise. We’ll look at these in a moment.
Readers come first
Journalists serve readers, not markets nor companies. They do this by making information easy to get and understand. Messing around with capital letters interferes with that.
Capitals are the reading equivalent of speed bumps. They slow a reader’s flow. As you scan a text, your eye stops when it reaches a word spelled out in capitals. They appear in lights.
This is a reason companies want their name spelled that way. It increases the impact of the word. They thing words spelled out in capital letters stand out in text passages. They leap out from a page or screen.
Narcissistic companies
A less charitable interpretation is that spelling a company name in capital letters is a variation of [narcissistic capitals.](https://billbennett.micro.blog/2022/07/28/narcissistic-capitals-companies.html)
Puffed-up fools think capitals makes them look more important. It doesn’t. In fact it can do more harm than good.
Editors who nod through product names in capitals knowingly or unknowingly put brands’ interests ahead of their reader’s interests. There can be commercial pressure to do this, especially from companies that are potential advertisers.
Smart readers will realise this and learn not to trust the publication. For similar reaons, readers are, subconciously, less inclined to trust companies who insist their names are spelled in capitals. This may not be true in other cultures, but in ours, a name spelled all in capitals is a warning.
When company name are capital letters
We pronounce names like HP or IBM as a string of letters. It makes sense to write them as capitals. This doesn’t apply when company names are acronyms forming a pronounceable word.
Acronyms are words formed from a series of initial letters or parts of other words, such as: IBM, BBC, Unesco, WHO, Anzac, laser and radar.
Acronyms can make text simpler, easier to read and understand – life would be harder if you had to write light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation every time you refer to a laser.
Spell an acronym out in full the first time you use it unless you are writing for a specialist audience and the term is instantly familiar.
I prefer to write the full term, followed by the acronym thus:
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
Others like to write the acronym, followed by its full title in brackets. Both are equally correct, it is a matter of editorial style. And there are times when you may want to swap, for example when someone uses an acronym in reported speech.
Confusing acronyms
If an acronym is confusing, don’t use it.
Some style guides allow acronyms written with full stops (or periods) between each letter or segment. I don’t. It’s ugly and adds nothing.
Likewise, there are those who think acronyms should always be written in capital letters. Again I disagree. In both cases the result is both inelegant and distracting.
You’ll notice in the examples above, I’ve written some acronyms in capitals, some with an initial capital and some in lower case. Here’s why:
Initialisms
When you pronounce the acronym as a string of letters, ie. eye, bee, emm for IBM the computer company, you should write the word in capitals. This type of acronym is an initialism. Linguists and grammar teachers make a distinction between acronyms and initialisms, but journalists generally tend to regard them as the same.
If the acronym is a word and spoken as a word, then treat it as a normal word with an initial capital if it is a proper noun. Otherwise with a lower case initial letter.
Some American newspapers automatically use an initial capital followed by lower case if the acronym had more than six letters.
One difficulty is deciding whether to use a or an before an acronym. The important thing is how it sounds when spoken. If the first letter sounds like a vowel, use an.
Certain acronyms were deliberately designed from the outset as pronounceable words. For example, Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).
T
he Economist Style Guide offers good advice:
…try not to repeat the abbreviation too often; so write the agency and not the IAEA, the Union and not the EU, to avoid splattering the page with capital letters. There is no need to give the initials of an organisation if it is not referred to again.
He mentions the editors' blogging and the way the BBC opened up its back-end to developers. Both matter.
His first item, the BBC’s web writing style, may prove more important in the long-term.
The organisation’s online news writers write crisp, tight news copy. They get right to the point, line up the important facts, then get out-of-the-way.
BBC learned the hard way
Bradshaw says the BBC learnt to write tight news stories when it ran Ceefax – a teletext information service which predates the internet. Ceefax allows little in the way of graphics and only 24 lines of 40 characters. Journalists had less than 200 words to tell their story.
Sharpening skills on Ceefax before the internet, gave the BBC a head start over other written news outlets which had become wordy thanks to larger newspapers.
Bradshaw says: “Even now it is difficult to find an online publisher who writes better for the web.”
The online team is even better at writing news headlines. Its editors compress the gist of an entire story into just five or six words. Most headlines fit inside that Ceefax page width of 40 characters.
Originally posted at billbennett.co.nz on Feb 21, 2011
Don’t waste time warming up when writing for online audiences. Get started straight away.
Readers are busy. They scan text looking for meaning and they want it fast. Other writing competes for their attention and it is only a click away.
Your first paragraph should summarise the entire story in less than 40 words. A 30-word intro is better. And make sure those words aren’t all in one sentence.
Don’t overload the first paragraph with too many facts. Save details for later.
Move straight to the action. Passive first sentences send readers fleeing for the exit.
Online, opening words are often a teaser to lure readers. If Google indexed your story, the first 150 characters become the descriptive text telling people what to expect when they click the link.
If you struggle to write short, snappy first paragraphs, imagine you are writing an old-style tweet. When Twitter still had its 140-character limit that was excellent training for writing introductions.
One of the great things about Micro.Blog is you can use it for quick social-media style thoughts or you can write a more expansive blog post.
Good blog posts communicate ideas and information. Do it with crisp, unambiguous writing.
There’s nothing wrong with flowery writing. Just leave it for poetry, song lyrics and literary fiction.
Here are seven steps to help you turn out snappy blog posts that’ll have readers coming back for more:
Get straight to the point. Set out your store in the opening paragraph. Tell readers what the rest of the story will be about. If you’ve got one, make the first paragraph your opening argument.
Prove it. Follow your opening paragraph by building on the first idea or argument. Provide back-up information to explain or support the first paragraph. Tell readers why you said what you did in that first paragraph.
Make extra points in descending order of importance. Readers can drop out at any point. Make sure they get the best points early while you still have their attention.
Use plenty of full stops and line breaks. Short sentences make your copy dynamic and fast-moving. Short paragraphs make text easier to read. This is more important online. As a bonus, tight copy helps you articulate your ideas.
Murder your darlings. If you think you’ve written something clever, chances are you haven’t. Hit the delete key and move on. Don’t use favourite obscure words or complicated metaphors. Anything that sounds like poetry needs cutting, unless you are writing poetry.
Get on, get off, don’t hang around. And don’t outstay your welcome. Don’t feel the need for a long wrap-up. Make your last point, summarise if it helps, then stop writing.
Check before hitting the send button. Read through your post, spell-check, look for poor grammar, weed out the needless words, make sure the text is understandable. I sometimes walk away from the screen and do something else before returning for one last read. The distance helps.
Learn grammar. Forget what teachers said about long words making you look smart. It isn’t true. Instead use simple words, grammar and sentences. It is harder to go wrong.
Finding simple words isn’t always easy, especially when you are in a hurry.
A thesaurus helps. There are online thesauri and there are two paper ones on my bookshelf at home. There’s a thesaurus built into MacOS.
Thsrs is a short word thesaurus designed to help social users find shorter words to fit in tight character limits. Thsrs is a great tool for digging out a simpler, easier-to-read alternative, option, choice.
You may call it a blog post, article or something else. A journalist would call it a story. Here’s how to write a good one.
Start your story by telling the reader what it is about. You do this briefly in the headline. Then again in the introduction or intro, which is a stop press paragraph.
Ask yourself:
What is this story about,
what information am I trying to get across and..
what points must I make to do this?
Sum up the story in your mind in one simple sentence. This is your intro.
Its job is to tell the reader what the article is about and draw the reader in.
As a rule, readers prefer brief intros.
Write so a reader who only gets as far as your intro still has a basic grasp of your story.
Newspapers teach journalists to start with a single sentence of between 15 and 21 words. This is what you should aim for, although at times you’ll need to use more words.
As an aside, proper nouns made up of multiple words only count as a single word when you’re calculating the ideal intro length.
You can have one sentence in your first paragraph or two or three. Either way keep it short and crisp.
Next comes the how — how did it happen or, more usually in your case, what happens next?
This is background information or explanation.
After the explanation comes amplification. You amplify the point or points following on from the intro.
Make these points one by one and in descending order of importance.
Last, after making all the main points, tie up any loose ends — ie., add any extra or background information deemed necessary but of lesser importance.
Years ago, when training journalists, I would joke that Americans use more commas than British journalists because they are rich and can afford the extra ink. The same applies to journalists in Ireland, Australia or New Zealand.
You would often find long, comma-packed sentences in American newspapers. They don’t make for easy reading.
It’s better to write using plenty of full stops instead — periods if you’re American — and go sparing on the comma.
Keeping track of who does what to whom is hard in long, comma-laden sentences. Breaking sentences into smaller units of meaning makes writing easier to follow.
Only use commas where they aid understanding.
Writers often underrate the comma’s use as an aid to sense.
Some Americans put commas between all clauses and sub-clauses. Som grammar checking software tells you to do the same.
British-trained writers avoid them between short clauses at the start of sentences.
Americans also use commas before and at the end of a list of items. This is sometimes called the Oxford comma. As the name suggests, this is an not exclusively American habit.
Argument in favour of the Oxford comma seems to be gaining ground in some circles. That’s partly because writers who favour the Oxford comma have trained us to read prose the way we might read a formal logic argument.
Some experts say Americans are moving towards British patterns and commas are now less common on both sides of the Atlantic. Let’s hope so.
One last point. Neither approach is right or wrong. How one uses commas and full stops is a matter of editorial style, not grammar. The important thing about style is to be consistent.
Quotes are important in journalism and reporting because they tell readers the information in question wasn’t made up by a reporter, but is someone’s account or opinion.
Not all quotes are equal. The best come directly from an interviewee’s speech and are faithfully reproduced. In electronic media these are obvious – you see or hear the person in question saying their own words.
With written media, quotes can be either direct or indirect.
Direct quotes
Direct quotes are written inside speech marks and are more or less exactly the interviewee’s words.
I say “more or less exactly” because many journalists, myself included, tidy up, taking out the hesitations, the ums and the ahs. This is perfectly OK. What isn’t acceptable is putting words in someone’s mouth – words they didn’t use.
It would be normal to correct the grammar up to a point.
We often edit – often the reader only sees part of an interview. It wouldn’t be practical to include every word.
Indirect quotes
Journalists use indirect quotes to simplify and summarise an interviewee’s words, they improve readability.
Most quotes you see in written media come from interviews. Some come from prepared statements.
Organisations use prepared statements to control their message rather than answering pesky questions from nosey journalists whose job is to extract the truth not parrot propaganda.
Robotic speech patterns
Prepared statements generally don’t read like human speech. For some reason people think robotic English makes them sound more sincere or knowledgeable. Often the reverse is true.
Journalists don’t always make it clear when they repeat a prepared statement. This isn’t dishonesty. It happens because constantly telling readers where information comes from all the time quickly gets boring. We come from a tradition where the column inches allocated to a story was limited. And we still work in a market where readers lose patience with too much detail.
On the other hand, journalists shouldn’t pull the wool over reader’s eyes.
I tell my readers when a quote is from a statement when I’m writing a news story or feature, but not if I’m writing a two paragraph snippet. Most of the time I also tell readers if a quote is from an emailed response – which may have been written by committee or a social media post.
There’s a fine line between full disclosure and boring readers. But if the story is controversial or important, it is best to take the risk and be candid.
Your job as a writer is to get your message across clearly and quickly.
One way you can sabotage communication is by laying traps for readers. Traps that halt a reader’s natural flow as their eye scans over text.
Punctuation – as the name suggests – stops flow. This is why I leave out optional commas.
You can also slow down a reader’s flow when you use capital letters incorrectly. For the same reason you should never write a word entirely in capitals.
Companies that insist their names are spelled out in capitals only do this because they want to halt the reader’s flow and make them take notice. You do not have to indulge them. It’s another story if they are paying you to write marketing copy.
Likewise I don’t use the ‘&’ symbol – instead I always write ‘and’. The exception to this rule is when the ‘&’ forms part of a company’s name.
The same applies to ‘+’.
It is also better to write out percent in full than use %. Although some newspapers, including one where I work, insists on using the symbol.
Never resort to phone text-style language in anything written for a wider audience. It isn’t funny, clever or useful.
Avoid jargon if you can. Sometimes you have no choice.
It makes your writing difficult to understand and puts readers off. Jargon confuses readers and in many cases jargon is ambiguous – always a sign of poor communication. It puts a barrier between you and your readers.
This is especially hard if you interview someone who talks in jargon and mangement cliches. You have a duty to report their words accurately, but you also have a duty not to bombard readers with gobbledegook.
Where you can, turn quotes into indirect speech and simply drop the jargon term. Use easily understood descriptive words and phrases instead.
When you can’t avoid a jargon term give your reader a short definition in plain English.
If possible add an example to illustrate the definition.
I had to write about management when the term ‘participative management’ came up as unavoidable jargon.
I explained this as:
Participative management, a way of running things where the workers take part in decision-making.
It would have been so much better if the interviewee said that in the first place.
Some people think worrying about spelling and grammar is anal and backward. They are wrong.
There are two reasons why spelling and grammar are important and will remain important for as long as people still read printed words:
First: Well-written, properly-spelt, grammatically-correct English is unambiguous.
Poorly written English is open to misinterpretation.
If being understood is important, then worry about spelling and grammar.
Second: Well-written text flows, it’s a pleasure to read. It sends readers a message about your professionalism and wisdom. It is credible. People want to read more of it.
Poorly written English jerks around, it causes readers to stumble. They may not realise why this sets off alarm bells in their heads, but it does. They won’t look for follow-up reading.
Too much poor English and they’ll question the message. This may not happen on a conscious level. It may not happen with all readers. It will happen enough for it to matter. So yes, spelling still matters.
Use capital letters for proper nouns. Avoid them for common nouns.
Proper nouns are the names of things. So use capitals for the names of people, places, months, days of the week, companies and so on. Don’t use capitals for common nouns.
People run into difficulty with capitals because there’s a temptation to use them for important words. In business writing people often use capitals as a way of avoiding offending someone or something by implying he or it isn’t important.
Another difficulty is with titles. Newspapers typically use a capital letter when the title comes directly before a person’s name but not otherwise.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is correct, but it would be the prime minister’s desk.
In his book Newsman’s English British newspaper editor Harold Evans says;
“Avoid using them unnecessarily. The Parks Committee, but subsequently the committee. The South West Regional Hospital Board, but then the hospital board.”
One piece of advice I had early in my career as a journalist is: “If in doubt use lower case unless it looks wrong”.
Lastly, do not use capital letters for emphasis and avoid writing words in all capitals.
I’m so pleased this had nothing to do with me. This was published in _The Australian _ 15 years ago and spotted by Mumbrella.
So let’s do some role playing. You’re a sub on The Australian.
Your boss has just given a speech about the health of newspapers.
You’ve got to put a headline on the speech.
Do you a) Check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline or b) Not check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline? Remember, your career may depend on the choice you make.
Your school may have taught you not to end a sentence with a preposition. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek. Sentences in those languages never ended with prepositions.
Years ago I worked in communications for Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. My boss took me to task for ending a sentence with a preposition.
He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.
Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was a joke.
While the grammar police won’t agree, this is a rule you can ignore. It doesn’t apply to everyday writing, business writing, journalism and online communications.
There will be times it doesn’t make sense to twist sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.
Relax. You’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it. Most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors sidestep the rule.
Google is one of a rare breed of companies that has moved into everyday language as a verb.
There are language purists who argue against turning nouns into verbs.
Don’t worry. It’s fine to “google something” online. People have “hoovered carpets” for years.
Note the lower case G and H.
Most of the time Google and Hoover are proper nouns requiring a capital.
There’s no such thing as a proper verb, so why should Google or Hoover take a capital when they are used as verbs?
Years ago when I was starting out as a journalist there was a regular supplement in the UK Press Gazette which argued exactly that: a company name used as a verb needs a capital.
Free hosting services, like WordPress.com can as good as or better than self-hosting. You’ll need to pay for a few basics, but it won’t cost more than web hosting.
A low-cost, minimalist option like Micro.blog (where you are reading this post) is the best for anyone who’d rather write posts than mess around with code.
Blogging can take up a huge amount of time. It doesn’t have to.
There’s a community aspect to blogging. It isn’t apparent until you dive in and do it yourself.
Blogging is similar, but not the same as journalism.
My blogs don’t have any direct economic benefits, but they keep me in touch with audiences and show prospective clients that I’m alive and kicking.
Follow a few simple rules and you’ll be able to write decent, readable articles or stories about technology for any audience.