Teaching PR

Dr. Lauren McGrath of Kennesaw State's English department led a breakout session on writing for the Web.

General principles:
Write to your audience
Keep it conversational
Chunk your content and use headings and subheadings to increase readability
Use a screen-friendly font like Verdana or Trebuchet
Write well -- clear, correct, well edited

Side discussion on SEO -- problem of overstuffing with keywords. Suggestion: add more content with keywords instead of stuffing all keywords on a few pages.

Suggested resources:
Hot Text: Web Writing that Works (Price)
The Web Writer's Guide (Maciuba-Koppel)
Writing for Multimedia and the Web (Garrand)
Writing for the Web (Jeney)

Brand "You":

• Communicating your own value
• Letting people know what to expect from you -- what is the promise you're making?
• Good qualities identified in this example site: creativity, identity and credibility, personality, consistency, audience awareness, media mix, linking, connections to other brand-building tools; thought leadership
• Getting "dooced"

Labels: conference, social media, writing

I'm not an org theoriest but a sentence in a post by Valeria Maltoni got me thinking about the nature of our relationship with organizations.

"We should never talk about organizations as entities, it leads to all sorts of false assumptions, the most glaring of which is that an entity has a mind, it does not," she writes.

This is a fundamental error that people make all the time. Yet when my students write about a company using the pronoun "they" (example: Company X sold a million widgets, and they could've sold even more), I have to correct the grammar. Wouldn't we be better off if reminded that a company really is "they" rather than "it"? That is, it seems to me that the grammar is teaching us to think incorrectly about what organizations really are.

Dan(nye) Santow and Andy Bechtel, I'm throwing this one to you.

Labels: writing