Through my educational career, I’ve been a successful writer. I received high marks on my papers because I followed the rubrics and was eloquent. I loved complex sentences that strung my thoughts together, used adjectives to detail my stances and showcased research with commas and lists. My writing style was not conducive to public relations writing. This course required me to embrace the opposite of what I was used to and almost relearn how to write for public relations. Writing this news release was difficult for me, so I took my time on the drafts. The first draft was especially difficult because I wasn’t used to this writing style. Staying in active voice and being concise was a struggle. I spent at least four hours writing and editing the release for the workshop, and an additional one to two hours making changes for the assignment submission. After the workshop I fixed several grammatical errors and cut down phrases, but the biggest change was rearranging the layout. As suggested, I switched around …show more content…
Adapting the sentences to active voice helped, but they still needed words trimmed to be as concise as possible without losing meaning. The first sentence of the third paragraph was too wordy, so I split it into two sentences and condensed them. Then I searched for any phrases I could prune words from. The word “downsize” replaced “cut down on their” in the second paragraph, and I reworked the boilerplate to make it more concise. I also removed the words “thank” in the second paragraph and “supporting the school” in the quote. By tightening the wording, the message describing what the ceremony is and why it’s important is consistent. The ceremony is about recognizing recipients and donors and having them meet, so thanking and supporting are implied rather than stated. With these revisions, the release looks and sounds the way a news release should with a clear