Bad grammar and typos will lose you business warns author and trainer Paul Mathieu

Don’t say you weren’t warned. A recent contributor to PRmoment wrote, “Journalists write for a living, so bad grammar and typos will turn them right off.”

She was spot on. Every working day, journalists and other influencers open emails or pick up press releases – and they groan. Sometimes, they’re so affronted by the parade of marketing speak, repetition and gushing adjectives that they hold the offending copy up for ridicule. This is from the restaurant critic of the FT:

“I dutifully looked through the first two pages [of the press release] until a run of simple spelling mistakes told me to stop … perhaps [the owner] would be equally careless about his wine list or his staff recruitment policy.”

The moral here isn’t just that the agency was, surely, fired the same day. It’s that the critic linked the quality of the writing to the customer experience. Poor copywriting resulted in the restaurant’s product and service being called into question – without so much as a test meal. File under “own goal”.

The Daily Telegraph columnist Bryony Gordon gets personal: “Why would I date someone who can’t punctuate?”

Again from the FT, an interviewer wrote in a back-handed compliment that Lord Bell isn’t, “Difficult in the way that most PR people are difficult. He doesn’t write rambling, illiterate press releases, for instance.”

There you have it. Most media, most of the time, think we’re rambling and illiterate. Our jobs may depend on us proving them wrong. But this isn’t to say that making the effort to write clearly, and without mistakes, is just to swerve attacks in the press or on a popular blog.

Clarity can help your career. A Business Wire survey found that of all the things that annoy journalists about PR people, “Poorly written material” was second only to, “Unfamiliarity with editorial requirements”. Sub-standard writing turned out to irritate hacks even more than pestering them and failing to meet their deadlines.

The head of PR at an NHS Trust will agree. She was sent an agency’s email with an attachment inviting her to, “Click to download our broacher”.

You won’t be surprised that the agency wasn’t considered. A software firm was begged by a different agency to be its, “Pubic relations agency of choice.” The letter was signed by seven agency seniors. Brilliant: show the client that your managers don’t read what’s sent out in their name. A win? No.

The segue is that carefully checked copy with all its facts in place is a competitive advantage. Just for a start, you’ll stand out from the numpties responsible for the horrors quoted above.

Fleishman-Hillard chairman John Graham says, “Putting ideas into words is still at the heart of what we do”, and as he built the PR firm all the way from six staff in Kansas City, his opinions warrant respect. Then, if you plan to apply to Diageo for a PR job, heed its corporate relations head, Ian Wright. He insists that recruits, “Need to be able to think clearly and write clearly.”

The ability to translate clear thoughts into clear words is a priceless differentiator in PR – and, whisper it, in journalism. I’m prepared to concede that there are, and will be, people with minimal writing skills who get into PR and flourish. Likely, they possess a host of compensatory strengths and a great work ethic. But I submit they’re a tiny minority.

Author and trainer Paul Mathieu (writefirsttime@paulmathieu.co.uk) founded, built and sold the European consumer and tech shop Herald Communications.