Give it what it’s worth
By Leo Valiquette
There’s been no shortage of commentary here and elsewhere about the value of brevity when it comes to engaging with the media. As PR practitioners, we’re often making cold contact with harried folks overwhelmed by numerous pitches that all claim to be inherently more worthy than whatever else is clogging up the inbox.
By the same token, readers must be equally busy, with equally short attention spans, so it only makes sense that written material intended for their consumption must also be short, sweet and to the point, right?
Well, not necessarily.
There is a clear difference between copy that is reader friendly and copy that isn’t. And mere length is a poor means of distinguishing one from the other. On the fiction front, I’ve torn through tomes 400 and 500 pages long in an afternoon, and struggled for days through artful prose only half that length. The style in which something is written is as important, if not more so, than length, when it comes to engaging the reader.
So what defines reader-friendly copy from that which isn’t? It’s an important question for us, as we produce for clients news releases, backgrounders, case studies and other materials that must be both informative and engaging for the media and the media’s audience.
Daily Writing Tips offers up some good pointers and refers to a fellow who has had significant influence on the business of writing, Rudolph Flesch, the man who developed the Flesch–Kincaid Readability Tests for assigning appropriate grade levels to reading material.
From our perspective, spinning a good yarn is what’s important to engaging the reader and how long that yarn will be is determined wholly by the quality of the material. The key thing is to ensure the piece has a tight focus with an obvious beginning, middle and end, written in a clear active voice. Long-winded sentences and complex vocabulary should be kept to a minimum. Lots of periods and white space are good things.
One of my profs from J-school summed it up best. When asked how long a story assignment should be, she would always answer, “Give it what it’s worth.”
