Whether you are a consultant for a PR agency or you work in-house, you will be crafting communications copy daily. 

This could be media releases, website copy, byline articles or speeches. And for each, the messages need to be clear and concise.

Everyone writes differently and, while it is great to have individuality, the goal of every piece is to ensure your clients’ varied personalities and style shines through and to keep the copy tight.

Here’s some tips to help get your PR copy right:

Brain Dump: Looking at an empty word doc trying to think of the perfect first sentence rarely achieves much. Try using a working title, spend a few minutes jotting down some objectives, put down some part sentences that come to mind.

Craft Your Messaging: What are the essential points you need to get across to achieve the objectives? You may have already developed key messages with your client to use. How do they fit with what you already have on the page and what order should they be in?

Give It Time: If you have time, and this is not always the case, get as much of the copy down as possible and then leave it to come back to later in the day. You will be sure to think of missed messages or information and will likely have a fresh approach.

Edit Yourself: Once the copy is written it’s time to edit. Check for wordiness and redundant statements. Make sure you are writing in active tense, not passive. Obviously, also read through for spelling and grammar errors. You may want to check out Grammarly or Hemmingway – while you don’t want to reply on tools, they can serve as useful reminders. 

Enjoy the writing and see every project as an opportunity to evolve your writing skills.