Chapter 5

The first important takeaway for me was knowing who your public audience is. According to the book everything you write is to influence people in some way. If you don’t get to know your target audience, your writing is not going to match up to their interest and what kind of information they are looking for. 

The second takeaway was Trade and Business-to-Business Publications. There are trade newspapers that are created for people who work in a specific industry that want to stay updated on the current happenings, trends, and products within that field.

The last takeaway was the section that tells you the questions you should ask when it comes to writing a news piece. I found this is important because a lot of times we jump into doing a project without asking questions. The questions provided were all related to writing a good piece.

“How long should the piece be?”

“What is the preferred tone of the piece?”

“What is my deadline?”

“Do you have any materials that would help me get started?”

Something that made me think of public relations writing in a new way is that it is OKAY to ask questions whenever you are asked to write a news piece. What I think is most useful to my current writing is that I must be clear about the purpose of a piece and its value to the organization. I find this to be applicable to anything I write because it is important to get your point across in a way that is easily understood.  I found research to be the most useful to my professional goals because it is said to be critical when writing to unfamiliar publics. When you do your research, you find out questions your public may have. You don’t want to write a piece just to find out your audience is not interested in you or the things you have to say.