Clients can’t write, that’s why they have PR agencies

 6th December 2012    PR Guru 

We were struggling to think what to fume over this week, until an email dropped into our inbox from one of our new clients. Included in said email was a string of corrections to our latest release. Idiot!

Now don’t get us wrong. We accept that clients should be allowed to express their opinions. But we’ve had years of experience as sub-editors, editors, writers and finally PROs, so if there’s one thing we know about, it’s writing news releases.

I'm so bored with having to explain to people that companies are in the singular, it is not essential to capitalise every alternate sentence (shades of Catch 22!), job titles are in lower case (also, if we have used that format it’s probably because that’s the house style of the target magazine) and that inserting aren’t-we-great style sentences into alternate paragraphs, with no news value does little to engage the audience or impress the editor.

OK, we admit the odd one does sneak through occasionally, but hey, nobody’s perfect!

Clients always have to fiddle. They won’t accept the fact that, actually, we know what we’re doing or that their writing skills – in most cases – are shite.

And it’s the ones that think they know about PR that are the worst … we waste so much time re-correcting their corrections, and changing things to what they want, only to be told that actually it read better before – of course, it did; we wrote it!

Still, we’ve said it now. Next time this particular client emails over corrections we shall point them to this anonymous piece on PRmoment.in with a little note saying: “At least none of our clients are like this”. Then we shall smile sweetly and get on with rewriting their article.”