Umm….Words, you know, are…err…. very important

When I was in class 5, we had a workbook called ‘Words are Important’. Every chapter had a list of English words that we had to find the meaning of and then use it in a sentence.

I loved that book. Its exercises we were made to do taught me a lot. But so did its title.

Words are so important. Yet people use it with disregard and carelessness. They use it wrongly with wrong spellings, they use too much of it, they use the big ones even when their shorter, simpler cousins are as effective.

I have been in the business of communication for 12 years – first as a journalist and now as a PR professional (there, I said it!). As a journalist, whatever you write is considered gold most of the times – which, let’s face it, very often it’s not. You don’t have the obligation to please anyone, except maybe your editor.

As a PR professional, you have to please everyone – your client, your client’s Corporate Communication person, their assistants, your media, your boss. Both professions are two sides of very different coins, because no coin worth its salt will straddle PR and journalism at once. 

No, I don’t disdain my profession. Well, not anymore. Because it is a tough job. But there are a few fools in the industry who give it a bad name, which kind of prompts me not to use ‘PR’ in the same sentence as ‘I am a’.

Y: So, what do you do?
Me: Er… I’m in the communication business. It’s a lot of fun!

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that people whose profession is communication, don’t do it well. When I overhear some of them talking to a client, especially on the phone, I can only hear fillers and false starts. If this is frustrating to an innocent bystander, wouldn’t it frustrate the client who has better things to do than listen to their PR person go, “Err… yeah, we got in touch with the reporter and he’s replied…umm…also we’re written the err….brief note, which does not have the….um…but we would also like you to look at the ….err…. PR strategy…”

Finish the goddam sentence before you go to another idea, you fool! I say this to myself, not aloud of course, because it can lead to HR issues. But you get my drift? Things just get worse on paper.

My point is – if you don’t know how to communicate, why are you in the business? HOW are you in the business, would be a more relevant question! Either way, they should try and understand one word at a time before they try to string them together.