Considering Education: More Choices Mean More Chances

The next couple weeks are a whirlwind. My daughter is graduating from elementary school this week. My son is graduating from high school next week.

Next year, he will be headed to the University of Nevada, Reno while she looks forward to starting her middle school years at Legacy Traditional School in Las Vegas. We’re grateful she was accepted by a charter school, as it seems like it will provide a suitable transition from the private school she has attended for the past six years. We never had to consider such a transition for my son. He attended public school from kindergarten through high school.

She might have attended private school from kindergarten through high school too, but school choice, a.k.a. Educational Saving Accounts (ESAs), continue to stall in Nevada. So while I helped campaign for ESAs, writing columns and comments, we also toured and applied to several charter schools where selection is determined by lotteries and waiting lists.

After she was accepted at Legacy, some people wondered why I continued to donate my time in support of ESAs even though my family would no longer benefit. My answer was simple enough. My support of ESAs isn’t about just about my family. It's about all families because I know school choice works. An early version of it changed my education experience and my life.

Affording more parents school choice will course correct more kids.

As one of those students who was mislabeled by the public system in first grade, I had already been ushered off to the school’s portable classrooms, dubbed the “barracks.” Out there, away from the other students, education was optional. Most kids so assigned would bide their time, failing forward.

My grandmother wanted more for me so she intervened. At the end of third grade, she pulled me from the public school system and enrolled in me a private secular school to repeat. While we were too poor to afford it, she somehow managed to secure a hardship grant. I’m grateful.

The new school reassessed the public school system’s perception that I wouldn’t amount to anything and discovered something different. I was only struggling with most subjects because I couldn’t read. They also determined I was gifted in math and art and provided advanced placement curriculum so I wouldn’t become bored with the standard lessons.

The change in classwork changed my outlook. Within the course of one year, I rose from the bottom percentile to one of the top in my class. And as my performance improved, my sometimes unruly behavior — the by-product of being teased in public school for being raised by grandparents and having a visible handicap — dissipated. School choice gave me a chance.

After that school year, my grandparents were no longer able to raise me so I was returned to public school in a different state. The foundation that the private school provided me, despite not being ‘held accountable’ by the state, placed me well ahead of my peers. This never changed.

Sure, I had some ups and downs across the entirety of my educational experience, but my love for learning always persisted. Not only have I become I a lifelong learner, but I also share my passion for education as a part-time continuing education instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — an outcome that would have been an impossibility had some version of school choice not existed for me.

At the end of the day, no matter what political arguments people raise, ESAs come down to one thing. Different students excel in different learning environments. Knowing this, we should be doing everything we can to make it easier for them to be enrolled in the right environment and without any of the pervasive socio-economic and faith-based labels on students or the bureaucratic requirements that frequently restrain public schools from better performance. More choices mean more chances.

Writing Across Communication: An Introduction To Writing

Anyone who has ever been introduced as a writer already knows the most common question that follows. In the thirty some years I've been introduced as one, it has never changed. It's timeless.

"So, you're a writer," they say, in admiration and sometimes skepticism. "What do you write?"

"Words," I would tell them. "And on good days, sentences."

I'd immediately follow up with a litany of audience-tailored examples that could be easily understood before settling on the umbrella concept as a commercial writer (copywriter isn't readily understood by people outside advertising and marketing) and occasional journalist. Later, I turned in the nouns for stylistic adjectives that ranged from strategic and interactive to gripping and zippy. I still do at times. 

Nowadays, I'm more likely to tell people that how we define writing really depends on whom we ask. Whereas Walter Lippman might define it as an opportunity to tell the truth and shame the devil, Stephen King is more likely to say that it's "the truth inside the lie." They're both right for their craft.

Bigger than that, writing is the process by which we translate our desired perception of objective and conceptual realities into a form that others may see, adopt, and act upon. It's one of the ways we exploit our extraordinary cooperative capacity as humans — agreeing or disagreeing that certain ideas, thoughts, and concepts have greater value than the objective, physical world in which we live — even if we don't personally know the person or group of people who put the words together. 

Regardless of what "kind of writer" someone is, the fundamental core of it remains unchanged, which is why I invested some time to design a class that could provide students with an understanding of how writing could be applied across communication — disciplines such a journalism, public relations, content marketing, advertising, and multimodal integration — with tremendous impact.

Writing Across Communication: An Introduction To Writing

This deck serves as an introduction to the class as well as some of the fundamental skills that can be learned by different writing disciplines. It also introduces writers to the changes taking place within the occupation as writers are being asked to specialize and generalize at the same time. So instead of learning how to write from within the silo of one discipline, they can learn from all disciplines: 

• Editors understand organization, structure, and universal ideas. 

• Journalists know how to find and define news and source information. 

• Public relations practitioners serve both organizational and public interest. 

• Crisis communicators possess empathy while managing a crisis and bad news. 

• Content marketers are experts in developing content that has customer value. 

• Copywriters are masters at developing creative stories that speak to people. 

• Writers of the future understand non-linear content, multimodal interaction, and UX design. 

The skill sets for modern writers don't end with journalism and commercial writing. Beyond the four primary approaches to effective communication (journalism, public relations, content marketing, and advertising), writing literature can help someone become more adept at storytelling, learning poetry more masterful at alliteration, and understanding psychology more attuned with the impact we impart on audiences. 

From script to screen and everything in between, getting it all right can be profoundly rewarding. The words and, on good days, sentences written for ourselves or our organizations have the potential to reshape how people see the world in small, almost unnoticeable ways and in grand life-altering ways that have shaped the course of world events. Nothing else is so important. 

What do you think? Where are the writers of tomorrow headed in terms of skill sets and craft? Are they really destined to be replaced in part by automation? And as an aspiring or working writer, would you want to take a class like the one being taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas?

Writing Occupations Are Changing. Are You Changing With Them?

As much as 75 percent of marketers may be increasing content creation, but the average job growth rate for occupational writers isn't keeping pace. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, job growth for writers averaged 2 percent, with exception to some specialized fields such as technical writers.

As more and more content is produced, organizations are relying on other occupations to produce material for their communication channels, including blogs and social media, while occupational writers are simultaneously being asked to specialize while overseeing generalized content being produced by their non-occupational peers. Specifically, it's not uncommon for a writer (or communication manager) to be assigned specific projects but also serve as an editor for the organization.

Likewise, other companies are growing content while charging occupational writers with other titles, such as coordinator or manager, and then making them responsible for a broad range of advertising, marketing, and public relations tasks. Interestingly enough, however, the integrated communication specialist track hasn't taken hold as an occupation path even if it has been adopted in practice.

Writers are being asked to review content well beyond their scope. 

Nowadays, it's not uncommon for marketing managers to write news releases or for public information officers to be tasked with writing advertisements. Both tracks ought to expect a heavy load of proofreading, editing, and rewriting too as more employees, managers, and executives write content.

There isn't anything wrong with the shift in work loads, aside from obvious time famine, but it does require professionals self-assess their abilities and continually strengthen their skill sets in areas where they are less familiar. Ergo, most copywriters are not familiar with news release writing and Associated Press Style guidelines, and most journalists or public relations specialists aren't always prepared to relax their desire to write with a certain literalness. (Some even struggle with relaxed blog content.)

The outcome can be found everywhere, as advertisements become boring and marketing puff pieces attempt to masquerade as news. As they do, ironically, outcomes begin to wane with the only solution offered up by some is to double down on the investment. There is only one problem with that. More lackluster communication doesn't produce results with luster. It exposes dullness to more people.

Stop trying to wear different hats and start writing from the inside out. 

One of my biggest issues with clients and so-called brainstormers who want steal everyone else's work is that it never produces anything that elevates the conversation. It's writing from the outside in, and only contributes to the communication overload suffered by more and more consumers today.

They don't need more content. They need the right content, written in a way that meets organizational goals and best suits the medium.

This is also why I transformed Writing For Public Relations at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas into Writing Across Communication. It's a better way to expose writers to different styles, formats, and techniques that used to be associated with specific fields. You see, I believe we have to start  teaching occupational writers how to write differently given we live in a world where copywriters are asked to write blog posts or white papers, public relations specialists are asked to write advertisements and 140-character tweets, and journalists are asked to be adept with social media and broadcast — all the while proofreading and editing everyone else's contributions too.

So rather than teach writers to form professional perspectives, they really need to understand the core communication components of an organization and various processes used in creating effective communication. After fundamentals, they can learn four primary approaches to effective communication: journalism, public relations, content marketing, and advertising.

While many writers likely find they are more suited to one approach over another, diversification also strengthens specialization. Even fiction writers can benefit from learning different writing approaches. Many fiction writers begin as journalists or copywriters before transitioning to the arts.

Hey Writer ... Why Do Think Your Words Are So Special Anyway?

As mind boggling as it seems, we will be exposed to more than a million words today. No, we won't see all of them, but they are there — framing webpages, breaking up social media updates, decorating walls, accompanying us to work on the horizon, and tucking us in when we go to bed.

Even those who didn't pick up a book this year — their lives are overflowing with words. In fact, this overwhelming volume of messages might even explain why the number of book readers has dipped in recent years. With as much content as people consume, voluntarily and involuntarily, it becomes increasingly difficult to fathom why anyone might want to add a few thousand more.

If you write, it ought to make you think too. What makes your words so special?

It doesn't even matter what kind of writer you might be. Literary writers have the seemingly impossible task of targeting voluntary readers to add more words to their lives, which is precisely why most authors never break more than $10,000 per published novel. Content marketers and copywriters have a seemingly impossible task too.

They target otherwise involuntary readers, using interruption, distraction, and attraction as tools of the trade. But even if they are very good at it, even great at it, most of them know that the number of times a reader has to be exposed to a message before it sticks has increased from three times in the 1960s to somewhere around 300 times today.

Even if it does stick, awareness is fragile. One typpppo, intentional or not, and even the best written message suddenly evaporates as our minds are attracted more to mistakes than best intentions.

Sure, some people argue that typos have become okay. They really aren't so okay when you realize they tend to attract more attention than the message.

Sure, we can all appreciate that the quantity of communication (how much we write) and the speed of communication (how fast we are asked to write it) has certainly contributed to the diminishing rate of quality — so much so that forgiveness is given much more readily than it once was. But does that make it right?

It depends, I suppose, on our expectation of outcome. Do we want people to remember our message or our mistake? If you want them to remember your message, then the error acceptance rate is zero.

If you want people to take the time to read your work, then take more time to write it.

In a few weeks, I'll be teaching Editing & Proofreading Your Work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. There are several takeaways from the class, including a better measure of how much time — from research to layout revisions — writing projects require (even if very few have such luxury).

It also includes some fundamentals on proofreading (the final polish) the work, start to finish:

1. Read the content out loud, slowly, with special attention paid to alliteration
2. Break up the content with a ruler, allowing you to see a line instead of a page
3. Start from the bottom up and backwards, seeing each word to check spelling
4. Print the content and, if you cannot print it, then change the font size and style
5. Set the work aside for a few hours or a day between writing, editing and proofreading

If you noticed that each of these techniques is tied to tricking your brain to see the content differently, you are right. The phenomenon that makes other people's writing errors stand out is the same phenomenon that makes ours so hard to spot. It's likely related to the Troxler effect, an optical illusion where unchanging stimulus away from a fixation point will fade and disappear.

Becoming a better proofreader of our own work often means changing the stimulus so our brain doesn't fill in details that don't exist after we've fixated on the work. Conversely, readers tend to spot errors much more quickly because the error disrupts the unchanging flow of content and our brains are programmed to see disruption. Never mind that our perception of authorship is the only change.

This isn't the only area where perception affects our writing. The value we place on it is based largely on perception too, unless we invest the time it takes to elevate the reader instead of merely informing them. Why bother? An article of 750 words is .00075 percent of the words someone will see today.

Educators See PR Trends From A Different Perspective

When the Public Relations Certification Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) began experiencing a decline in enrollment several years ago, most people pointed to the economy as an explanation. I didn't see it that way. The decline in enrollment was the symptom of an ailing industry.

As the old business model for journalism in the digital age began to fail, so did public relations. Sure, some people might call me out with claims that public relations firms are booming. Maybe some firms are, but most aren't relying on public relations as much as content marketing anymore.

Forbes recently called it the devolution of public relations. And while Christopher Penn pointed out that public relations is not doomed, even he couched his assessment in the observation that the media landscape is more diverse than ever before and public relations is adapting to the media landscape. I think he is right, except that it seems public relations firms aren't adapting to the market as much as they are adopting more marketing.

You can see it in enrollment. In prioritizing their educational investment, students and working professionals are more inclined to take classes that seem better suited to integrated marketing communication (which includes content marketing) than public relations. In fact, it was for that reason I asked the university to develop an Integrated Marketing Communication Certificate instead, and include public relations under a new umbrella. UNLV met me halfway with two certificate programs.

Pubic Relations and Integrated Marketing Communication Certificate programs.

Although the complementing certificate programs are still in their infancy and without the marketing support that I hoped for, the concept has merit. The idea is to offer two programs with up to five concentrated core courses while the balance of the curriculum consists of transferrable elective courses.

These are the four classes that I have signed on to teach this fall. Although the descriptions for two of the courses were inherited, three of the four classes are being built from the ground up. The fourth, Editing & Proofreading Your Work, is my long-running class offered three times a year and always refreshed between offerings. Course descriptions follow:

Fundamentals of Public Relations - 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Thursdays, starting Sept. 8

Explore the history, principles, procedures, and ethics guiding those who work in the field of public relations. You will also learn concepts, definitions, and techniques related to enhancing an organizational presence, elevating an organizational identity, and reinforcing an organizational brand by serving both the organization and public interest. The class is held Thursdays from Sept. 8 to Oct. 27 (with no class on Sept. 22 and Oct. 20). Course: 163PR6101

Editing & Proofreading Your Work - 9 a.m. to noon, Saturday, Sept. 10

Make a positive impression with clear, concise, and grammatically-correct personal or business correspondence. This half-day program will focus on essentials such as content, flow, mechanics, spelling and punctuation. You will leave the workshop with several editing exercises you may use to self-test and practice the skills you have learned. This class is an intensive 3-hour refresher for all writers, literary and commercial. Course: 163WR1150

Content Marketing - 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Thursdays, starting Sept. 26

Gain the insights, knowledge and skills you need to design, develop, promote, and manage digital, mobile, and social content as part of a successful marketing campaign. In this skills-driven class, you will learn some of the newest trends in the creation of compelling and engaging content that not only supports marketing but solidifies customer loyalty in marking them (and the media) as an important part of the campaign. The class is held Mondays from Sept. 26 to Dec. 3 (with no class on Oct. 17, Oct. 31, or Nov. 7). Course: 163MK2120

Crisis Communication - 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Thursdays, starting Nov. 11

Weather a natural disaster, accident, product recall, or other organizational crisis with a skillfully executed crisis communication plan. The class will take you through the process of developing a plan while minimizing legal liability, executing the media response, and managing key messages. The final project is to participate in an on-camera interview about your assigned crisis. The class is held Thursdays from Nov. 10 to Dec. 8 (with no class Nov. 24). Course: 163PR6103

Will the new curriculum work? I don't know. While public relations remains a critical component of any integrated marketing communication background and an important skill set, its overemphasis on media relations (for decades) has diminished its attractiveness as a standalone program. So, we'll see.

All of these classes also follow a traditional classroom model so you must be in Las Vegas to attend. In the future, there may be room to develop similar classes as an online alternative or, perhaps, private one-on-one instruction. Considering the direction of education today, it seems inevitable.

Never Mind The Cliche If Its Omission Is A Crime

Every now and again someone complies a list of words that need to be kicked to the curb because the list builder claims such words are overused, overblown, and otherwise tired. Sometimes they're right.

And other times? They aren't so right, at least not so right for everyone. Some people truly deserve the words that others dismiss as overused or in need of being avoided. Maybe you deserve some too. 

The real crime seldom has to do with a word being cliche, but rather the author or orator using a phrase or opinion that betrays a lack of original thought — power word and omit lists, inclusive. 

"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean." — Robert Louis Stevenson

The problem faced by many authors or orators isn't the word they choose but the way they go about choosing it. Instead of investing time to find the right word, they rely on tips and tricks that follow the pendulum swings between popularity and platitude. So rather than ever finding the right words to describe themselves, all they ever do is describe the trends that surround them. 

What they ought to think about instead is writing straight, honest prose that lends clarity to their meaning. A serial entrepreneur is something who has incubated a string of successful startups. A strategist is someone who envisions something new or at least reframes it in an unconventional way. Some of them might even be called innovative or collaborative, depending on their approach. 

The same can be said for any of the nineteen words called out for being hyperbolic. If they apply to you, continue to stand your ground and use them. But if you only grabbed onto to them because they looked good as part of someone else's message, then heed the warning and take the lesson to heart.

Skip manipulations, cognitive distortions, and pretend qualities that you or your company might profess and focus in on those qualities you really do have. That's all anybody really wants nowadays. They want the truth (or as close as you can come to it) with neither exaggeration nor omission.