Things that make you go "Oh, grow up for goodness' sake"
Someone opened an email to me this week with the word “Yo”.
The next sentence was about the challenges of retaining control of the HR function during redundancies.
It does make me laugh when PRs try to introduce faux mate-iness into work emails. For example, a fellow hack this week told me they’d received an email from a PR asking if the hack was “around for a gossip”, which is just embarrassing, frankly.
Of course, corporate wankspeak is just as bad. This morning a PR contact actually sent me an email with the words: “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if it flies”. Er, let’s not.
At 101 training events, I always make a point of saying PR execs shouldn’t ever use a word with a journalist that their mates in the pub would laugh at. This includes such gems as “herewith”, “facilitate” and 99.5% of instances of the word “dialogue”.
However, don’t go the other way and imagine we are your mates in the pub. Because in most cases we’re not. Communication with a journalist should be simple, direct and straightforward. Anything else and you risk them either not understanding what you mean (someone once asked if their idea was a “snug fit”, and I had no idea what they were on about, so I just deleted the email) or they will forward the email to people who actually ARE their mates and they’ll laugh at you*
* I have never done this. Obviously.






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