SCHOLARLY ARTICLE
SUMMARY OF SCHOLARLY ARTICLE
DELIVERABLE #1: SUMMARY OF SCHOLARLY ARTICLE
Purpose: Students will apply their critical reading, summarizing and writing skills to this deliverable. Students will learn to adjust their writing to fit the audience. Students will also determine and interpret their readability scores.
Scenario: You are an assistant account executive at the public relations firm ACME Public Relations, where the Commission on Public Relations Education (CPRE; see HYPERLINK http://www.commpred.org http://www.commpred.org) is a new client.
ACME strongly believes in the professional development and continuing education of its staff. To that end, the monthly newsletter (delivered as a Word and PDF document to staffers emails and available on the firms Intranet) runs a regular column that you write. In I Read It So You Dont Have To,
This is a riff on the title of former weekly column in The Washington Post, We Watch So You Dont Have To, written by Lisa de Moraes, the papers former television columnist.
you summarize an interesting scholarly research article about public relations for the newsletters non-academic audience, namely your ACME colleagues.
The scholarly article chosen for your upcoming column explored what experienced public relations professionals think of the writing skills of entry-level public relations practitioners (viz., Cole, Hembroff, & Corner, 2009). What they think is not good.
NOTE: The study is provided as a PDF file in the course folder. We will use this study throughout the course. For the sake of this and other course deliverables, pretend that the CPRE funded the study. It did not [the Public Relations Society of America did in part], but lets pretend that it did. We are also assuming that the Cole et al. study has just been released, which is not the case since its publication date is 2009 and its 2016 now.
Execution of Tasks:
Before writing anything:
Read HYPERLINK http://libguides.unf.edu/c.php?g=177086&p=1163776 http://libguides.unf.edu/c.php?g=177086&p=1163776
Brooks, P. (2002). Writing articles and newsletters: An easy step-by-step guide.Havant, UK: Crimson ebooks (downloadable as an ebook/PDF via the UMUC Library).
Before reading the Cole et al. (2009) study, look at the following materials. They will help you read it in a more critical (meaning, thoughtful) way:
Cohens (n.d.) Guidelines for Critical Reading, (in the Week 1 course folder)
The Center for Media Literacys critical news reading guidelines (in the Week 1 course folder
Then read the Cole et al. study. BUT ï
Avoid the abstract! It will plant too many ideas in your head, like how seeing a movie does before youve read the book. Its harder to come up with your own mental images once the movies images are in your head. Its a similar thing with the abstract and this deliverable.
Whats my endgame with this piece?
Your operational goal is, of course, to write an engaging, well-written piece for your PR firms internal employee newsletter.
Your mission goals are:
to get your colleagues thinking about practitioners writing skills in the PR industry generally and at ACME PR specifically and
to help familiarize your colleagues with ACMEs newest client, the CPRE, and CPREs mission and work.
Now its time to write:
Adopt the role of writing alchemist:
Transform this long, scholarly article into a compelling summary that your audience can understand and find relevant. This is not so different from writing a good, old- fashioned book report.
Summarize and distill the main points of the study so your audience can get the main takeaways from the Cole et al. article without actually having to read it. After all, your column isnt called I Read It So You Dont Have To for nothing! But dont pull a Big Nate:
Tease out the articles findings your audience will find most meaningful. Consider what about this study might be useful to them as they do their public relations jobs, mentor interns, interview recent college graduates for entry-level assistant account executive positions and so forth.
Your firms new client funded this study, so your article should not criticize or poke holes in it. Be diplomatic. You are not developing a critical response (Fowler & Aaron, 2016, p. 157).
Your piece is supposed to be friendly and interesting. Your column has a playful, clever name. Consider writing in the first person. Maybe break down that fourth wall between you the writer and the readers, by directly engaging them with rhetorical questions or questions à la What do you think your supervisor thought of your writing when you first started out in PR?
Use one of the outlining strategies suggested by Kallan (2012; e.g., piling) or LBH (aka Fowler & Aaron, 2016), covered in the Week 2 lecture notes, to develop the structure of your newsletter article.
Students may find that the five-paragraph essay format useful, but dont feel bound by that length or structure.
DO feel bound by these parameters:
Your deliverable-as-newsletter column may not go beyond one 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, formatted with:
one-inch margins all around.
a 12-point font such as Times Roman.
lines single spaced.
three columns (mimicking the appearance of the actual newsletter). In Word, click open Page Layout and then Columns. Choose the three-column format.
Place your name and column title (I Read It So You Dont Have To) in a header, so to reserve your column inches, of which you have 27 (I think!), for the text of your column.
After writing your first/rough draft:
Run the draft through the spell/grammar checker and proofread to catch any obvious issues.
Then, determine your readability score in Word. These are the instructions for Word 2007 but it should be a similar process for more current versions of Word:
Click on the spelling/grammar checker icon as if you are running the checker on a document. In the box that pops up, place a check in the box next to Check Grammar, if it is not already checked. Then click on Options in the lower left corner of the pop-up box. Check Show readability statistics under the When correcting spelling and grammar in Word category.
Jot down all of the readability statistics that pop up on the screen:
number of words, sentences and paragraphs;
the average number of words per sentence and sentences per paragraph;
the percentage of passive sentences;
your Flesch reading ease score; and
your Flesch-Kincaid grade level score.
After running those readability statistics:
Put your first/rough draft away for a sufficient amount of time (ideally, at least one day).
Engage in some strategic rewriting of your deliverable-as-newsletter column. Consider your diction and syntax. What about the style of your writing? Is it engaging and compelling? Does it fit a column playfully named I Read It So You Dont Have To? Have you captured the overall gist of the studys findings and any particularly outstanding points for your audience? Is it in final form (even though its considered a first draft for the purposes of this course)?
Then, run your readability stats again on this final version and jot them down.
Prior to/during submitting your deliverable to me, please note in the Student Text Box:
your first set of readability statistics, and
your set of your post-rewrite statistics.
References
Fowler, H. R., & Aaron, J. E. (2016). The Little, Brown handbook (13th ed.). Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson.
I did this project and got a feedback from the professor. I will attach my work and his feedback. Please,using what I started can you follow his feedback and produce an end product?
viz., Cole, Hembroff, & Corner, 2009
American corporations spend an estimated three billion dollars correcting business writing errors. Imagine how many new PR college graduates jobs would have been created with this fund! PR textbook Autor Fraser Skitel described the state of public relations writing as a deplorable.
Based on studies and surveys done by PR professionals, entry level or otherwise, the current communication students are not capable of real writing Writing is identified to be one of the weakest areas of most college graduates. Todays employers continue to value employees who can communicate well through the writing words. The study identified these college graduates, freshly entering the PR profession tend to poorly handle the fundamental writing challenges like; email, client memos, reports, and budgeting request. The result also shows entry level practitioners spend more time writing than others 10+ years in the profession. The writer thinks students in college do not learn how to organize their writing which is the major contributor for poor writing. The study indicates the need for a series academic resources within the public relation curriculum. He notes educators, practitioners, and students engaged in this development identified writing skills as first on a list of five core competencies for PR undergraduates. These same study identified undergraduate public relation curriculum should include a list of thirty-seven basic knowledge.
Through numerous studies and surveys, the skill gaps of entry level writing within a sample of public relation practitioners represents entry level employees, college graduates, supervisors of all regional markets of the PR organizations in the country. Data collected by these studies indicated the need for PR educators to improve the quality of their teaching system and identify the cause of why PR practitioners writing skills are deteriorating.
Based on the studies done, and the cost that is incurred by PR organizations correcting printing errors of entry-level professionals; there is a need for improvement. vis., Cole states a live discussion must begin within the practitioner and educators community. The outcome of this debate must be to determine precisely which aspect of the current PR curriculum must give way to make room for a public demand for better business writing in the practice of public relations in the twenty-first century. This negative perception of PR supervisors and lower expectations of entry-level practitioners is creating frustration to colleagues and costing PR organization time and money.
Individual Feedback:
Zeke: Please see the attached. You are definitely on the right track, but you need to develop new content and adjust existing content so that your piece focuses exclusively on summarizing the Cole, Hembroff and Corner study and that your readers know it. You have some room in the 3rd column to add new content.
When you develop that new content and tweak current content, remember that your task here is to write an engaging summary of the Cole et al. study. Whats its title? Who conducted the study, who participated in the study (nearly 850 active members of the Public Relations Society of America), what was the studys major finding? Who funded the study (hint: Its your PR firms new client, the Commission on Public Relations Education)? What are one or two minor findings of the Cole et al. study not from other studies discussed in its lit review that are particularly interesting, relevant, counterintuitive, head-smacking, etc. that your readers would want to know? You want to be confident that just from reading your piece, an ACME colleague could intelligently discuss the Cole, Hembroff and Corner study with the client contact from CPRE. What you submit needs to be executed well enough that I, as your supervisor in the grading rubric scenario, could pass it along as is to my own boss and/or the client for their approval and publication/distribution.
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