Screenshot stating: “Practitioners spend long hours framing ideas, composing messages, writing content, checking phrases and words, all to ensure the discourses that end up circulating across audiences are the ‘right’ kinds of discourse, communicating messages that align with their objectives. Yet the importance of language formulation as a form of public relations practice is underplayed in empirical research, which has tended to focus on practitioner experiences and power rather than technical practices such as writing. As a result, there are still many unanswered questions about how practitioners understand and use discourse as a tool of their trade. We know little about how they work with language, how they make choices about the ways they craft texts, the roles of text and visual language, particularly in multimedia environments, and the degree to which their use of language is instinctive rather than conscious, a form of practice that has been absorbed through the rules of the occupational ‘game’ they have bought into” (p. 46).
Dr. Lee Edwards wrote about the same questions I’ve encountered in exploring language. How can we challenge students and practitioners to think more deeply about the words, language, rhetoric, and stories they put into the world? #PRProfs #CritPR