Importance of reading for a PR executive
Importance of reading for a PR executive
by Vikram Sawant
“Think before you speak. Read before you think,” so said American author, public speaker, and occasional actor Fran Lebowitz. This is especially true for Public Relations where every word must be weighed and measured for economy and effectiveness. Which means that no strategy or statement can be random, frivolous or ill-informed. The foundation of good PR is information. But to give credible information, you need to have information. That means you cannot exist in a vacuum and must read to understand not just your client but the world she/he inhabits.
This also means that your reading cannot just be industry specific but must be broad, varied, reflective of national and international events and the cultural, political, social and economic context of the piece of art, cinema, music, literature, skill or the business you are promoting.
The purpose of reading is to make us understand that everything is interconnected. And so the more you read, the more cohesive your world-view will become and dots that were once disparate, will begin to connect. There are some more benefits of reading especially in PR and here are some of them.
Reading improves communication
What is PR if not communication? And good communication is all about the precise and impactful use of language. Language is the basic tool of PR communication and intensive reading sharpens this tool, showing you that there are better ways to say even predictable things in unpredictable and refreshing ways. Reading helps expand your vocabulary, gives you a bigger tool box so to speak, to engage in wordplay, to add subtext and achieve both substance and clarity. Reading also inculcates in you a love for good writing and fine tunes your gaze in such a way that you will weed out mistakes, wrong usage, clumsy phrasing from press releases and create briefs and pitch notes that hit home and communicate what they need to, every single time.
Reading prepares the ground for success
Another incentive to read? Well, success! Some of the most articulate and successful personalities including Oprah Winfrey are known for their passion for reading. Oprah and her idol, the revered author Maya Angelou had extremely challenging childhoods but books gave them solace and transported them to worlds they wanted to live in. Oprah would learn a new word every day and as a young woman, it was her vocabulary, confidence and ease with language that opened doors for her in the media world and the rest is history.
Maya Angelou not only used her writing to catharise her pain but went on to become a poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose influential work spanned over 50 years and won her countless awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.
Sidney Poitier, who died last week at the age of 94, was the first Black movie star to win an Academy Award for Best Actor and was known for his clear diction and powerful delivery. Yet there was a time when he didn’t know how to read. His parents were struggling farmers and as a child, he would wear flour sacks and could attend school for only two years. He was just 16 when he decided to be an actor but he knew that to deliver lines, he would need to read them first. While working as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant, he met a waiter who changed his life by reading the newspaper with him every day. He learnt punctuation, the resonance of words, improved his diction and listened to the radio to better his pronunciation and in six months, was ready to answer the knock of opportunity. He even went on two write three autobiographies and one science fiction mystery. Who knows what you will achieve if you commit to improving your diction, vocabulary and language skills?
Reading helps us to write better
There is a reason why schooling gives equal emphasis to reading and writing. It is because one improves the other. With attention spans shrinking in the digital age, it is even more important to not get caught in the quagmire of memes, hashtags and reductive phrases beyond a point and challenge the eye and the mind to explore longer journalistic pieces in renowned journals, to read and really take the time to absorb new information, syntax, sentence formations. Reading also calms the mind, brings it back to the present moment and gives you a break from the ceaseless scrolling that we have become habituated to. The more we read, the better we will express ourselves on paper and in person. We will have more reference points to enrich a piece and less confusion about how to say something complex in simple words. Simplicity and clarity in writing are the hardest to achieve because they come from a place of learning and not hurried short cuts. So make the effort to learn more than the bare minimum because as Roger Staubach, the Hall-of-Fame football player said, “There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” Read. It will put you miles ahead of your peers.
Reading teaches us empathy
George R.R. Martin famously wrote in ‘Game of Thrones’, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Books can bring comfort, inspiration and knowledge to us but they can also help us to relate to others better. Empathy is not just an invaluable human quality, it is also a critically important aspect of PR. If you cannot relate to clients, their inner world, aspirations, fears, personal and professional challenges, how will you represent them with conviction?
To inhabit a world, a mind, a perspective other than yours is very important not just in PR but in life because it helps you to manage relationships, friendships and professional equations with a certain amount of grace and generosity. Reading organically connects us to the joys, sorrows and human experiences of diverse characters and subliminally makes us aware that many lives, truths, experiences exist outside our narrow digital bubbles. Reading in a nutshell, makes us better as humans and by default better PR professionals.
Reading makes us more creative
In 2004, Swedish-American entrepreneur Frans Johansson wrote a bestselling book called ,’The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures’ which basically said that creativity stimulated in one area of life can galvanise our progress in another. Acclaimed architect Ar Krishnarao Jaisim, for instance, read Ayn Rand’s book ‘The Fountainhead’ in his formative years and was so impressed by the tribute to free-spirited architecture in the story that he went on to call his own architectural practice ‘Jaisim-Fountainhead’. Who is to say also that someone like Malala Yousafzai who names ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ as one of her favourite books was not inspired by it to stand up to oppression? She even tweeted in 2017,” The words Anne Frank wrote in this room still remind us to cherish and defend human rights.” The point being that you never know when you will run onto a book that will change your life forever and elevate you to a different level of personal and professional excellence.