By Sydney Thompson
My name is Sydney Thompson, Treasurer for Ball State’s PRSSA chapter, and my #WhyPR moment has to revolve around the importance of writing.
As students we’ve heard for all of our academic career that writing is critical to success. I hope that by sharing a personal story of how writing positively affected my life it will add fuel to the fire, encouraging all of you to exercise your writing rights.
Last semester, I was in an Introduction to Interpersonal Communications class. If you have the opportunity, take this class–it was by far one of my favorites. The class incorporated exercises in which we actually practiced to become better interpersonal communicators. One of the sections of the class had to do with the fact that the quality of our communication directly correlates with the quality of our life.
For one exercise, we had to write a letter of gratitude to someone in our life, thanking them for impacting our life in an influential way. I chose to write my letter to my mother, who has been a huge influence in my life. The gist of my letter thanked my mom for being such a powerful, hard-working woman, being the epitome of a strong work ethic, always supporting me and for creating such a strong relationship with me despite rough times in our past.
After a few minutes to hand write our letters of gratitude, our professor spontaneously told us that a few of us had to then call the person we wrote our letter about and recite the letters to them verbatim. I wanted to so bad. These were words from my heart, words I don’t often tell my mom, but I was so nervous. We were in a lecture hall of over 100 students; I felt vulnerable. I was envious of those brave people that raised their hands and got to read their letter to their loved ones but as I finally gained the courage time ran out. I felt like I missed an opportunity, but I still had my letter. Even if I didn’t get to read it to a huge audience, I could still read it to my mom on my own time and it would mean the same. As soon as I left class, I called my mom. I didn’t read the letter word for word, but I thanked her and felt really good about it. We shared a moment that doesn’t come around very often and that made me happy.
All because of a class writing assignment.
It turned out that we did this writing assignment because it had scientific benefits to the human emotional state. According to a study done by Harvard Health, just writing a letter of gratitude can increase personal happiness between 2-4 percent, but expressing that gratitude to a loved one can increase personal happiness between 4-19 percent. Writing can literally improve your happiness–it’s scientifically proven. How great is that?
I’m not just telling you this story to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, I am telling you this story to encourage you to write. I am saying #WhyPR because the PR industry requires us to be great writers. Well, practice makes perfect. The perfect way to practice is to write often and for any situation. I saw how much writing can make a difference by having to write my letter of gratitude as a class assignment, but that led me to write this blog. I was inspired.
Find what can inspire you and write about it. Be creative. Be fearless. Whether it is a blog, class paper, poem, essay, creative story, or letter of gratitude like I did, write. In order to be a better writer you have to write as much as possible to improve your writing technique.
Writing not only improves your written skills, of course, but it can boost your verbal skills as well. This is your art form. As a PR professional, writing is how we create art. I see writing as a way to tell a compelling story. It’s a way for us to share our art.
One of my favorite quotes about writing goes as such:
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” –E.L. Doctorow.
In the PR world, evoking that type of feeling in consumers from our writing is so important to get critical messages out to the public. We can’t achieve that level of writing success though unless we practice. Now more than ever is the time to perfect this skill. As Lucas Scott told Peyton Sawyer (for all my One Tree Hill fans out there), “your art matters, Peyton.” Now I am telling you that your art matters. It does. It really does. And for us PR professionals (or aspiring professionals), a way to tell our story is to write about it, so keep writing because that is your art. It can literally make you and the people around you happier.
For more information on the study mentioned above, click here to watch the video. Be prepared to grab a tissue.
Comments