Gotcha Grammar: The Most Common Press Release Writing Mistakes
Even the most adept marketing copywriters can publish a press release with these errors. Just to make sure you’re not smacking yourself at the last minute wishing you’d caught that one little mistake, here’s McCauley Marketing Services’ list of common press release writing mistakes.
Misspelled people and product names – When you’re writing the same name repeatedly it’s easy to mistype, jumble the letters, or just forget how to spell it correctly. The thing about names is that spellcheck doesn’t check for consistency. If you spell a name three different ways within one press release, the only thing that will catch it is a person, not the computer!
Misusing the apostrophe – McCauley Marketing Services’ team of writers understands your apostrophe woes so much so, that we dedicated a whole blog to it. Check it out for a detailed explanation of this tricky grammar fiend. In brief, make sure you’re using the apostrophe correctly in possessive nouns, contractions, and to pluralize lowercase letters.
Broken links – For any press release published online, linking is an important element in directing readers to places where they can get more information. There are plenty of ways to get a broken link. If the links are misspelled or missing any piece of information, readers who are interested in your event or product will be sorely disappointed to be led to a 404 error page. This means that the web server tried to find the web page, but it couldn’t be found.
Awkwardly placed keywords – Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important element to any press release. While it’s crucial to include keywords and SEO in your press release, placing them naturally is also significant. People won’t want to read an awkward press release, and a press release stuffed with too many keywords is considered black hat SEO and is frowned upon in the marketing world.
Confusing your homophones – We’ve all done it—typed “their” when we meant “there” or “they’re.” It’s an embarrassing but common mistake, especially when you get on a roll writing and ignore grammar. Much like the misspelled names, your spell check won’t catch this one! This leads to our last press release mistake.
Not getting a second proofreader – This is one of the top rules of writing! Once you’ve been staring at a piece of work (whether it’s an advertising piece or not), it’s hard to catch your own errors. Make sure to get another writer to look over your work for any of the errors on this list.
While grammar seems like something that you can fix on a press release after it’s written, it’s important to check yourself throughout the writing process to ensure that you’re not making the same mistakes repeatedly. Now it’s time for you to chime in. What are some common grammar mistakes that you have to pay careful attention to avoid? Let us know in the comments below.