Making content and its meaning crystal clear is so important in PR writing, perhaps more so than anywhere else, because the role of a PR agency is safeguarding its customer’s reputation and position. What a PR consultancy says and how it says it reflects directly on its customer. Keeping ambiguity out of PR writing is not only courteous to the reader, it could be business-critical to the client.

1. Getting the wrong meaning - Don’t start a sentence with the description (or modifier), it only obscures the meaning. Modifiers or qualifiers are there to further define something. They are an optional extra, and taking them out should have no effect on the meaning. They have their place, but it’s not at the beginning of the sentence. “Smashed flat by a passing bus, the dog ate the half-eaten burger.” Clever dog! But it’s not so funny when it’s business-related. “Hoping to increase sales, the new phone was released by Big Mobile Phone Company.” Who was hoping for increased sales? The  phone? A better sentence would be: “Hoping to increase sales, Big Mobile Phone Company released its new phone.” Or better still “Big Mobile Phone Company released its new phone, hoping to increase sales.”

2. Getting words in the right order – seems easy enough, but so many people forget that the positioning of words is vital. Often one little word in the wrong place can completely change the meaning of a phrase, and really annoy your client.  “Big Construction Firm Ltd only built 50 flats last year.” (that’s all they did, they did nothing else all year?) This is not only ambiguous, it’s doubly ambiguous – it could also be construed as “Big Construction Firm Ltd only” – that is, no-one else built anything! If we are careful about where we place ‘only’ it becomes unambiguous: “Big Construction Firm Ltd built only 50 flats last year (ah ha! they did lots of other things too, but for one reason or another built only 50 flats).

3. Hyphenate to avoid ambiguity – and more importantly, to avoid upsetting people. “Although only a small business man, his company has become very successful.” The man is not small (well he might be, but you’d be advised not to make that the point of the sentence) just the business. Pop a hyphen in: Although only a small-business man, his company has become very successful.” Likewise: “mulitiple-user configurations “ not “multiple user configurations”  The users are multiple not the configurations. Keep everyone happy, keep ambiguity out.