Same old, same old

I feel like I'm stuck in Groundhog Day.

Writing press releases is for the birds, I tell ya. There's only so many ways to skin a cat / push a product / spin a story.

And it's not like it's difficult. I could do this stuff in my sleep. It's just dull.

Occasionally something super exciting comes across my desk (as occasionally as my husband picks watching a travel documentary over a Blue Bulls rugby game, that is). The rest of the time, it's the same old nonsense. The trick, PR gurus tell me, is to disguise it so that it doesn't sound like nonsense.

As a journo, I get press releases from other PR people all the time. I have a list of all the things that irritate me about these releases, and when I write my own, I try not to do these things.

Occasionally, however, I just don't care enough... when I'm writing about the 50 millionth bloody new product distributor the client has signed with, for instance.

Then you might find the occasional flowery sentence littered with adjectives (I recently received a release from a music PR person about some unheard-of singer that had no less than NINE adjectives in the first sentence).

You might find completely unnecessary information that will be of no interest to anyone other than the client (like the release I was sent that detailed every single role a particular actress had taken from age five [she's now in her late 30s] before getting to the point).

You might even, on a very, very rare occasion (if I have been overdosing on Rescue Remedy when I see things are about to reach boiling point at the office, for instance) find me doing the absolutely unthinkable and mixing up there/their or its/it's. But that's only under dire circumstances when the ability to write English has abandoned me completely.

Wait, actually, I'm pretty sure that happens quite regularly on this blog...

Thank goodness this is just a half-day job. I feel like PR eats my soul. At least it pays, I suppose ;-)