I became slightly
obsessed with Portland, Ore., last winter. I stayed up all night watching the
entire first season of a sketch comedy about the city. One of my closest
friends and I decided we wanted to go to Portland for spring break our
senior year. I found a graduate school in the area that had the program I
wanted. I was given a book that happened to take place in Portland. The city just kept showing up.
I typed “nonprofit
press kits” into the Google search bar on my computer this week. As I scrolled through the results, I
noticed one from The Nonprofit Association of Oregon. I became more excited
than a reasonable person should ever be about a media kit. I could not contain my excitement. The kit was
about Oregon and nonprofits.
As excited as I
was to find the media kit, I was disappointed by its contents. The news release
and other components did not follow AP style rules. The different
components also continually used acronyms for at least three different organizations
involved. I understand not wanting to write out long organization names more
than once, but as a reader I found myself unable to remember what the acronyms
stood for.
The only quote I
found in the entire media kit was buried in a paragraph of the news release.
Because the quote did not stand alone in a paragraph, I almost forgot the news
release contained one. There were also inconsistencies in the style of writing that were
distracting for me as the reader.
My six-week
journey of reviewing ends with this post. These six weeks of using my blog to
review writing styles has shown me the value in critically looking at the work
of others. The Lord has used what I looked at as just an assignment to grow
me in more areas than writing.