APR 332: Public Relations Writing, an evaluation

Public relations writing has been one of my favorite classes at the University of Alabama. I have gained a cornucopia of knowledge about writing for public relations. I have taken so many classes that meant nothing to me. I have taken classes that were simply an information dump, and correspondingly, I dumped the information out of my brain as soon as the class was over. However, PR writing is totally different kind of class. Through this class I have developed my own portfolio of my own writing. In my portfolio I have an event plan, press releases, pitch letters and many more documents. I plan to use this portfolio when I have the opportunity to show it to future employers. In the class we chose one client to work for and produce documents for that specific client. I chose United Way of Central Alabama. I knew little about the organization before, but after mock working for them for a semester I have learned about their marketing strategies and how they operate. United Way of Central Alabama markets donators through “corporate employee solicitation.” This is where they hold employee rallies to pump up corporate employees from large organizations. They tell them about the mission and values of United Way. After the rally presentation, United Way encourages the employees to sign pledge cards to donate a portion of their paycheck to United Way for a specific time period. Donations received by United Way go directly to the community. I would not have learned this information without taking PR writing from Dr. Heflin. She was amazing. She gave us the freedom to choose our own clients, and she treated the classroom like a workplace. I will look back on this class and remember that this was the class where I learned the skills that I would use for my career.