To the point: Hot air
This morning I was once again annoyed by a grotty PR text. A text that one would have preferred to throw directly into the electronic mailbox - even if the topic was of interest. Not a good prerequisite for a PR text that the sender hopes will be printed.
I remembered the Blablameter on the Internet, which I had tried a long time ago. The Blablameter says about itself: "(...) checks the texts for different linguistic features. Among other things, it checks whether there is excessive nominal style, furthermore, the text is checked in different weighting for certain phrases" and further "If the BlaBla Meter sounds the alarm, one can usually assume that an inner warning signal also sounds in a human reader. People today are trained every day to distinguish authentic messages from artificial advertising messages - it would be naive to think they can't!"
An amusing site that can be recommended to anyone who writes texts. Certainly not to be taken completely seriously, but funny and informative. So now to the field test. I took ten randomly selected media releases I received in the last few days and ran them through the Blablameter. The result didn't really surprise me. The mean value was 0.52, which means: "Your text clearly signals: You want to sell something or deeply impress someone. It seems unlikely that there is also a clear message associated with it - and if so, who is supposed to understand it?" The best value was 0.3, which means: "Your text already shows the first signs of hot air. For advertising or PR language, this is still a good value; for higher demands, you should perhaps polish it a bit more." The worst one had a value of 0.81, which means in clear words: "It stinks of hot air! Even if you are a PR professional, a politician, a management consultant or a university professor - when it comes to making an impression, you should not forget your statement. "
For the sake of fairness, I also analyzed ten randomly selected texts from Werbewoche. The mean value was 0.21 ("Your text shows first hints of 'bullshit' German, but is still at an acceptable level"). The best value was 0.11 ("Your text shows only slight hints of 'bullshit' German"). The worst was 0.28, which means the same as 0.21 points, So why are PR texts worse than editorial ones? Actually, they want the same thing: to arouse the reader's interest and captivate him. Wrong.
Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief
pc.meier@werbewoche.ch
