A Rose by Any Other Spelling...Is Not a Rose

It's something of a curse to care about correct spelling and word usage. It's like the proverbial fingernails on the blackboard to see words misused...especially by those with college degrees. I once received an email note from a woman with a Ph.D. after her name that said, "Your welcome."

The explosion of social media has only made matters worse. Writing in a hurry seems to be an excuse for carelessness. Remember when Sarah Palin's use of "refudiate" on Twitter caused a stir? Then she claimed to be in a league with Shakespeare, who actually did know how to use -- and expand -- the English language.

You may be writing in a hurry, but readers will peruse your words at their leisure. If they see a typo or misspelling, it could lower their opinion of you by a notch or two. Then, instead of enhancing your credibility as you'd hoped, your expertise may actually be called into question.

Following are some of the words and phrases I've seen misused recently in social media, print publications and in books (with the wrong usage in parentheses):

"principal concern" (not "principle")
"go its own way" (not "it's")
"a tenet of belief" (not "tenant")
"taking some flak" (not "flack")
"led" (past tense of "lead")
"whose idea" (not "who's)
"impostor" (not "imposter")
"all right" ("alright" is never correct)
"fireplace mantel" (not "mantle")
"rite of passage" (not "right")
"someone with flair" (not "flare")
"real trouper" (not "trooper")
"had a big effect" (not "affect")
"straitjacket" (not "straightjacket")
"The Smiths" (not "Smith's)

My biggest pet peeve, though, is seeing "everyday" used when it should be "every day." Nearly "every day" (two words) I see an example of major companies misusing the word(s).  When you mean "every single day," it's two words. When you mean "ordinary," it's one word, as in:

"She wears her everyday clothes almost every day."

The good thing is that companies still need to hire professional writers like me to edit and proof their writing. After all, a rose by any other spelling ("rows"?) could be misunderstood.

Presenting the Book, ‘Tour Guide to Missouri's Civil War’

Through my grandmother Elizabeth Vandiver Selby, my family has a link to Missouri's history. Her ancestor Willard Vandiver was the Missouri senator who in 1899 said, “I'm from Missouri. You have got to show me.” In his honor my grandmother named two of her three sons Willard and Vandiver. The third son was my dad, Forrest Selby.

Both of my parents' families had been rooted in Fulton, Mo., since before 1850. The town is in Calloway County, which became known as the Kingdom of Callaway in the Civil War because of its Southern-leaning sympathies.

With these strong ties to Missouri's history, I'm relishing the opportunity to publicize a new book about the state's pivotal role in the Civil War. It's a fascinating look into our past and the rivalries that are still with us today.

Here's the news release I wrote for St. Louis writer Gregory Wolk:

‘A Tour Guide to Missouri’s Civil War’

Offers Driving Tours of Battles, Historic Sites

St. Louis ... In the recently released “A Tour Guide to Missouri’s Civil War,” St. Louis lawyer and first-time author Gregory Wolk offers “the first comprehensive sesquicentennial driver’s guide to Civil War battlefields and sites in Missouri.” Wolk has studied the Civil War for 30 years, and is president of Missouri’s Civil War Heritage Foundation Inc., founded in 2001 to educate people in Missouri and neighboring states about the state’s pivotal role in the war.

To commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War on April 12, 186l, the book highlights more than 230 sites and scores of little-known historical facts. Few are aware, for example, that Missouri witnessed more battles than any other state except Virginia and Tennessee. “Almost half of the battles fought in 1861 occurred in Missouri,” the author notes.

The book’s 272 pages include nearly 400 black-and-white illustrations and 19 maps. Easy-to-follow directions are provided for five tour loops, each requiring about two days:

Loop One – St. Louis and Southeast Missouri: City and Swamps

Loop Two – North Central Missouri: Sick of Killing

Loop Three ­ South Central Missouri: A Knight to Remember

Loop Four – Region of Kansas City: Roots of Rebellion

Loop Five – Southwest Missouri: Ozarks Battlegrounds

Subtitled “Friend and Foe Alike,” the book details the state’s split loyalties. “Brother was sometimes pitted against brother, ” Wolk said. “One farm would be Confederate…and another farm up the road would be Union.” Historical vignettes throughout the book describe the wartime roles played by notables including Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Sherman for the North and Gen. Joseph O. Shelby for the South, plus William Quantrill, Mark Twain, George Caleb Bingham, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Belle Starr and Jesse James.

The tour guide is the product of Wolk’s years of traveling the state’s highways and byways to visit Civil War sites and promote Civil War preservation and tourism. “A useful guide resource for the armchair historian, Wolk’s volume is an even more significant tool for those who enjoy venturing out to the locations where history was made,” wrote Thomas F. Curran, Ph.D., author of “Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement.”

In the foreword Stuart Symington Jr., whose family has a rich heritage in the Show-Me State, points out that the Civil War affected Missourians “in more ways, for a longer period of time, and more profoundly than it affected the people of any other state in the union.”

Published by Monograph Publishing LLC in Eureka, Mo., “A Tour Guide to Missouri’s Civil War” may be ordered for $29.95 in softcover through the website, wwwcivilwartourguide.com, or through Amazon.com by searching “books” for ISBN 0979948266).

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Turning the Page on a Year in Books: 2010

It's been another great year in books. In varying degrees, they were entertaining, educational or enlightening. Often all three.

I also joined another book club at midyear, bringing my total to three:
Central Exchange (Overland Park, Kan.)
Fairway Book Club (Fairway, Kan., neighborhood group)
BlueStockings (Kansas City, Mo.)

Book group membership encourages you to read a much wider range of books. Plus, it's fun to discuss books with friends who provide insights you haven't considered.

Here's my list of books read in 2010.

Classics (read or reread):
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Capote, Truman – A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, The Thanksgiving Visitor
Carlton, Jetta – The Moonflower Vine
Franklin, Benjamin – Autobiography
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Lagerlof, Selma – Gosta Berling's Saga
Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle
Silverstein, Shel – The Giving Tree
West, Dorothy – The Wedding

Philosophical and Life Lessons:
Alford, Henry – How to Live
Cathcart, Thomas and Daniel Klein – Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates
Dosa, David M.D. – Making the Round With Oscar (cat helping Alzheimer's patients)
Kick, Russ (editor) – Everything You Know About God Is Wrong
Rubin, Gretchen – The Happiness Project
Ulin, David L. – The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time
Welch, Suzy – 10-10-10 (on decision making)

Autobiographies:
Alda, Alan – Things I Overhead While Talking to Myself
Brown, Helen – Cleo, "the cat who mended a family"
Heimke, Betsy Herold – Bring Cup, Plate and Spoon (Japanese prisoner of war as child)

Novels:
Barbery, Muriel – The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Bauermeister, Erica – The School of Special Ingredients
Durant Sarah – In the Company of the Courtesan
Horan, Nancy – Loving Frank (about Frank Lloyd Wright)
Larsson, Gtieg – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Maguire, Gregory – Mirror, Mirror
McCann, Colum – Let the Great World Spin
Robinson, Marilynne – Housekeeping
Rowling, J.K. – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Selznick, Brian – The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Shapiro, Dani – Black & White
Simonson, Helen – Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Nonfiction:
Dawkins, Richard – The Greatest Show on Earth
Farley, David – An Irreverent Curiosity
Fogarty, Mignon – The Grammar Devotional
Gladwell, Malcolm – Outliers
Gosling, Sam – What Your Stuff Says About You
Gregory, Leland – Stupid American History
Jonnes, Jill – Eiffel's Tower
Restak, Richard – The Secret Life of the Brain
Rosenberg, Scott – Say Everything (on blogging)

Newspapers and magazines are essential too, including The Kansas City Star, The Kansas City Business Journal, Newsweek, Smithsonian and The Saturday Evening Post.

I think it's important to read news on the printed page instead of online. Seeing the placement of stories on the page gives context, so you can see that the vote on "don't ask, don't tell," for example, is more important than Paris Hilton's latest antics. Online, celebrity gossip and (often intentionally) misleading or mistaken information is impossible to avoid. We still need editors to check the facts, as I was taught in the University of Missouri's journalism school.

I'm looking forward to another year of reading in 2011!

Honoring Pearl Harbor Survivors on the 69th Anniversary

Dec. 7, 2010, marked the 69th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I spent over a week working on publicity for our local survivors. Our Mission, Kan., event went well, with 200 people, including 60 middle school kids, attending.

I got to read my commemorative poem for #HonorFlight and introduce four survivors to tell their stories: Ed Russell and Jack Carson (both Army Air Corps) and Jess Dunnagan and Loyal George (both Navy). All the TV stations were there. Two other survivors also attended: Manfred Olson, 97, and Jim Baker (both Navy).

A story about my adopted Uncle Dorwin Lamkin (Navy) ran on the front page of The Star today: http://tinyurl.com/252aoxx. He was invited by the Dept. of the Navy to return to Pearl Harbor for commemorative ceremonies.

Also got him interviewed by a TV station in Honolulu: http://tinyurl.com/2a9ggg6. (Click on video screen on right side of page.) This report ran in Hawaii and on our NBC affiliate, KSHB-TV here.

This year at our event we had on display a metal relic from the USS Arizona, the ship that was bombed and sank at #PearlHarbor with a loss of 1,177 crewmen. Eventually the relic will be permanently encased in the Pearl Harbor Memorial Park in Mission, Kan.

On Dec. 8 there will be another Pearl Harbor event in Kansas City, with the addition of Pearl Harbor survivor, Wilbur Wright, 92, attending from Fairfax, Mo. I was his guardian on the Honor Flight in September 2009, and he insisted that I be there. So I have to go!

It is such a privilege to help these veterans get the recognition and appreciation they so deserve.

Great News! Layne Christensen Helps in Chilean Miner Rescue

This is what I love about public relations! On Saturday, Oct. 9, I received the call I'd been waiting for. The CEO of Layne Christensen, my client of 18 years, called to inform me that the company's drillers had been successful in reaching the 33 miners in Chile, setting the stage for their dramatic rescue a few days later.

He authorized me to start our PR effort, so that night I wrote a news release describing the team effort of Layne Christensen and its Latin American affiliate Geotec Boyles Bros. in successfully drilling the rescue shaft.

We distributed the release internationally through Globe Newswire at noon Sunday, Oct. 10, starting an onslaught of calls and e-mails from media around the world. We heard from news outlets in Singapore, Paris, Canada, the BBC in London and Radio New Zealand. Calls also came from CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, the Washington Times, and broadcast outlets and newspapers in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Denver.

We had to turn down Larry King and Al Roker because of scheduling conflicts, but did arrange interviews on Fox News Network, Anderson Cooper on CNN and many others. One of the drillers, Jeff Hart, almost became a household name.

The CEO, drillers and other team members even accepted an invitation to the White House, receiving official recognition on Oct. 28 from President Obama.

The definition of PR I've always liked is: "Doing good things and then telling people about them." That was certainly true in this case. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to share good news with a global audience numbering in the hundreds of millions. I've loved every minute of it!

Here's the news release that launched our PR campaign:

Layne Christensen Drillers Reach Trapped Miners in Chile

It’s a Joint Effort of Layne Christensen and Latin American Affiliate Geotec

MISSION WOODS, Kan., Oct. 10, 2010 – “Plan B” worked. Winning the three-way race to reach the 33 miners trapped in Chile since Aug. 5, drillers from Kansas City-based Layne Christensen Co. broke through at 8 a.m. Saturday.

“This success required the extra special knowledge and skills only our team could provide,” said Dave Singleton, water resource division president for Layne Christensen.

About two weeks after the collapse, Layne’s Latin American affiliate Geotec Boyles Bros. brought in a Schramm T130 tophead drill. Layne also sent in two drillers, Jeff Hart and Matt Staffel, who had been drilling water wells in Afghanistan to support U.S. troops stationed there. Assisting the drillers were two Spanish-speaking drilling helpers, Doug Reeves and Jorgé Herrera, from Layne’s western region in the U.S.

Working as a team, Layne and Geotec drilled a 5-inch hole nearly 2,300 feet, reamed it to 12 inches and finally to 28 inches in diameter – large enough to accommodate the “Phoenix” rescue capsule. A cheer went up as families and rescue workers joined in a celebration when the drill broke through. “I’m on top of the world,” Hart told a TV reporter.

It took the drillers 33 days to reach the 33 miners. “Had Layne and Geotec not been there, it probably would have taken until Christmas for ‘Plan A‘ or ‘Plan C‘ to break through,” Singleton noted. “We cut more than two months from the original estimate.”

“It’s a first for our company to be involved in a rescue effort like this,” added President and CEO Andrew B. Schmitt. “It’s also noteworthy that we’re celebrating our 15th anniversary with our Latin American affiliates,” he said. In 1995 Layne merged with Christensen Boyles Corp. and became the joint-venture partner with the Boytec group of companies in Latin America.

Now in its third century of operations, Layne started in 1882 as a water-well drilling company in the Badlands of South Dakota. Headquartered in Mission Woods, Kan., a Kansas City suburb, the Nasdaq-traded company operates worldwide, providing products and services for the water, mineral, construction and energy markets.

Using PR to Promote Book by Former K-State President

Once again public relations is proving to be an effective communications and sales tool, in this case to promote the book written by a former president of Kansas State University.

In the years since I studied journalism at K-State (and later at the University of Missouri), the avenues for spreading the word have expanded. Here's how the distribution has changed:
1970s – Mailed releases.
1980s – Mailed or faxed releases.
1990s – Mailed, faxed and started e-mailing releases.
2000s – E-mail releases. Post them on websites. Use online distribution services, especially for public companies and international distribution. Use blogs and social media for additional distribution and to create "buzz."

Some things haven't changed, though. The media still want news releases written in Associated Press news style that cover the “who, what, where, when, why and how." And you still have to have a timely story or news angle.

Here's the release for Duane Acker's book about K-State, available in hardcover, softcover and e-book versions at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore:

K-State President, 1975-86, Recounts Stories in New Book

MANHATTAN, KAN. ... In his just-released book Duane Acker, Kansas State University president from 1975-86, offers a behind-the-scenes look into happenings during his tenure, recounting many stories that are still relevant today. Because events often came in pairs, he titled the book “Two at a Time.”

The book offers candid descriptions of the inner workings of a major university, ranging from the humorous – when margarine was served at a dairy luncheon – to the more serious, such as athletics finances, academic freedom and student concerns. As recounted in an article in the Fall 2010 issue of The K-Stater alumni magazine, he also revisits his handling of disruptive protesters at a guest lecture in McCain Auditorium.

“The book is an honest and straightforward look at the unique challenges of a major land-grant university,” notes William H. Johnson, who was director of the Engineering Experiment Station in the College of Engineering during the 1980s. "While Acker cites his successes, he also does not avoid discussing mistakes he made."

“Athletics consumed much of Acker’s energy as he went against the common view of the conduct of department management,” said Elizabeth Unger, then associate faculty representative to the NCAA and still a K-State faculty member today. “It was difficult but paid large dividends for both men’s and women’s athletics.”

“Acker’s recollections are narrated with candor and humor, offering descriptions of dealings with students, staff, alumni and policymakers, recalling his personal experiences with budgets, athletics and the Nichols Hall renovation,” said Richard Reinhardt, a K-State graduate and farmer near Erie, Kan., who was on the Kansas Board of Regents during Acker’s presidency.

Acker also shares his and his wife Shirley’s apprehensions and satisfactions at the end of 11 years in the presidency, and their experiences after leaving K-State.

The book will be of interest to those involved then or now with K-State or other universities in the state, as well as to current and aspiring academic leaders. “Two at a Time” is available from the publisher, iUniverse, www.iuniverse.com/bookstore, in hardcover, $31.95: softcover, $21.95; and e-book, $9.99.

"If it were my own money, would I spend it on this project?"

For years I have asked myself this question before making a recommendation to a client. In fact, I included it in a brochure to promote my newly founded business in 1992.

Why ask it? Because if you don't, you risk recommending projects that will make money for you, but won't get results for your client.

Here are some examples from my experience:
Feature Articles – Sometimes a client or prospect desperately wants positive feature coverage, but doesn't have a story angle the media would be interested in. It's my job to let them know – and then think creatively to find an angle I can successfully "pitch" to an editor.
Brochures – My graphic designer associate and I once talked a client out of doing a brochure, and recommended direct mail pieces instead. We probably would have profited more from a brochure, but it wouldn't have worked as well in selling the company's services.
Special events – A major oil company wanted to do a bike race across the country. I pointed out that it made no sense from a PR standpoint to promote a mode of transportation that didn't use their product...gasoline. We developed a different proposal that was more effective as well as less expensive.

By now I have enough experience to have confidence in whether an idea will work. If I don't think it will, I tell the client that "If it were my money, I wouldn't spend it this way." That gets their attention. I used this criterion just last week with a client as we discussed his advertising budget. He appreciated the alternative recommendations we came up with.

In the long run, this is also the best approach for my business's success. When clients get results from my PR efforts, they come back for more!