Reservations for Learning: Booking a Table at the Journal Article Café

I remember the first time I was asked (told) to use a “peer-reviewed article” in my research for a paper, I had no clue what the professor was talking about. I looked around the room, and the other students in the course were either nodding along or nodding off; no one looked confused, so I decided I wasn’t going to speak up and ask what she meant.

But I didn’t want to do poorly on the assignment, so I waited until after class and went up to ask.

Thank goodness I had a kind and caring professor who was much more interested in making sure her students learned than showing how intelligent she herself was. She told me that in general, it meant that the article came from an academic or professional journal (rather than something like a popular magazine) and that the article had gone through a rigorous review process before being published. It wasn’t just the writer and editor who decided it was good enough to print; other experts in the field provide their input. (There’s a lot more to it than that, but this was a clear enough explanation to get me started.)

When I got to the library (yes, I had to physically go to the library when I was an undergrad), I went to the periodical section and took a recent Public Relations Journal off the shelf. Flipping through the journal, I realized quickly that these articles were nothing like the ones in People or Newsweek. They were written in a much (much!) more formal way, a way that would take some serious getting used to. I pored over an article, trying to make sense of it.

Then, I had an a-ha moment.

Reading a journal article is kind of like going to a new restaurant.

Should we even go here?

Now, when we explore a journal article, we want to make sure it’s a trustworthy source. Think of it like checking out a new restaurant. We’ll look at things like the reputation of the journal (like checking online reviews), the authors’ credentials (are they renowned “chefs”?), and when the article was published (fresh ingredients or stale leftovers?). There’s not really a Yelp for academic journals, but maybe that would be a fun side gig for me. But I digress.

Read the menu

Before we dig in too deep, let’s start by giving the article a quick skim. Think of it as reading the menu to see if anything catches your eye. We’ll check out the title, abstract, and headings to get a sense of what the article is all about.

Eat dessert first

Despite what your parents and grandparents might have told you as a child, it’s 100% okay to eat dessert first, at least in terms of reading a journal article. A journal article is NOT a mystery novel. You won’t ruin anything by knowing how it ends before you start. Skip to the end of the article and read the limitations and conclusions right away to see if it supports or denies the claim you are trying to make in your own research paper. (NOTE: You will want to read articles on both sides of your claim.)

Taste the app

Now, the introduction is like the appetizer that sets the stage. We’ll find out why the authors decided to do the research, what questions they wanted to answer, and why it’s important. It’s like the first taste that gets our curiosity going. Still interested? Then . . .

Sit at the chef’s table

Time to get to the juicy parts! In the methodology section, we’ll learn how the researchers cooked up their study. We’ll look at the ingredients they used (research design), how they gathered data (like secret recipes), and how they analyzed everything. We want to make sure their approach is solid and follows the rules of the kitchen; it’s like sitting at the chef’s table in the restaurant kitchen, watching how things are prepared for the diners.

Dive into the main course

Ah, the results and discussion sections, the main course! This is where the researchers present their findings and start digging into the flavors. This is the meat of the article (see what I did there?). We’ll see charts, graphs, and analysis. Then, in the discussion, they’ll interpret those results, link them to previous research, and talk about any limitations. It’s like a chef explaining the unique flavors and how they relate to other dishes.

Try an intermezzo

At a restaurant, an intermezzo is a refreshing sip or bite of a palate cleanser between courses. Reading journal articles can be heavy. If you’re feeling like your brain is getting full, get up and walk around for five minutes or watch that TikTok that your best friend just sent you. Then get back to your table.

Savor the dessert

Finally, let’s enjoy the article’s takeaway. It’s time to indulge in our own thoughts and opinions. We’ll consider what we’ve learned, how it contributes to the field, and how it might inspire our own research or practice. And don’t forget, we’re here to discuss and debate, so feel free to spice things up with your own ideas!

Yelp it

Once you’ve finished with the article, you won’t want to forget what it was about. Take the time to make notes on the article, including all the required information for an APA citation (just in case you’ll actually use it in your research) and your own paraphrased thoughts about the article. I used to use the app EndNote to keep track of information like this — it was great when I was working on my Ph.D., as I could easily find articles I’d read for previous classes using it.

A question for you: do you remember what it was like reading your first academic journal article? What advice would you give students early in their college careers on how to read one?

NOTES

The analogy comparing reading a journal article to going to a restaurant was inspired by ChatGPT. Images were created using Adobe Firefly.

7 Things PR Professors Wish Their Students Would Do Over the Summer

This year, I’ve had the opportunity to teach public relations for both Auburn University and the University of Oregon. I’ve met some fantastic students.

Summer is a time for relaxing. For some folks. But if you’re a public relations student, you’ll want to keep these suggestions in mind for how to keep current in the ever-changing world of public relations over the summer. When you go back to class in the fall, you’ll be refreshed and knowledgeable.

Here are seven suggestions:

  1. Listen to For Immediate Release and/or Spin Sucks podcasts every week.
  2. If you’ve been blogging throughout the school year, blog at least every other week during the summer. You don’t want to lose readers who are not students or faculty
  3. Read at least one public relations trade book AND write a review of the book on Amazon and your blog. My recommendation? The second edition of Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content.
  4. Update your LinkedIn profile. See Are These Common Resume and LinkedIn Mistakes Holding You Back from Your Dream Job? for tips on brushing up your profile.
  5. Stay current with changes in Associated Press style.
  6. Write thank you notes to people who have made a positive impact on your life.
  7. Have some fun! Relish this time without homework with deadlines.

What are some other recommendations YOU have for how public relations students should stay engaged in PR over the summer?

Resumes That Resonate . . . Revisited, Part Deux

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Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

One of the most popular posts here at Public Relations Matters is one I wrote years ago on writing resumes. Below, I’ve updated this post for 2023.

What’s the purpose of a resume? It’s not to get you a job. . . instead, it’s to provide a positive first impression that MAY garner an interview for you. The advice below comes from my years of being a hiring leader – and listening to many more. If you’re lucky, hiring leaders may scan your resume for up to 10 seconds (10 seconds!) before they determine if it’s worth pursuing further. The tips below should help you gain their attention in a positive way.

In General

  • Tailor your resume to the specific position that you’re applying for. Use the same phrasing in your resume that you’ve found in the employer’s job posting whenever possible.
  • If you have less than 10 years of experience, it’s best to stick to the traditional one-page resume. Each additional 10 years may help to “earn” you an additional page. (If you want or need to provide more details, offer the URL of your LinkedIn profile. See my profile.) If you are not yet out of college, it’s presumptuous to think you need more than a one-page resume.
  • Corinne Weisgerber reminds us, “Resumes are often read by resume scanners first, so you got to write them to be read by a computer and a human audience. So work those keywords in. Just like SEO.” Pepper your resume with keywords and terms that are relevant to the career field and industry in which you desire employment. Phrase your work experience in terms that are relevant to your career goal.
  • Go easy on the fonts. Simpler is better (but avoid Times New Roman, as that may make your resume look dated.)
  • Even though many of the resume templates you can find in Canva and other sites include them, leave your photo off of your resume unless you’re applying for a job in Europe, says Leah Jones.

Contact Information

  • Your full name should be at the top of your resume, followed by contact information, including email address, cell phone number, city and state.
    • Use a professional-looking email address, not something like fuzzybunnyslippers@hotmail.com. (You’d be surprised.)
    • It’s no longer typical to see a candidate’s complete mailing address on a resume according to Chandler Claxton.
  • Optional: the URLs of your LinkedIn profile and relevant social media accounts. (ONLY include the social media accounts you want a potential employer to look at, of course.)
  • If your blog has content that may interest your potential employer, include its URL or the URL to a specific landing page with links to relevant posts on your resume.
  • Use the same header (contact information) for your resume, cover letter and reference page. Everything should coordinate.

Experience and Education

  • If you’re a soon-to-be or recent college graduate, you may want to highlight your education, followed by your experience. If you’ve had work experience in the field where you are seeking a new role, lead off with your experience.
  • Use reverse chronological order (most recent first) when listing your experience and education.
  • Wherever possible, quantify your achievements in your experience. For example, “Grew 11 channels by 10,000 followers in six months.”
  • Always start every bullet point in your experience section with an action verb
  • Chandler Claxton reminds us to use present tense for current jobs and past tense for previous jobs.
  • Never start a bullet point with “responsible for” or “duties included.” (Just because you’re responsible for something doesn’t mean you actually did it.)
  • If you have little paid work experience, provide details on projects done in classes to show that you are prepared to enter the working world.
  • Volunteer experience counts too! Don’t forget to include service projects you’ve been involved with.
  • Explain acronyms and cryptic group names on resumes. A potential employer will not automatically know that SOCS stands for Society of Communication Scholars, ILA stands for International Listening Association, or that The Oaks Agency is a public relations firm made up of college students.
  • Many employers assume that if an organization’s name includes Greek letters, it’s a social fraternity or sorority. If you belong to something Phi Kappa Phi, indicate that this is an honor society.
  • If you are still in college, it’s okay to leave your high school on your resume if you have available space for it, especially if you did something noteworthy during your high school years. After you graduate from college, leave high school off your resume.
  • What to do about that GPA? If it’s above 3.0 (on a 4-point scale), you may want to include it. If it starts with a 2 or lower, definitely leave it off. Or, you can include your GPA just in your major if you’d like, for example “3.4 GPA in Major.”
  • Before you graduate, you can still include your anticipated degree on your resume. For example, “Bachelor of Science in Public Relations expected in May 2023.”

For entry-level public relations positions, Jennifer Abshire of Abshire Public Relations & Marketing offers these additional suggestions:

  • Leave the objective off, or customize it for the specific position you’re applying for. Don’t use a generic one that you found on a template somewhere.
  • Include all your work experience, even if it seems not directly related to the position. (The worst that will happen is that it will show that you are a hard worker.) Abshire holds in high regard people who are well rounded and street smart, rather than with a high GPA and no work experience or community involvement.
  • Send a few samples of your writing or design work along with your resume.
  • If sending your resume (and samples) electronically, make one PDF file that has all the information in it, rather than sending multiple attachments. (For an inexpensive and easy-to-use program for creating PDFs, try CutePDF.)

A Few Common Sense Reminders in Closing

  • Jen Zingsheim Phillips says, “Don’t lie and don’t exaggerate.” It’s far too easy for you to get caught. Jen adds, “Employers will understand starting out — they will not understand lying.”
  • Doublecheck every link you include to ensure they go where you expect them to go.
  • Read your resume backwards, from the bottom up. It might be easier to spot errors this way. Your goal is zero mistakes.

After you’ve created your resume, have several people proofread it for you. Set it aside for a while. Then measure your resume up against this Resume Checklist.

What additional tips would YOU share?

I'm Listening

A Magazine, All About *You*

For my PR students at Auburn University

Here’s a fun assignment that will help us get to know each other. Since our class is semester is online, it’s even more important to help your class learn more about you since we won’t have the face-to-face time that we’d have in a traditional brick-and-mortar class.

Using your choice of software or online service (such as the Magazine Cover creator at  Big Huge Labs), create a magazine cover that depicts you (personality, background, aspirations). The finished cover doesn’t have to be perfect (mine definitely isn’t). If you need to get assistance from a more tech-savvy friend to create the cover, that’s fine; just be sure to give them credit

The Assignment

  • The cover photo must be of you, taken at some point during the last year or so. (If the photo is a group photo, be sure to somehow let us know which person is you, if it’s not readily apparent.)
  • Include at least your first name somewhere in the design. The easiest place to do this is in the title of the magazine, but you can put it somewhere else.
  • Feel free to emulate an existing magazine cover’s look and feel.
  • Save the magazine cover as a PNG, JPG, PDF or some other format that can be easily shared.
  • Go into your class in Canvas and find the “Getting to Know Us” discussion area on our class’ home page. Click Create Message, then enter your magazine’s title into the Subject area. Attach the cover. And also write a bit about yourself in the Message area. Click Post to have the message appear.
  • Toward the end of the week, review several of your classmates’ magazine covers. Reply to their posts with your feedback, comments, etc.
  • This assignment will “count” as your Discussion Question for Week One.

Questions?

Arrive, Survive and Thrive in Prof. Nixon’s Summer Classes

An Open Note to All of Prof. Nixon’s Students at Georgia Southern University:

We’re almost off and running in our Summer Semester classes at GSU. This summer, I’m teaching three courses, and they are all taught online. The syllabi will be e-mailed to all my enrolled students, and I’m also posting links to them (on Scribd) here.

So that we can make the most of this semester, please (Please, PLEASE) take some time to read through the blog posts I’ve included here. I promise you, it will be well worth your time. (How often do professors let you get inside their heads, letting you know their tips for success and their pet peeves?)

Additionally, here are a few more tips:

  • When communicating with me via e-mail (or Facebook), always put your course number (such as PRCA 3330) in the subject line to help me immediately identify who you are and frame your questions or comments. Do your best to write in full sentences, paying attention to standard English grammar and spelling. Always sign your e-mails with your first and last name, as your GSU e-mail address will not make that readily apparent to me.
  • When submiting an assignment in GeorgiaVIEW, always put your last name as part of the file name, and also include your name in the document itself. Papers submitted without your last name as part of the file name cannot earn full credit.
  • If an assignment is due in GeorgiaVIEW, the only way to get full credit for the assignment is to submit it in GeorgiaVIEW. (E-mailing an assignment to me can be risky; I receive 250+ e-mails a day, and there’s a chance I will not even see it in my inbox.)
  • Follow me on Twitter, if you really want to get inside my head. (What’s Twitter?)

Let’s make this a great semester together!

(PS: If you’re one of my students reading this post, please leave a reply to this post so that I can know you have read it. If your reply doesn’t show up immediately, no worries — I may need to approve it before it appears, if you’ve never commented on my blog before.)

Portfolios for Public Relations Students

[Updated from a post written in Fall 2009]

As part of our PRCA 3711/4711 Public Relations Practicum course at Georgia Southern University, students create and present portfolios of their work.

Kelli Matthews, an assistant professor of public relations at the University of Oregon, created a packet of information for her students to help them prepare their portfolios. With Kelli’s permission, I have tweaked it slightly (only removing the U of O specific information) and am sharing it here.

PR Portfolio Reviews Overview

Also, I asked PR professionals on LinkedIn for their advice about portfolios. Specifically, I asked:

  • Do you prefer a PR student’s portfolio to be digital or in a binder?
  • How many samples do you hope to see?
  • What tips would you offer a student who is showing you a portfolio in an interview (how should they show it to you)?

I was pleased to receive nearly 20 responses within a week’s time. Here’s what the professionals said.

After Fall Semester’s PR Practicum students had their Portfolio Reviews, I wrote a short post hitting the highlights (and lowlights) of their interviews. It’s worth a read.

Do you have additional suggestions for PR students who will be interviewing for entry-level positions? I’d love to hear from you!

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4 Ways to Keep Current in Public Relations

Let’s face it . . .  whether you’re a PR student, practitioner or faculty member, we’re all busy. So how can you get (and stay) up to speed with the ever-changing world of public relations? Here’s a quick guide to how I stay current in public relations.

One: Listen to PR podcasts.

Some of my favorite podcasts are: For Immediate ReleaseInside PRThe Creative CareerTrafcom NewsMarketing Over Coffee, and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. My favorite time to listen to podcasts is during my daily three-mile walks. I also listen to them when I drive, work out and clean the house. Some people prefer to listen to podcasts on their computers; my preference is listening to them on my Palm Pre or iPod.

Here’s a short video on how to subscribe to and download podcasts using iTunes. If you’re not an iTunes person, you may want to visit Podcast Alley, where you can find thousands more podcasts. You can listen to the podcasts directly from the website.

Two: Read PR blogs.

There are hundreds of blogs about public relations. I’ve bookmarked many of them in Delicious for you. You can subscribe to them using your favorite RSS reader (such as Google Reader), or just read them on the web. Some of the most helpful blogs I’ve discovered recently include The Comms Corner and Karen Russell’s Week’s Best, as they aggregate current posts of interest to PR practitioners.

Three: Follow PR practitioners on Twitter.

Are you a public relations student (or recent grad) just getting started using Twitter? Try following some (or all) of these people or organizations in my Twitter Starter Pack for PR Students. They all have something in common: they tweet useful or interesting information for people involved in public relations.

Four: Subscribe to daily or weekly PR e-mailed newsletters.

My favorite PR newsletter is one that comes into my inbox daily from Ragan Communications: the PR Daily newsfeed. When I want to read the latest on PR, this is the newsletter I turn to first. Another helpful newsletter comes from Chris Brogan; Chris provides different content in the newsletter than he does on his blog, so it’s definitely worth subscribing.

Your suggestions?

What additional resources would you recommend?

A Twitter Starter Pack for PR Students

confused twitter birdAre you a public relations student (or recent grad) just getting started using Twitter? It’s usually best to test the waters a bit before you dive in. Try following some (or all) of these people or organizations in my Twitter Starter Pack for PR Students. They all have something in common: they tweet useful or interesting information for people involved in public relations. Read their tweets for a few days before you start tweeting yourself.

You may also want to read these two blog posts I’ve written about Twitter: Choosing Whom to Follow on Twitter: My Strategy and A Twitter Lexicon. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Prof. Sam Bradley’s College Student’s Guide: Twitter 101.

Questions?

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(PS: Suggestions for other good people for PR students to follow? Please let me know with a comment to this post.)

PRCA 4330 Article Review

For my PRCA 4330 Public Relations Research class:Reading Well by moriza.

Review an academic article on public relations that appears in a peer-reviewed journal. Your review is due by midnight on Tuesday, September 1. Recommended journals include (but aren’t limited to):

Choose the article you will review by August 26 at class time, and reply with a comment to this blog post with your article choice. Use APA works cited style to tell me which article you will review.

Your 500-word minimum review could take the following form:

  • What did you learn from reading the article?
  • What surprised you in the article?
  • What do you want to know more about, now that you’ve read the article?

It is acceptable to use first person for this review. Be sure to cite your source–in text as well as in your reference section–in proper APA format. (Using Citation Machine might be helpful.) This assignment is worth 100 of your 1000 points in PRCA 4330.

Turn this assignment in using GeorgiaVIEW by midnight on Tuesday,  September 1. No hard copy is needed.

UPDATE: On her PRConnections blog, Purdue University’s Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu shares her tips for how to read a research article. This is a MUST read. See the PPT version of her blog post here at Public Relations Matters, also.

Questions? You know where to find me . . .

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/1704875109/