19 math terms for PR professionals
Fight back against the stereotype that PR pros are no good at math by familiarizing yourself with some basic lingo.
People, with good reason, hate stereotypes about their professions.
A recent post described some of the most annoying generalizations about PR professionals. One that was left off the list: PR pros (and writers and editors) bad at math.
I wouldn’t say we’re bad at math; maybe it’s that we don’t like math. After all, we went to school to learn how to write and edit, not solve differential equations. The one math course I took for my undergraduate degree in journalism was called “Math: Its Spirit and Use.” So I get it: Math is not for everyone.
It is important to be math literate, to do more than just nod and smile politely when someone starts talking about compound interest or exponential growth. So here is a primer on math terms for writers.
(Definitions from math.com and about.com.)
Accuracy—how close a measured value is to the actual value.
Precision—how close measured values are to each other.
Area—the amount of space inside a two-dimensional object such as a triangle or circle.
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