5 things my summer internship taught me about bloggers

I spend most of my time during my Ragan internship reading and editing blogs from PR pros and corporate communicators, and using Twitter. When I return to school this fall, I’ll apply the following lessons to my college experience.

1. The power of headlines

When I began my internship, I did not grasp the difficulty of writing headlines and, for the first few weeks, struggled forming them. I expressed my frustration to a friend, and she jokingly told me that we could talk in headlines to improve my skills. Now, after spending hours searching for content for Ragan’s websites and reading numerous headlines, I’ve improved.

In fact, I now think in headlines. When recently reading the novel “A Room With a View,” I unconsciously changed the chapter titles into headlines: “Learn how Lucy witnesses murder” and “The top 5 mistakes Lucy makes in Italy.” When reading an article in The New York Times about the capturing of a Boston mafia boss, I replaced the original title in my head with “3 ways to catch a criminal through social media.”

2. Beware the hyphen