4

Writing for the ear

Writing words to be heard by the ear is quite different from words to be read by the eye. The layout of sentences, their order and construction has to be thought through in order to be totally clear and unambiguous at their first hearing. The listener does not have the possibility of re-hearing something. It must make sense first time, and this places a special responsibility on the radio writer. So whether we are writing a 15-minute talk, a one-minute voice piece or a cue to a recorded interview, the basic ‘rules’ of radio writing – and the pitfalls – need to be simply stated.

Who are you talking to?

The listener comes first. Decide who it is you are talking to. Is this for a specialist audience – like children, doctors or farmers – or is it for the general, unspecified listener? In passing, it could be argued that there is no such thing as the ‘general listener’ since, for consumer research purposes, we are all categorized by one or more of a number of criteria, e.g. socio-economic group, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, demographic location, social habits and so on. Even so, the style for the ‘Morning Drivetime’ will be tighter and punchier than the more relaxed ‘Afternoon Show’. The language will be different but will nevertheless be appropriate when you know and visualize who you are writing for – the one person, the individual who is listening to you. Are they busily dashing about? Getting a meal, or lying in bed? Forget the mass audience, as if talking in a hall full of people. Radio is not a PA system – ‘some of you may have seen …’. Write directly for the person you want to talk to, seeing them as you write. It's then more likely to come out right – ‘you may have seen …’.

Avoid talking about your listener, not ‘listeners who want to contact us should …’, but to the listener, ‘if you'd like to contact us …’. Only when questions of what we want to say, and to whom, are answered can we properly start on the script.

What do you want to say?

Having decided who you are talking to, what do you want to leave with him or her? It may be that the script is simply to entertain – a light-hearted afternoon show – but it still needs thinking about unless it is to be just waffle. So, what do you want to say? What jokes, stories, anecdotes to tell? What information to include? Will you comment on news of the day or local gossip? Start by listing the points to be made and put them in a logical order. Visualize the effect that each will have on the listener – bringing about a smile, or causing them to think about an issue, or to wonder at a particular fact. Build on the effect you create, leading from one point to the next so that you have connected strings of thought – so much more satisfying than everything being isolated and on its own.

It's important to have a strong opening – get the listener's attention at the start. In scripting a piece, this is the part that often gets written last. It's difficult to set down a really good first couple of sentences on a blank page – much easier to come back to it when you know the shape of the whole and you can have an interesting, teasing or dramatic opener. Use an interesting metaphor, paint a picture, get me, the listener, to do some work by anticipating what you are on about – the issue, problem or story. Grab my attention in the first sentence, tell me something in the second.

The storage of talk

You are talking, and writing a script is essentially the storing of that talk on paper or in a computer. So we need to write conversational language – quite different from the starchy prose we mostly learned at school. We want to use good colloquial words such as ‘wasn't’, ‘didn't’ and ‘shouldn't’ve’. The easiest way of doing this, having listed out your points, is to say out loud your way of expressing them and writing down what you hear. In other words, you record in script form an already spoken stream of thought. The sentences are generally shorter and simpler. You may need to check it and alter it later, but essentially it is the stuff of talk – audible communication – so much better than the more formal and often stilted language of the written essay or letter. A newsroom where scripts are being written should be a noisy place!

Even so, the best script is a fairly crude and imperfect form of storage. It gives no indication of emphasis and inflection, which can be very important in communicating sense. Neither does it say anything about speed or pause. Some people underline words to help with where the stress should go, but the danger here is that when reading it you concentrate so much on the underlining that the end result is artificial. Much better to communicate meaning by first understanding it.

For example, how should the following be said?

‘You mean I have to be there at 10 tomorrow?’

Put the emphasis on the ‘I’, the ‘there’ or the ‘10’, and the implied meaning is altogether different. In other words, a script will tell you what to say, but not how to say it.

Delivering a script properly is presentation – the art of retrieving talk out of storage.

Words

These are the building blocks of our meaning and need to be used with a little care if that meaning is to be recreated in the mind of the listener. For example, a news story about a collapsed building included the sentence: ‘Questions are being asked about whether there were flaws in the building.’ It looks alright on paper, but on the air might not ‘flaws’ be confused with ‘floors’?

Again, ‘The government warned of attacks on foreigners.’ What was that about ‘a tax on foreigners’? Special care has to be taken over words that sound the same but have different meanings, like:

In any language there are many such homophones and we have to beware of them. We cannot always rely on the context to make their meaning clear, and our purpose is to avoid misunderstanding and ambiguity, especially for the preoccupied, half-hearing listener. We look at this further in writing news (see Chapter 5, Intelligibility in the writing, p. 64).

A final point on words is to prefer the simple to the complex. They generally communicate more directly being easier to understand. So we would use ‘begin’ or ‘start’ rather than ‘commence’, ‘find out’ rather than ‘ascertain’, ‘ask’ rather than ‘enquire’, ‘buy’ instead of ‘purchase’, ‘try’ instead of ‘endeavour’.

Words with Latin roots may sound ‘educated’, but our aim is to communicate in the most direct way that avoids mishearing. Our job is not to impress but to express.

Structure and signposting

After your strong opening, it's still true in a talk to say what you're going to say, say it, and then tell me what you said. Otherwise, be logical in the order you put things, and be interesting – that means being relevant, funny, useful or unusual.

With the printed page, a book or newspaper, it is possible to look back to clear up a point or to check how the writer got to the present assumption. With radio that's not possible, which is why the structure of our talk is important. So not only are our words simple and our sentences shorter, but things must be in the right order – cause comes before effect. For example:

‘Jim, who is about to leave school, where he's been for five years, which included a time as head boy, is looking for a job.’

Avoiding those relative clauses, this is better as:

‘Jim has been at school for five years. This included a time as head boy. He's now about to leave and is looking for a job.’

Other ‘joining’ words like ‘and’ and ‘well’ can be added to ease the flow. Long, convoluted sentences are difficult to follow and it is to no one's benefit to use polysyllabic words in complex phrases. Keep it simple and straightforward.

Signposting is the very useful technique in any oral communication of saying where you are in a talk, and where you are going next. For example, ‘So much for the selection of staff, let's now look at their training.’ Phrases like ‘let me explain’ are there to clarify structure, to help the listener follow your train of thought – ‘and now, the weather’. Signposts, without being overdone, make listening easier.

As a matter of style we avoid using the same word twice in the same or adjacent sentences.

‘The hurricane swept across the Florida coastline at midday, bringing 120 mile an hour winds. By this evening the hurricane will be well inland.’

It sounds better if the second ‘hurricane’ is replaced by ‘storm’ or ‘storm centre’.

The ending of the talk is what you will leave with the listener, so typically: repeat a main point, finish with a story that illustrates your theme, or look forward to the future. Give the listener something to hold on to – make it memorable.

Pictures and stories

Remember the visual nature of radio and illustrate what you are saying with pictorial colour. Appeal to the sense of smell and touch too if you can. Blue seas and white surf, red buses and silver cars, black umbrellas and grey stone streets, yellow bananas and the dimpled skin of shiny oranges. Recall the smell of new-mown grass or a Chinese meal, the reddish brown earth after rain and the blue haze of a warm camp-fire. These all help the listener to be there, to share the experience – we shall meet this again in the chapter on commentary.

Instead of strings of facts or concepts, turn them into evocative anecdotes and metaphor. Who said what to whom, how they responded, why they disagreed, and how it turned out in the end. Real life or made up, stories and pictures are memorable. This is why we turn a ‘new 100 000-ton cruise liner’ into a ‘ship as tall as Big Ben with enough power to light a city the size of Southampton’, or describe the solar panels for the latest space station as ‘the size of two football pitches’. Such images, like any relevant visual aid, stay in the mind and your listener will remember better what you said.

Double meanings

In the same way that word sounds can have more than one meaning, so can phrases and sentences. Here are some real examples (signpost).

‘Our reporter spoke to Mister — on the golf course, as he played a round with his wife.’

You have to avoid the double entendre, unless of course you intend to be funny.

‘The Union said the Report was wrong.’
‘The Union, said the Report, was wrong.’

The meaning depends on whether ‘said the Report’ is in parentheses. Two little commas alter the whole sense as to who was wrong.

‘At first, supplies of the new car would be restricted to the home market.’

Does this mean that the car is being supplied only to the home market, or is it that home supply is restricted so it's all going for export? The meaning as written is surely unclear.

‘The man was found lying on the pavement by his wife.’

What picture does that give you? Of a man alongside his wife? No, the story was of a shooting incident where the victim was found by his wife, lying on the pavement – and that's how the sentence should have been structured.

‘The Prime Minister would say if he is to send more troops in a few days.’

To avoid confusion over what the ‘few days’ refers to, this is better as:

‘The Prime Minister would say in a few days if he is to send more troops.’

And finally, this dreadful example of double meaning in a story meant to calm the fear that Hormone Replacement Therapy treatment might increase the likelihood of cancer:

‘The Report published today said that with the use of HRT there was no greater risk of contracting cancer.’

Do we mean that the risk was no greater, or that the risk could not be greater?

There are two ways of way minimizing errors of this sort. First, get the punctuation right. Punctuation shows you how to read it. Capital letters for the beginning of sentences and proper names, commas or dashes in the right places to indicate pauses or the subordinate clause. Second, speak out loud as you write, preferably to someone else. Many times a double meaning is avoided because ‘as soon as I said it, I knew it was wrong.’

The script

We speak at about 180 words a minute – three words a second is a good guide for a bulletin or scripted talk. A single typed line is 3–4 seconds, making a double-spaced page of A4 – 27 lines or 270 words – about one and a half minutes. Thus, a 30-second voice report needs about 90 words, and a three-minute piece for the Breakfast programme about 540. The computer counting of words is extremely useful.

A script on the page or on the screen should, above all, be clear and easy to read. Double or triple spaced, with wide margins for any notes or alterations. Difficult words, foreign or unusual names may be given their phonetic pronunciation in brackets. Numbers can also be written in words if this helps, i.e. ‘10 700 (ten thousand seven hundred) tons of food aid were supplied’. Where possible such statistics are simplified, so this becomes ‘almost 11 000 tons’.

Clear paragraphs should be used to separate distinct thoughts or items. We use one side of the paper, and good quality paper at that, because it's quieter to handle.

Computers don't care about the ends of pages, they just go on printing on the next. However, best practice doesn't break a sentence at the bottom of a page, hoping that the reader will follow on. Each page ends with a full stop.

Finally, why have a written script at all? Whether on paper or on screen, its purpose is to tell us what to say, in what order, so that nothing gets left out and it runs to time. It is also a safety net, reducing the stress of having to remember. Essential for news, but even informal spontaneous programmes will have scripted notes – even the best ad libbers are better with an aide-mémoire for names, points to make, stories to tell. More than this, preparing a script provides the opportunity of thinking more deeply, adding substance, expressing ourselves more accurately, and developing the well-crafted memorable phrase.