Editing writing for the ear

There is a huge difference in writing for the eyes and writing for the ear. This past summer, I was fortunate enough to work for a radio station in Olds, Alberta and one thing I noticed when going going through the weekly list of PSAs is that a lot of them were not written for the ear. The same thing is happening now when I announce U of M Bison games with the sponsor script. A fair number of them are written well for the eyes; grammatically correct, proper syntax, etc, but sound awful to the ear. 

Sometimes I realize this much too late as I am already half way through the script and have no real choice other than to plow ahead in full knowledge that what I’m about to say is going to make little or no sense.

This is not to fault anyone, because unless you have done it, it’s hard to tell. Complicated verses or words don’t translate when saying them “with style”. This isn’t a poetry reading. An announcer needs to have the correct tone, flow and inflection to sound proper and bad scripts don’t allow the proper breathing room for this to happen.

The other big one is that the important information jumps around. Instead of writing one, two, three, the author has written two, three, one. Again, this might work when writing an award winning piece of fiction but does nothing for the announcer. It doesn’t make sense to the ear, and as such I end up sound ridiculous. 

Many of the PSAs needed a serious rewrite before I could go on the air with them, and some were so bad that I just plain refused to say them. Same thing would happen for radio commercial scripts that clients would write themselves. But since the clients were paying for them, there wasn’t much I could do.

Here are a couple tips for those of you who find yourself writing PSAs or any thing else to be heard on the radio:

• No long sentences.
• Who, what, where, why, when, in that order. Short, sweet and concise.
• If you’re unsure what to write, just put the facts down in point form. We can figure out the rest.
• No complicated words. Nice easy vocabulary that isn’t likely to get jumbled.
• Spell tricky names phonetically somewhere on the release so we don’t pronounce it wrong and look dumb.
• EDIT!!!!!!! Nothing is worse then reading a PSA and halfway through, catching a typo. It freezes the announcer.

By following some of these simple rules, your writing will make it much easier on the announcer and there for be much more likely to be aired.

We don’t have time to edit your work for you. These things happen on the fly, so the easier, cleaner and more concise a message is, the better.