Better Broadcast Writing, Better Broadcast News

Greg Dobbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138472471
• eBook ISBN: 9781317349907
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Better Broadcast Writing, Better Broadcast News teaches students how to write with the conversational simplicity required for radio and TV. This text draws on the Emmy Award-winning author's decades of professional experience in broadcast journalism. In addition to writing, the text also discusses the other elements that make up a good story--producing, reporting, shooting, editing, and ethics. The author's real-world perspective conveys the excitement of a career in journalism.

Part I

How to Write the Right
Words and Sentences

1

The Right Words, The Right Stuff

What You’ll Learn_________________________

A few broadcast stories depend strictly on pictures, a few strictly on sound. But the rest? They depend mainly on words. Words you understand. Words everyone understands. So that’s where this book will start. The right words. The right stuff.

Probably by the time you’re in high school and certainly when you’re in college, you walk into a new course and the teacher hands you a syllabus. You read it, you discuss it, hopefully you abide by it, and maybe you even tell friends who will be taking the course the following semester about it. But does anyone ever actually explain the word “syllabus,” let alone define it? No one did when I was in school.

That’s why, when I started teaching journalism and a dean asked me to “prepare a syllabus,” I wasn’t really sure what to do, because I wasn’t really sure what it meant. I had seen and used plenty of syllabi (that’s even worse; at least “syllabuses” is a more acceptable plural form of “syllabus”), but nothing in life had ever forced my brain to instinctively understand the word.

This leads me to the whole point of this chapter: when you’re writing for a news broadcast (and this is a good rule for newspaper writers too), don’t use words your audience wouldn’t use in normal conversation. Don’t use words they may not be able to envision. Don’t use words they won’t easily understand. And don’t use words that sound judgmental, because that’s not your job. It obstructs the process of communication, when you’re supposed to enrich it. How can you avoid these pitfalls? By using the shortest and simplest words possible. Short, simple, unambiguous, descriptive, active, fair, everyday English.

This chapter is simply about words you ought to use, and others you shouldn’t. Simple, huh?

The Never Ending Story

One of the ongoing features of this first section in Better Broadcast Writing, Better Broadcast News is the Never Ending Story, a news report that starts out written about as poorly as a news report can be written. It’ll appear twice in each chapter that deals with the style and mechanics of writing: first at the beginning and again at the end. Your job at the beginning is to simply read it (and review the corrections you should have made in the last chapter), then at the end, to clean it up. Don’t make every conceivable correction though; just make changes based on that chapter’s lessons.

For instance, in this chapter, “The Right Words, The Right Stuff,” your only task is to find specific words that should be improved or eliminated, which you should be able to do by the end of the chapter. Don’t peek ahead though, because the next chapter, “The Wrong Way to Write It,” will open with the improved version that you should have produced (although it still will be packed with other kinds of flaws). In each chapter that follows in this section of the book, those flaws will be more obvious to you, so that at the end of each, you’ll be able to find and correct them. By the end of the section, you ought to have a news report that can be read on the air!

In a place where a rear-ender traffic mishap’s usually the most consequential event of the day there’s been a huge occurrence with a terrible impact on each and everyone. Tonight the lives of three persons were tragically claimed by a bomb, which set off a 3-alarm blaze that raised temperatures to almost 200° Fahrenheit at a garment store at 3645 Main Street, in the heart of Ft. Stutter, Miss., the police said. No group took credit for the horrific blast, but forensics experts are combing the scene of the senseless attack tonight and in case there’s more danger there, a hazmat team’s dispatched to the scene. In order to explain why there wasn’t an admonition, the police chief of the city of Ft. Stutter, Jazibeauz Perez, claims there was definitely no indication that the explosive device was going to detonate, then he said, “Everyone wishes to God we’d known this was going to transpire.” The police dept. hasn’t asked the FBI for help the chief said. The deceased includes Jason J. Jones, 29, Sally S. Smyth, 24, and Greg G. Goldstein, who died at 22. None were employees at the bombed store. Two unidentified men are in critical condition, meaning they might die too. Everyone in Ft. Stutter is absolutely petrified now to go out on the street, and city officials admit increased protection will cost the population of Ft. Stutter a lot of wampum, $6.1-million. There isn’t a date set for a decision about expending that aggregate of money, but the mayor can’t be back in the community by Tues., which isn’t early enough for her critics. Whether such an expenditure’ll really be beneficial remains to be observed.

Short Is Better than Succinct

Here is an example of a sentence where the writer uses a sophisticated, less conversational word, instead of a simple one:

The automobile crashed into the house.

It’s straightforward, it’s accurate. But it’s not as short and simple as possible. What would be?

The car crashed into the house.

As a speaker and writer of the English language, you have a heavier burden to bear than journalists who work in any other language on earth. Why? Because the English language has more words—616,500 of them, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—than any other language on earth. There are remote (and disappearing) languages in Asia and Africa whose entire word count is only in the tens of thousands. Writers in these languages don’t have to grapple with the burden of choosing between “vessel,” “boat,” or “ship.” You do.

Eventually in your journalism career, choosing the shortest and simplest words in our language (or any language) will be second nature, but until it is, consciously ask yourself whether you are using the shortest, simplest words in the sentences you write. When you are proofreading, make this one of the tasks on your checklist.

Why is it important? Because in a TV or radio news story, the audience hears your words only once. The fewer complexities you throw at them, the more easily they’ll absorb everything they hear. Think about the following pairs of sentences that might appear in news stories, and about which version—after simplifying a single word—seems better. Read them all aloud; the differences will be even more transparent:

He said he didn’t comprehend why his wife killed herself.
He said he didn’t understand why his wife killed herself.

The councilwoman says she wants to revise the speed limit.
The councilwoman says she wants to change the speed limit.

The attorney is charged with contempt.
The lawyer is charged with contempt.

Police apprehended the suspect.
Police caught the suspect.

She was murdered outside her residence.
She was murdered outside her home.

And here’s the best example to test what you’ve learned so far:

The student saw the syllabus and decided to drop the class.
The student saw the course outline and decided to drop the class.

See which one works better? The second one, every time. In fact in the last example, more (slightly more) is best, if more is simpler.

What’s the Point?

Although there are exceptions, the basic principle here is as true with individual words and phrases as it is with whole sentences (which you will read about later in the book): shorter and simpler almost always is better. In other words, although you want to avoid the unstructured nature of spontaneous conversation (such as repetition, putting your own words into parentheses, pronouns without reference), write the way you talk!

Learn These, for a Start

Here are two lists of words. The list on the left has words most people probably understand, while the list on the right has words that are undoubtedly shorter and simpler and understood by all. Almost without exception (yes, like most rules, there are exceptions), the words on the right side are the ones you should use in news stories.

For Example … Words to Live By

...

aid	help
altercation	argument
apprehend	catch
attorney	lawyer
automobile	car
beverage	drink
blaze	fire
cognizant	aware
commence	start
compensate	pay, pay back
comprehend	understand
conduct	do
deceased	dead
determine	decide
endeavor	try
exacerbate	make it worse
examination	test
expound	talk
extricate	pull out
female	woman
incarcerated	in jail
indisposed	sick
inferno	fire
initiate	start
intoxicated	drunk
juvenile	child
lacerations	cuts
lawful	legal
male	man
manufacture	make
mishap	accident
obfuscate	confuse
observe	see
occur	happen
pass away	die
persons	people
physician	doctor
presently	now
prior to	before
produce	make
reside	live
residence	home
revise	change
subsequent to	after
terminate	end
transform	change
transpire	happen
vehicle	car, truck, whatever!
vessel

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• How to Write the Right Words and Sentences
• The Right Words, The Right Stuff
• The Wrong Way to Write It
• Being Perfectly Clear
• The Right Way to Write It
• Saying It Twice
• The Story of the Story
• But Before You Write…
• Organizing Your Facts, Organizing Your Story
• Choosing Your Lead
• Choosing Your Close
• And After You Write
• Proof Positive of Proofreading
• The Correct Corrections
• Finding Out What to Write
• News Hunters and News Gatherers
• Running in Place
• Letting It All Hang Out
• A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
• It's All Part of the Show
• If the Shoe Fits, Write it
• Fitting It All In
• Even More Ways for Radio
• Being the Right Kind of Journalist
• Holding onto Your Sources
• Holding onto Your Ethics
• Holding onto Your Dream
• Index