Page 68 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

BROADCAST WRITING AND SPEAKING

is difficult to pronounce. You can create the problem with the sks
combination simply by unfortunate placement: Task says creates the
same problem even though the sks group is in separate words. The
point is that how something sounds matters, both for pronunciation
as well as meaning. Pay attention to sound, and remember that you’re
never done with a piece of copy until you’ve tested it by reading it
aloud.

Pronouncers
Any word that might be mispronounced requires a pronouncer—a pro-
nunciation guide. Written after the name within parentheses, it’s a
phonetic guide for someone who doesn’t know how to pronounce the
name. Calais, Maine, would be written as Calais (CAL us), Maine.
Don’t substitute phonetic spelling for real spelling. That will trip up
people who know how to pronounce the name, and it’s why we period-
ically see the phonetic spelling written across the bottom of the screen
instead of the correct spelling. This only applies to proper names. If
you’re planning to use a word that isn’t a proper name but that you
58 think might be mispronounced, you need to evaluate why you’re using
that word.
All of the preceding rules are designed with the notion that announc-
ers should be able to pick up any piece of broadcast copy—even one
they have never seen before—and read it well. In an ideal world, that
would never actually happen. In the real world of broadcast, it happens
all the time. Anchors have a much better chance of reading copy well
if it conforms to those rules of readability.

Rules for Understandability

We need to construct messages in such a way that someone who only
gets to hear the material—and gets to hear it once—can understand
it. We need to do this within a framework that recognizes that as
passive media, radio listeners or television viewers might be split-
ting their attention among multiple tasks. Guidelines for enhancing
understandability follow.

Informal
We don’t write broadcast copy exactly the way we speak, but it’s close.
Spoken language is a bit too casual and frequently not grammatically
correct. Broadcast copy is what we wish we had said if we collected