Down deep, broadcast writers appreciate the formal rules of English composition, even if they can give good examples of when each should be ignored. The discussion ahead explains The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. Of the two authors, White is the more familiar as an essayist and the author of Charlotte’s Web. Strunk was his English professor at Cornell University in 1919. Forty years later, White edited and published anew the 53-page textbook Strunk had originally written for his own composition students.
White revised the book in 1972 and again in 1979, six years before his death. While written as a guide for print media, Strunk’s advice-directed by his unfailing commitment to the needs of a reading audience-is remarkably appropriate for electronic mass media as well. The flavor of the book is well represented by Strunk’s explanation of perhaps his most famous rule: “Omit needless words.”
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the editor make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Strunk and Shannon would have seen eye to eye. They both recognized the tenuous relationship between a coding system and a set of possible messages, appreciating what it meant to convey accurately an unanticipated message using a minimally redundant combination of signals. Interestingly, in the 1960s, computer scientists at Bell Laboratories attempted to integrate many of Strunk’s elementary rules into a text analysis program for UNIX, their computer operating system. The utility is called Writer’s Workbench and still exists. The style-checking program for your personal computer is in all likelihood derived from the original Bell Labs program.
Among Strunk’s elementary rules of composition there are at least three others well worth repeating. Strunk recognized, first, that the editor must adopt an organizing structure for any composition. Choose a suitable design and hold to it, he wrote. The design can be as rigorous as the 14-line rhyming scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet or as loose as a love letter. But the basic point is that good writers, by virtue of adopting a design, always know where they are headed, even if they are not sure how to get there.
In broadcast writing, there are two aspects to the design. Each message requires both (1) forethought about its logical structure and (2) adherence to a technically correct format. In the chapters that follow you will be introduced to a series of broadcast script formats appropriate for various types of fiction and nonfiction productions. You will also find that in the world of broadcasting, where time constraints are ever present, a suitable design helps the editor eliminate extraneous material. The clock is a ruthless dictator. The editor with a clear plan knows what fits in the script and what does not.
Strunk is also famous for alerting his students to the advantages of the active voice. As a rule, the sentence “Columbus discovered America” is much preferred to the passive alternative “America was discovered by Columbus.” Strunk argued that the active voice is more direct, more vigorous, and more concise. For the broadcast writer, there’s the added advantage that three words do the work of five, which saves precious air time as well.
But, like any rule of composition, we can press the advantage too far. While normally the subject-verb-object order of the active voice results in a more economical use of language, there are times that the object of the verb deserves to be the subject of the sentence. If someone were to shoot the president, even Walter Cronkite, on first report, would use the passive voice: “The president has been shot.” Nor would Strunk ridicule the crime victim who shouts, “I’ve been robbed!” instead of “Someone robbed me!” In these cases, the object acted on is initially more important than the unknown actor. When the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, the local newspaper report began: ‘The problem of aerial navigation without the use of a balloon has been solved at last.” The reporter failed to identify the Wright brothers until the fourth paragraph.
Strunk recognized that there is a case to be made for structuring thoughts so that the subject of the discourse is also the subject of the sentence. Sometimes the passive voice is unavoidable. To update Strunk’s example, consider the following sentences.
PASSIVE VOICE: The op-art paintings of the 1960s are scarcely appreciated today.
Here, the passive voice is acceptable because the focus is on op- art painting. Sentence topic and sentence subject are the same. But let’s say that the preferences of contemporary art critics are the topic. We can write the sentence using either form. The op-art paintings of the 1960s are scarcely appreciated by contemporary critics.
ACTIVE VOICE: Contemporary critics scarcely appreciate the op-art paintings of the 1960s.
In this second example, however, the active voice is more direct, more vigorous, and more concise. The passive construction is both awkward and wordy. To avoid it requires constant vigilance. Indeed, the use of the passive voice in initial drafts and impromptu speech may be the all-too-natural representation of how thoughts are associated and linked by topic and subject in our brains. In a like manner, we may be prone to overuse the first person point of view in our spontaneous speech, because it too provides an easy means to unify our thoughts. As we refine our ideas, however, we should try to shed these mental crutches.
Finally, Strunk was a champion of concrete language. “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.” Strunk argued that the greatest writers were effective because they dealt in particulars and reported the details that mattered. All too often writers attempt to broaden their audience by appealing to the general case instead of the particular, employing abstract terms rather than concrete examples.
The linguist S. I. Hayakawa illustrated this problem precisely with what he called the “abstraction ladder.” Consider the case of the farmer’s cow, Bessie. As we move up the ladder noun by noun, the farmer’s cow is identified as Bessie (a unique animal), a Guemsey, a cow, livestock, farm assets, assets, and, finally, wealth. At each higher level of abstraction, Bessie’s relationship to the farmer is put into a broader perspective, but the characteristics that uniquely identify her must be left out. While we can clearly envision a picture of Bessie, the Guernsey cow, there is only the faintest trace of her image as we try to conjure up a picture of the farmer’s wealth. An important lesson here is one that Strunk explicitly recognized. Details and particulars have the power to call up pictures in the audience’s mind, an observation that’s particularly important when writing for radio.
For instance, Strunk argued that it was better to express a negative in a positive form. Hence, “dishonest” was a better choice than “not honest,” and “forgot” was better than “did not remember.” Today broadcast journalists will report that the jury found the defendant “guilty” or “innocent” even though by custom the foreman answers the judge’s query with “guilty” or “not guilty.” Print journalists still write, “not guilty.”
It would be hard to fault Strunk, however, for failing to anticipate specific practices that stem from the intrinsic nature of broadcast technology and communication. A broadcast writer’s words must jump two hurdles on their way to the audience. They must be unambiguous to the eye of the broadcast talent who reads them and clear to the ear of the listener who hears them. Thus, broadcast writers put a premium on familiar vocabulary and conversational writing styles. For instance, contractions like “haven’t,” “I’ve,” and “she’s” are usually preferred except if the shortened form may be misinterpreted. Sometimes the “not” needs to be retained as a separate word to add emphasis, but a unique negative form such as “won’t” can be more distinctive than its longer counterpart “will not.”
It’s a good rule for broadcast writers to use their speaking voice instead of their rehearsal voice (the one we use to talk to ourselves) to test their writing. That should make you sensitive to the hissing Us” or the exploding Up” and “boo. Also embedded in your writing can be homonyms such as “their,” “there,” and “they’re” that suddenly become unclear to listeners because the words are not spelled out for them. The problems can be even more complex when writers unconsciously create homophones: “a tax on drug dealers” sounds the same to the listener’s ear as “attacks on drug dealers.” We might keep in mind the story of musician Louie Armstrong who once amused his radio listeners by characterizing an unusual jazz tempo as “half slow, half fast.” The point is, we don’t want our words to inadvertently embarrass us or the person who reads them. Write for the ear as well as the eye.
Finally, we may want to reconsider what is an acceptable level of repetition in our writing. Print journalists shift from proper names to pronouns almost immediately in writing a news story. In broadcast copy, a short name can be repeated in two successive sentences without raising the listener’s hackles, a practice that makes it easier to mentally process the second sentence.
Furthermore the right measure of repetition can add rhythm and power to spoken language. Thus Glenn Mitchell stresses the differences between Jacqueline & the Beanstalk and the original fairy tale by describing the revised version as a story that contains “no goose, no golden egg, no death of a giant.” It is shorter to say “no goose, golden egg or death of a giant,” but not as clear or emphatic.
