Reading for the Week

The reading for this week deals with writing for broadcast versus print (finally!). I have been waiting to read and learn more about this because it is what I am most interested in. Most of what I have learned about writing for Television has come from fellow students at Newswatch 16, so it is nice to have a professional text give advice. It was nice to see that the concepts that I have taught to assistant producers and freshman this semester is accurate. For example, television writing is much more conversational than print. The stories should be shorther (20-30 seconds to read), and should explain the concepts succintly and avoid using superfluous or complex language. Television is much more visual than print, so when writing a story, TV producers must keep this in mind. A similarity, however, is the emphasis on flow of reading. Writers for television, radio, or print should write so that the sentences transition well into one another and do not impede the reader's progress in deciphering the information. This tight phrasing is something that I have always emphasized with the news crew of Newswatch 16.