Reporters usually get all the credit for great broadcast writing, but if you consider the amount of writing TV producers do in a single day, you’ll understand why we thought WXII-TV’s Executive Producer Brian Neal might have some good advice after years of writing and editing scripts in the Winston-Salem market.
1. Keep it short. Less is more. Many stories suffer from wordiness. One of the worst offenders is any script written from a news release. “For example if you get a press release from Greensboro Police with maybe a minute’s worth of information, I guarantee maybe about 20 seconds of it’s going be relevant,” Neal said. Writing shorter sentences helps out the anchors, too – making the content easier to read and reducing the chances he or she stumbles over words.
2. Get to the point. Scripts should always be as conversational as possible. If you don’t usually hear certain words or details used in everyday conversation, it probably doesn’t have a place within a script. “The biggest mistakes I think some anchors and producers make is putting too many details in the story,” Neal said, “you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Is it absolutely essential to the story?’ ‘Do the viewers really need to know this?’”
3. No vague titles. “One word that I hate is officials, be more specific — who are the officials that you’re talking about,” Neal said. The facts are important. Stories should be brief but informative. Unless there’s just a general spokesperson speaking on behalf of for example a city, the name should be included.
4. Reel in the viewers. It’s very important to grab the viewers’ attention at the very beginning of a story. “There should be creativity in the writing that makes it come alive…where you can get creative is the lead line of the story,” Neal said. The rest of the story can be just the facts, but the lead line is the most important line of the story, the most compelling, interesting detail of the story should be placed at the very beginning.
Thanks to University of Mississippi broadcast journalism student Gabriel Austin for this post. Austin is interning at WXII-TV in Winston-Salem.
