PRINCIPLES OF WRITING FOR VISUALS /Television News Writing Structure

BASIC RULES OF TELEVISION 

USE SIMPLE SUBJECT−verb−object sentence structures.:

The writer of TV news must be able to make complicated stories simple. In short, understanding must be immediate in the TV News Bulletin. The golden rule to follow is "never underestimate the viewers' intelligence or over-estimate their knowledge".Stick to short sentences of 20 words or less. The announcer has to breathe. Long sentences make it difficult for the person voicing the script to take a breath.

CLARITY: The first rule of TV news is that the story must be clear at once. Unlike the reader, the viewer has no second chance to go over the material. TV news is written on the wind.

BREVITY: Clarity comes not only from writing simple sentences but also from writing short ones. Long sentences cannot be read easily by the newscaster, and a viewer has a hard time following them. Every sentence that you write for broadcast should be short, simple and easy to understand. The average acceptable number of words per sentence in a TV copy is 13 to 14. TV news has been described as a headlines service. It is intended to give the viewer only an outline of the event. A good newspaper story ranges from hundreds to thousands of words. The same story on television or radio may have to fit into 30 seconds—perhaps no more than 100 words. If it is an important story, it may be 90 seconds or two minutes. You have to condense a lot of information into the most important points for broadcast writing.

USE CORRECT GRAMMAR. A broadcast news script with grammatical errors will embarrass the person reading it aloud if the person stumbles OVER MISTAKES-

PUT THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION FIRST.  Writing a broadcast news story is similar to writing a news story for print in that you have to include the important information first. The only difference is that you have to condense the information presented.

Write good leads. Begin the story with clear, precise information. Because broadcast stories have to fit into 30, 60, or 90 seconds, broadcast stories are sometimes little more than the equivalent of newspaper headlines and the lead paragraph.

WRITE THE WAY PEOPLE TALK. Sentence fragments—as long as they make sense—are acceptable.

USE CONTRACTIONS.  Use dont  instead of do not. But be careful of contractions ending in -ve (e.g., would’ve, could’ve), because they sound like “would of” and “could of.”

USE PRESENT TENSE VERBS, except when past-tense verbs are necessary. Present tense expresses the sense of immediacy .  The present tense is the most engaging tense in the language. It indicates that the action is still going on.  Use past tense when something happened long ago.