Thursday, February 26, 2009

*BEEP*BEEP*BEEP* The Following is An Important Announcement

Broadcasting reports are written in a much different form than any other written work. They are written in a very simple, to-the-point manner. The broadcasting scripts contain: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. There might be a few quotes or added details thrown into the report but nothing too much until the exact, full story is known. The viewers do not see what is written down so the report does not need to be complete sentences complete correct spelling. The two most important factors of the broadcast are clarity and brevity. Clarity is self-explanatory, it means that the information is clear and concise. Brevity means that the length is brief.

One way to make the information clear and a quick read is by following the Pronunciation Guide for Announcers. This is a way of making the pronunciations of words easier to observe and say by making the sounds of the consonants and vowels more obvious. A few examples include:

~using AY for a long A as in "gate"
~using EYE for I as in "chime"
~using Z for hard S as in "disease"
~using J for soft G as in "general"

The only reason that punctuation is used is to help the announcer annotate the report. The use of other symbols ( %, &, #, etc) are prohibited. They only marks allowed in the printed copies are commas, periods, question marks, dots, dashes and quotation marks. The only reason to use hyphens is when letters are to be spelled out and not read as a word.

Broadcasting reports are used for talk shows, news on call, news conferences, news releases, video news releases, and multimedia news releases. The structure is universal for every one of these different media releases. Even though they are the same for each media type, the messages can contain differing details depending on the sources of information.

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