Radio writing differs from writing for publication in print because the medium is different. Broadcasting is a form of live publication. It is not static, but something which moves forward in present time. This calls for a different approach - a difference in style.
The reader of a newspaper or a magazine can select or reject paragraphs or whole stories as the fancy takes him. When he is not clear in his understanding of the author’s meaning he can always re-read. This is not so of radio. The listener has to take everything as it comes or not listen at all. When he is unclear he has nomeans of referring back to clarify a point. A radio-script writer must therefore seek to hold the listener’s rapt attention and go to considerable pains to ensure that the meaning is clear and understandable at every stage of a talk or story as it progresses. Another distinctive characteristic of radio writing is that things heard on the radio appear to be happening now to the listener. A broadcast is not a report of something past and gone, even the act of news reading is something taking place at the same time as it is heard. Above all, radio writing is writing for the spoken words and everyday speech should be the guide to the words we use and the manner in which we use them. In talking with one another, we use familiar words. We assemble what we have to say in short phrases and seldom put our ideas together in the kind of lengthy paragraphs which we may write. We put forward our ideas directly, not cluttered with small details nor involved in rambling parenthesis. From these characteristics of radio writing we may deduce a series of rules.
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