ABSTRACT
Having established that broadcast journalists should aim to write as they would speak to an individual member of the audience, using a clear and accurate version of the spoken language, and avoiding journalese, the question then arises whether it is possible to learn techniques for writing against the clock, or whether good writing comes naturally. Some editors seem to believe that journalists have their talent genetically embedded somewhere in the anatomy – maybe in the blood, maybe in the nose: ‘He has a nose for a story, that one’; maybe in the bladder: ‘I have a feelin-in-me-water about this one’; or in the abdomen, home of the gut feeling. Many more distinguished editors believe no such thing.
