ABSTRACT

This chapter, explains that the most important thing to remember when writing news is to use good conversational English, whether one is writing for television, radio, online or text services. People who can communicate perfectly well in casual conversation and in some cases write perfectly good essays, or even newspaper copy, become afflicted by all manner of verbal tics when they write for broadcast. Precision also applies to any references to time in script. Broadcasting and the Internet replaced newspapers as the main source of news because they are immediate, and not subject to printing and distribution deadlines. Direct quotes appear all the time in newspapers. What somebody says appears between sets of inverted commas. It's the nearest readers of newspapers can get to hearing somebody say something. Journalism has its own ugly jargon – a form of the English language beloved of many newspaper journalists and abhorred in almost equal measure by most broadcasters.