ABSTRACT
So what principles should guide us as we try to write our bulletins, introductions, voice-pieces or commentaries? The first is that we must try to write scripts that sound natural when spoken aloud. All the broadcasting style guides emphasise this point. ‘The script should sound as if the presenter is talking to the viewer or listener, not just reading out loud’, advised a BBC News Training booklet in the ’70s. More than a generation later, the BBC’s Director of News was still urging all his journalists to remember this essential guidance:
It’s notable that, even before the age of broadcasting, many writers believed that the spoken language was the original model and the purest form of communication. Printing it on to a page became the problem. Shakespeare’s greatest lines were written to be spoken. William Hazlitt said, ‘To write in a genuine, familiar, or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation.’
