I started my journalism career as a newspaper reporter. Later I became an editor, then a radio news announcer, and finally worked in TV news. My point in giving you my background is to say that I learned how dissimilar writing for all three mediums is.

But learning to write for one particular type of medium can improve your skills in another. Even though you probably write for print (or print/web) you’ll write more effectively if you write as if it’s for radio. That’s because two key qualities of radio writing are short sentences and tightness.

Short sentences

Sentences for radio news should be between 10 and 12 words long. That’s short, and here are the reasons for that brevity: 1) No one wants to hear announcers take a breath in the middle of a sentence. 2) Listeners can’t go back and reread or listen again. The sentences must be understandable, and short sentences are clearer than long ones.

Tightness

Radio writing must waste no words. I often had only two minutes to read the news. In reality, it was less than that because I had to include sports, weather, perhaps traffic, and station ID. So I had maybe a minute and 20 seconds, or 80 seconds. If I wanted to squeeze in four news stories I had 20 seconds for each. News announcers typically speak at a rate of about three words per second, so do the math: Three words per second times 20 seconds equals only about 60 words for each story. Tight writing was critical.

Radio news announcers often grab copy intended for print/web and rewrite it for broadcast. So here is a typical print/web story lead. Let’s do an exercise of rewriting it for radio.

       The Largo City Commission voted unanimously on Tuesday evening to tear down the current city hall building and replace it with a new building.

What would we change if we’re writing for radio?

The sentence is 24 words, and that’s too long, so let’s split it. (It’s too long even for print; I intentionally wrote it that way to make my point.)

       The Largo City Commission voted unanimously on Tuesday evening to tear down the current city hall building.

       They plan to construct a new building in its place.

Now the first sentence is 17 words and the second is 10.

But, you might say, now we have more words than we started with, 27 instead of 24. That’s right, so let’s address that issue by rewriting for tightness.

Here are some changes we can make. In the first sentence we’ll:

       change Largo City Commission to Largo commissioners.

       kill the useless preposition on.

       replace tear down with raze.

       drop the unnecessary word building in the first sentence.

In the second sentence we’ll eliminate plan to and change They to They’ll. Now we have:

       Largo commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday evening to raze the current city hall.

       They’ll construct a new building in its place.

Now the first sentence is 12 words and the second drops to eight. We have fewer words and shorter sentences. Our exercise of pretending we’re writing for radio worked out well.

Before we wrap up, there’s a key test that our edits must pass: Did we change the meaning? Good editing doesn’t change meaning, and we didn’t, so we’re good to go.

More than likely, you write for print/web. But you’ll write more effectively if you write as if your words will be on the radio.