Writing for the Ear and the Eye

Print readers can slow down, reread and skim. Radio listeners get one pass at the speed of the voice, with a dog barking in the back seat. Video viewers get two channels at once, picture and sound, and will ignore whichever one is boring. Each audience needs copy built for how it actually takes in the ad.

Radio: the ear has no rewind

Radio copy is written for someone who is doing something else. They will catch about half of what you say. Your job is to make sure the half they catch includes the name and the action.

Short words, short sentences

Aim for sentences of 12 words or fewer, and break longer ones into fragments. Spoken English is full of fragments. "Miller Road. You know the spot." is fine on air and perfectly clear.

Choose words that are easy to say and hard to mishear. "Fifteen" and "fifty" sound alike over a car speaker. So do "can" and "can't." Write "one-five" or "fifteen dollars," and swap "can't" for "cannot" or rebuild the sentence. Read every line aloud and listen for tongue-twisters. "Six special sales" will trip a pro.

Measure 4 rebuilds Miller Road.
Eleven miles.
And it replaces the two old bridges by the grain elevator.
On your November ballot.

Numbers

One number per sentence, and only numbers people can picture. "About four dollars a month" works. "A levy rate of 0.000412 of market value" does not, even though it is more precise. Round where honesty allows, and keep the precise figure on the website.

Dates: say the day of the week and the date. "Tuesday, November third." People remember Tuesday.

Repeat the name

Say the name of the measure, candidate or business early, again in the middle, and again in the tag. In print that would be repetitive. On radio it is the minimum. Someone who tunes in at second 12 should still hear the name at least once.

Pronouns and clarity

"She told her she would vote for it" works on paper if you glance back. On air nobody knows who "she" is. Use names, or keep one person per sentence. Avoid "the former" and "the latter" entirely. Nobody listening remembers which was which.

Sound effects build the set

Radio has no pictures, so sound builds the scene. A good sound effect sets location in under two seconds: a screen door and birds says a porch in summer, a coffee grinder and murmur says a café. This is the old theater of the mind: you supply a few cues and the listener's head builds the rest, often better than any camera.

Rules for sound effects in spots:

• Familiar sounds only. A pothole thump, a school bell, a library date stamp. An obscure sound needs explaining, and you do not have time.
• Short. Most effects should be under two seconds, with voice over the tail.
• Nothing that sounds like an emergency. Sirens, horns and alarms startle drivers. And FCC rule 47 CFR 11.45 bars transmitting the Emergency Alert System codes or Attention Signal, or a recording or simulation of them, outside real alerts and authorized tests. Do not put EAS-style tones in any ad.
• Licensed. Use effects you recorded or got from a library whose license covers advertising. Lesson 5 covers licensing.

The SoundStudio audio theory page on radio explains why speech sounds different on air and over car speakers, which affects how you mix effects under a voice.

Web addresses and phone numbers

A web address read once on radio is mostly lost. If you need one, make it short, spell out anything ambiguous, and say it twice. "HarlowLibrary dot org. HarlowLibrary dot org." Phone numbers are worse. Most radio writers drop them unless the whole ad exists to make the phone ring, and then the number is said three times.

Video: the eye wins every fight

When picture and sound disagree, viewers believe the picture. When narration describes what the picture already shows, viewers tune out the narration. So video copy does a different job: it adds what the picture cannot show.

Avoid say-see

Say-see is the mistake of narrating what is on screen. The picture shows a bus on a bridge, and the voice says "a school bus crosses a bridge." The viewer just learned nothing twice.

Instead, let the picture carry the scene and use words for facts and feeling the viewer cannot see. Picture: the bus on a cracked bridge. Narration: "Rated poor by state inspectors. Crossed twice a day." Now the words and the picture make a third meaning together.

Supers and captions

A super is text laid over the picture. Use supers for anything the viewer needs to remember or act on: the measure name, the date, the web address, the cost. Keep them on screen long enough to read twice. A good floor is about one second per three words, plus a second. Required disclaimers have their own minimum sizes and times, and lesson 6 gives the numbers.

For text size, contrast and placement, the AV craft chapter on text people can read covers it in detail.

Video ads that run in social feeds face a twist: many people scroll with the sound off. Design so the ad makes sense silently. The single thought and the action should appear as text, and the first two seconds should be visually clear without any audio. Burned-in captions of the voiceover help everyone, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Broadcast TV is different: viewers expect sound and stations handle closed captions separately, so ask the station what it wants.

Fewer words than radio

Because the picture does half the work, video narration usually runs shorter than a radio script of the same length. A radio :30 might hold 60 words. A video :30 might hold 40 to 50, with breathing room for shots to land. Silence over a strong image is not wasted time.

Same idea, two scripts

You will rarely write one script and use it for both radio and video. Start from the same brief and single thought, then write each version for its medium. The radio spot leans on sound effects, names and repetition. The video spot leans on pictures and supers, with narration adding facts. Lesson 4 shows both formats in full for the same invented road bond.