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[ ARTICLE ]Broadcast Rhetoric:Incorporating RhetoricalTheories Into theTeaching of BroadcastWriting Courses at theUndergraduate LevelSara Magee, Ph.DAssistant ProfessorP.I. Reed School ofJournalismWest VirginiaUniversityP.O. Box 6010Morgantown, WV26506-6010Sara.Magee@mail.wvu.eduPhone: (304)293-3505 Ex. 5437Fax: (304) 293-3072Paper presented atBEA 2007 in LasVegasAbstractBroadcast news writing is a key skill that up and coming journalistsmust master in their undergraduate courses. However,by the time broadcast students reach these upper level classes,many of the basic writing skills appear to have been forgotten orare overlooked with the justification of the differences betweenliterary, print and broadcast writing styles. This results in lesscompelling, confusing and often sloppy broadcast writing. Ipropose a pedagogy for teaching broadcast news writing thatis infused with rhetorical ideas and philosophies, techniques ofwriting and language use that can be incorporated into upperlevel broadcast news writing classes. This combination of rhetoricaltechniques and how to apply them to telling stories andreporting news in the broadcast style should get students thinkingand writing more creatively. This paper explores the formationof such a pedagogy and provides examples and texts thatcould be used in creating a class based around these principles. Itis hoped that a pedagogy based around this infusion of rhetoricaland broadcast writing principles can foster more balanced,creative, and informative storytelling techniques among aspiringbroadcast journalism students.Aspiring broadcast news journalists are taught from the startthat writing for this medium is significantly different thanwriting for any other medium—be it magazine, newspaper, orcompositional writing styles learned in college English courses.Future radio and television reporters are constantly instructed towrite creatively but to keep stories simple and uncomplicated.Stories must be brief, often encompassing a wealth of informationin a thirty second time slot. This short, quick style oftenleads to very simple, unstructured news stories, concerned morewith cramming as many details as possible into a story, with nothought to transitional phrasing, sentence structure, or flow.6<strong>Feedback</strong> March 2009 (Vol. 50, No. 2)
The fundamentals of telling a story seem to have been forgotten in this business. “Wemay be doing news in the MTV age,” says Bob Yuna of WYOU-TV in Scranton,Pennsylvania, “but words matter. There is still a beginning, middle, and end to everystory” (Prato, 1995).So what can be done to improve broadcast writing skills to get students to thinkabout the fundamentals of basic writing and apply them? The answer, I believe, lies ina restructuring of how broadcast writing classes are taught. Teachers need to expandpedagogies from simply teaching students how to write in short, active voice sentencesto thinking and putting into practice the creative skills learned and used in compositionalwriting and rhetoric courses. I propose a pedagogy that would work towardsaccomplishing this goal through the incorporation of philosophies and methodsinvoked from the sophists and classical rhetoricians down to more modern thinkersand philosophers. Combining broadcast style lessons with texts and exercises inspiredby the ideas of different rhetoricians should help emerging broadcast writers open theirminds and unlock an arsenal of words and ideas. In addition, audiences for these newsstories should find them more compelling because of better storytelling techniques andwriting. This pedagogical combination of strategies, theories, and methods may seemradical, but it actually works well when considering that rhetoric and persuasive speechin written or oral form are quite similar to the nature of broadcast news writing. Bothhave goals of capturing viewers’ attention and persuading them to keep reading andwatching respectively. Applying these ways of thinking I believe will improve broadcastnews writing, benefiting the broadcast field itself as well as giving emerging broadcastreporters and writers more confidence in their writing skills and style.HistoryBefore creating pedagogy that would work in this situation, a clear understandingof the similarities and differences inherent in rhetoric and composition as taught inEnglish and the broadcast fields is needed. Both fields have many of the same goals yetboth fields differ significantly in style and form as well as content and presentation. Thedivide seems natural because of the technology and numerous elements involved in thebroadcast field that lend themselves to a certain style of writing and coverage. There isno time during a news day to write a five page paper on the topic assigned, only fouror five hours at most to compose a one-minute-30-second story that is complete andcompelling. Yet composition and rhetorical writing with lessons of form and structurecontain inherent principles that should and can be taught to emerging broadcastwriters.When television news first appeared on the scene more than five decades ago, themedium created a different style of writing and presenting stories. Until the mid to late1950s, radio had been how people received news and entertainment (Scherer, 2001).Radio dramas and serials were written for entertainment and storytelling purposes.However, radio news broadcasts during the war were becoming increasingly important,later making the transition to television(Kisner, 1998). Thus with the beginning of constantly updated network newscasts awhole new set of possibilities and challenges were introduced. With the considerationof time limits, pictures, video, and the growing diverse audience, a broadcast writingstyle was formed. Countless manuals on broadcast writing emerged, all stressing theBEA—Educating tomorrow’s electronic media professionals 7
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