Writing Style

   Broadcast news writing is very different from writing for print media.
   Not that it's more difficult; it's just different. How? Mainly because print is more forgiving. If readers do not fully grasp the idea on first reading, they can read the phrase, sentence or paragraph again until they do.
   In radio and TV news, however, that option is not available. The news writer/announcer has one chance and one chance only to tell the viewer/listener what the story is. There is no instant replay.
   OK, so maybe viewers can go to the On Demand listing of their cable TV provider and rerun the entire news program. Some, however, may not have that recourse, and more important, they shouldn't have to.
   Don't make them. They may not come back.
   Writers in the past delighted in the challenge of seeing how many words they could string together and still maintain control of the sentence.
   Novelist William James, for example, once wrote a sentence of 157 words. And the opening sentence of John Milton's Paradise Lost has 17 commas, plus a colon and a semicolon.
   Readability suffers from long-windedness. In today's era of instant gratification, viewers and readers don't want to be challenged.
   It is a fallacy to believe that writing must be difficult to read in order to qualify as good writing.
   Oprah Winfrey once said to author Toni Morrison that she had some difficulty understanding a portion of Morrison's work.
   Morrison replied: "That's called reading."

   But Stephen King commented: "No, that's called poor writing."