Transcript:
"Good afternoon, and welcome to Sunrise Side Matters. A bi-weekly programme discussing the news, art, entertainment and history of the sunrise side. My name is Charles Uncina and I'll be your host. Today we will be covering tourism forecasts for The Sunrise Side with Dennis Hutchison, Northern Michigan branch manager for Gordon Food Service, we also will be shining the spotlight on local musician Joey Spina, including a world premiere (premir?) of an original song.."
My Re-write:
"(Big Smile) Hi, I'm Charles Uncina and I'd like to welcome you to Sunrise Side Matters. A twice-weekly programme which discusses the news, art, entertainment and history of Michigan, which we locally refer to as The Sunrise Side. (Smile again) In this programme we take a look at tourism forecasts for the coming year/this year with Dennis Hutchison who is the Northern Michigan branch manager of Gordon Food Service, we'll also be shining the spotlight on local musician Joey Spina, including an exclusive of an original song..."
Charles, your script is written for reading, my script is written for speech.
Your delivery is too whispered for any kind of radio. Imagine for this, that you're at a party, it's not a noisy party but still there's enough noise from people chatting and laughing and there's a little backround music. You're being introduced to someone you've never met, how would you introduce yourself? Obviously you would smile for starters right? Your eyes open up in anticipation of meeting that person. That smile sets you up for how you're going to speak, it shapes your entire introduction. You're not smiling as you say hi to me in your intro. You don't sound happy to introduce yourself and you don't sound grateful that I've made the effort to listen to you. When I switch on the radio I want to hear happy and confident people, and I usually do. Some broadcasters learn to fake the 'happy to be here' thing by the inflection of certain words. It usually works, it sometimes sounds fake, but all of the time the effort is there to project the 'happy to be here' one way or another, so they are all forgiven. You have to somehow make that effort, and find your own way to project 'happy to be here' in your very first sentence. If you have to act a little, then do it, if all broadcasters always sounded 'natural' the radio would not be worth listening to, it would be extrememly boring. Even radio is a performance art. From the broadcaster's perspective it's speech, but it's not natural speech, it is 'projected speech', speech intended to hold the listener's attention, speech that get's past the compression you hear on the microphone. On-air you feel the need to make an extra effort to send out your voice. You want to be heard above the music, you want the listener to pay attention to you, you want the listener to love that station he's listening to (he has many other stations to choose from). You're also very aware that if you don't sound very good, the programme director has a drawer full of demo tapes and he can pick up the phone and replace you in 5 minutes. All these factors make you a little more competitive when you're on-air. You have to be good, you have to sound interesting, you have to sound happy and enthusiatic, you want to come back and do more. Radio is like a first date, you can't screw it up, first impresions every time, you can't afford to give a bad impression.
Am I getting through Charles?
Try my script.
And best of luck!
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