A friend commented on one of my posts recently that I seemed to have lost my ability to write in complete sentences. Fact is, I never could write in complete sentences. Microsoft Word points out the same thing. My page is filled with squiggly green underlines and the admonition “Fragment (consider revising).” I don’t consider it, and not only because the advice is a fragment in itself. It’s just the way I write.

After all I spent most of my adult life in and on television.

I owe my career in broadcast news to whoever invented the ellipsis. Proper punctuation has no place in television.

It’s a language of phrases… pauses and emphasis and nuance. You can write complete sentences, but they better be short. It’s being read out loud after all and it is best read aloud by the people who write it. It’s hard to write in another person’s voice; to construct a sentence the way they are comfortable reading it. Yet that’s what I tried to do for most of my career. I gave up reading my own writing very early on. It became apparent to me that I could write reading a lot better than I could read writing. (And that says more about my reading than it does my writing). Even at that, I wrote for very few people who could read my writing. For everyone else…I wrote their reading.

For instance. Shortly after I went to work in Greenville South Carolina I wrote this little story:

DAVID JANSSEN .. WHO RAN ACROSS OUR TELEVISION SCREENS FOR FOUR YEARS AS “THE FUGITIVE”.. DIED TODAY.

HEART ATTACK.

48.

The anchor couldn’t read it.

He went on the air with “Actor David Janssen, who played “The Fugitive” for four years, has died of a heart attack. David Janssen was 48 years old.”

He ruined my story. But in those two sentences I learned I couldn’t write for him the way I wanted to. I had to write the way he wanted to read. That’s the job.

I think my story had emphasis and even a little drama. “Heart attack” “48” were meant to stand alone, to make people say, god he died young.

The rewrite had no soul. It was wire copy. I was expecting him to end it with “he’ll be missed.” But if he had, I would have walked out then and there and never come back. As it was, I worked in Greenville a total of 89 days before I got a job in San Diego.

There, I would drop by the station on weekends just so I could write for Mitch Duncan. He could read my writing. Because it’s how he wrote too. He paused when he was supposed to; not when he was out of breath from reading some ridiculously long sentence full of prepositional phrases. The copy was a mess. Filled with enough dots and dashes to be Morse code. But he could read the hell out of it.

Pick up any textbook on broadcast writing and if the first paragraph of the first chapter doesn’t say it should be conversational, burn the book.

Think about it. When you first told someone Robin Williams had died you probably said “hey, did you hear? Comedian and Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams has died at the age of 63, according to a spokesperson for the actor. The Marin County Medical Examiner’s office reports it is suspected to be a suicide.”

Didn’t you?

If you did, you could anchor the news in Greenville South Carolina.

I learned most of what I know about broadcast writing by listening to other people write. You can’t figure out broadcast writing by reading it. (Or reading about it for that matter, so if that’s why you’re here you can stop now). It’s meant to be heard. I listened to one person in particular.

David Brinkley.

If you didn’t see David Brinkley, or if you only know him as the gray haired old man slumped in a chair on a Sunday morning talk show, you missed a great opportunity. The news anchor with the staccato style and razor-sharp wit. He single-handedly changed broadcast news. And my god could he write.

Brinkley anchored the NBC Nightly News, first with Chet Huntley and then with John Chancellor, and unlike a lot of news anchors, he wrote every word he read. He wrote without flourish but not without flair. With purpose, but without verbs.

Take for instance the night in 1977 when he did a little story about James Earl Ray’s arraignment for escaping from prison. As best I remember (it was 1977 after all) Brinkley wrote it this way:

JAMES EARL RAY… WHO KILLED MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR… ESCAPED FROM THE BRUSHY MOUNTAIN STATE PRISON IN TENNESSEE. FOUND THREE DAYS LATER… MUDDIED, BLOODIED AND LYING UNDER A PILE OF LEAVES.

WENT TO COURT AND SAID HE DIDN’T DO IT.

EVEN THOUGH HE DID.

It has stayed with me all this time because he had the gravitas to tell the truth. Too many broadcasts would have reported “James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King has been charged with escape and today pleaded not guilty to the charge. Ray is accused of escaping from prison in Tennessee and was captured three days later after an extensive manhunt.”

It is boring, sterile, confusing and ridiculous.

That last line….”even though he did”…took some guts. But I’m sure Brinkley didn’t see it that way. It was just the right thing to do.

Or consider this one —

P.K. WRIGLEY … THE CHEWING GUM MAGNATE… WHO STOOD BY THE CHICAGO CUBS THROUGH THIN AND THIN… DIED TODAY.

Also Brinkley. (Also 1977).

Irreverent? Maybe. Memorable? Definitely.

I wrote and produced television news for more than thirty years and can honestly only remember bits and pieces of three or four stories I wrote. After all, as soon as it’s off your fingertips, you’re on to something else. You don’t languish over it… you knock it out and move on. There’s a pile of other work that still need to be done and the clock is ticking. Plus, as we were fond of saying, as soon as the anchor has read it on the air it’s “on its way to Mars.” (I did most of my work before You Tube. Can you tell?)

My first story as a reporter in Waterloo Iowa was about a developer who wanted to turn an abandoned stone quarry into a residential tract. There were a lot of people still in the newsroom when it aired and I felt as though they were watching to see what the new guy’s story was like.

Or maybe I’m just self-conscious.

OK, I’m definitely self-conscious. Leave me alone, all right?

Stop staring.

I mean it, stop.

Anyway, the opening line was – A LOT OF PEOPLE LOOK OUT AT THE OLD (insert forgotten name here) STONE QUARRY AND SEE …. A STONE QUARRY. (insert forgotten name here) OWNS THE PLACE. HE SEES CONDOS.. SHOPS AND PARKS.

(For the uninitiated, I’m not shouting. Broadcast copy is written in all caps. Except by Brinkley who wrote in upper and lower case. Or so I’m told.)

Some time later, still in Waterloo, I was producing the news and wrote a sentence I like.

First, some background. There are several bridges across the Cedar River in Waterloo and one of them needed some repair. The Army Corps of Engineers was doing the work, and said the bridge would be closed for six weeks. It took longer…of course…and…of course…was a major inconvenience. When they let us know they were going to cut a ribbon and let the Mayor drive across the bridge one evening and then open it the next morning to traffic, it was welcome news.

So we shot the ribbon cutting and I wrote the story, that ended with … AND THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS PROMISES .. THE FOURTH STREET BRIDGE.. CLOSED FOR SIX WEEKS…. FOUR MONTHS AGO.. WILL BE OPEN IN THE MORNING.

It was all true. And it made several points, all at once. There’s a little bit of Brinkley in there.

Then there’s the David Janssen story. That didn’t go so well.

In San Diego in 2001 there was a shooting at a school. Our coverage won the National Headliner Award for Spot News coverage and an hour special that we turned around in short order won the Headliner for Public Service Program. It was pompously called “Preventing the Pain: Real Solutions for Stopping Youth Violence.” It could have won honorable mention for worst broadcast title, but that wasn’t a category. Colons have no place in broadcast writing. Ever. But then, I don’t write titles.

We didn’t succeed in stopping youth violence, maybe you noticed, but I had a line in the anchor copy somewhere that said

THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAY KIDS GROW UP IN THIS COUNTRY.. THAT MAKES THEM WANT TO HIT.. AND HURT.. AND HATE

I know, by itself it’s a pretty much indefensible statement. But it was in amongst a bunch of other phrases about studies and sociology. Those don’t matter now. It’s about the alliteration.

So there it is. A career of daily news writing summed up in four sentences. For the rest, you’ll have to go to Mars.