In the last couple of weeks, we discussed the theory of essay writing. We tried to define and pinpoint the ambiguous term essay by reading a lot of different essays. Today, we are at a certain level of fairly understanding what an essay could be, as we had to hand in our textual essays. Instead of writing an essay to read it, we are now trying to write essay in order to record the piece of writing to be able to hear it. The switch from the visual to the sense of hearing seems to be much harder than I expected, even though I already have some experience in writing news for the radio.

In relation to the reading by Jonathan Kern “Writing for Broadcast” and “Reading on the Air”, I noticed a significant contradiction: there is a big difference whether you write objective news as a journalist to inform people, or if your write subjective fiction in order to entertain your audience. The first is a serious profession to spread the truth all over the world, whereas the latter is rather a way of storytelling. I mean, I get the idea that you have to write short and declarative sentences for the audio essay, like a radio journalist do. But I already noticed in the former readings that many authors blurred the lines between those two domains. But for me, a possible future journalist, this distinction is crucial. And in my opinion, we are supposed to write a creative and entertaining audio essay, experimenting with the different kind of writing for a listening audience. The purpose is a completely different one: our audience will not be driving a car or prepare breakfast while listening to our essay. They will listen carefully to our words, trying to escape the harsh reality and enjoy our piece of art.

However, one very important feature of writing for broadcast which struck me several years ago, and has made me realize that I want to write for radio or television, is the completely different approach or rather style of writing. Kern phrases it as follows “Good broadcast writing often requires us to unlearn many of the ways we learned to write classes or in graduate school” (2008:29). Seriously, I remember the moment very clearly my professor told us something similar in one of my journalistic classes. It was like an epiphanic realization: I want to become an editor in a radio or television news station, so I never have to write term papers again! True to the motto keep it short and simple.