Radio Style Guide: Best Practices for Broadcasters
Radio Style Reports
The Radio Style Guide
The style guide contains expressive code that identifies and distinguishes the personality of each station. It establishes uniformity criteria, within the range of personal styles and equipment, for the benefit of clarity and radio communication to better serve the audience. The style guide cannot be limited to the rules for drafting. Radio imports the product in its final sound. Technical innovation, transformations in working methods, and dynamic lexical changes in radio communication require openness to new proposals. The guide is intended for those working in programs in any of the stations and channels of the network or a particular station unless it broadcasts in several languages. In that case, you must differentiate the specific proposals in the section according to the morphosyntactic, lexical, and phonetic demands of each language. Radio requires a particular work process, forms of communication, and phonetic sound. Its style is also influenced by linguistic characteristics as a means of hearing. The approach of a radio style guide should revolve around the following points:
- Principles for the general approach of communication and radio information, as well as the use, treatment, and contrast of sources, and the reprocessing of official notices and briefs.
- Information processing standards. How to cite names and positions, rules about vocabulary, jargon, clichés, etc.
- Phonetic rules concerning the general principles of pronunciation of sounds and intonation, pronunciation of sentences, names of personalities, and names of places and institutions.
- Radio communication standards in the guidelines for collection on the harmonization of sound resources, forms of communication and dialogue with each of the presenters and listeners in the studio or on phone calls, guidelines for correcting mistakes, use and combination of voices, tunes in and out, greetings, and farewells.
- Specific rules for reporting and types of programs in those aspects that make a difference in the style of each station.
- Rules for submitting letters, scripts, and recordings that must be shared to facilitate and expedite the work.
Often, the guides also incorporate a style dictionary that sets how to use each term specifically.
Guidelines for the Development of Information
Communication technique is providing new tools for rapid and light coverage that allow it to compete with other media. Each medium is moving away from the traditional conception of the speaker as an expert in information, music, entertainment, or education.
Investigations show overwhelming data on the lack of information compression, excessive rates of exposure, and the use of highly technical language. Expert informants become spokesmen for political, economic, and technical jargon. Recorded programs allow more rigorous respect for the time allotted in the schedule. Live broadcasts also conform to time, although they admit some exceptions. In radio information, authenticity prevails against verisimilitude. For this reason, the replacement of real sounds picked up because of their imperfection and reproduced in other studios with higher quality is rejected.
Style of Speaking
In radio information, clarity and simplicity prevail by adapting the language and different sources outside the environment, the use of common vocabulary familiar to recipients, and simple or reduced complexity syntactic structures.
1. Adjustments to Radio Speech
All news sources require written adaptation and redrafting of information according to the characteristics of radio. To respect people’s right to privacy and image, recordings of telephone calls or “in situ” recordings collected without the knowledge and consent of the person involved are often rejected. The identification of the source is required as accurately as possible. Generic formulations for lack of identification and obscure terms like “reliable sources” are avoided. The temporary fugacity requires indicating the broadest and most reduced time frame. Acts, openings, and parties are important as they represent people, not just attendees. Therefore, the story relates primarily to the fact and secondarily to prominent personalities. Quotes from people are normally accompanied by their name and surname or the best-known name. Only two names are cited as necessary for better identification and differentiation from another with the same name. Therefore, familiar names or nicknames are eliminated, except when recognized by the public. Professional positions held by women tend to be pronounced in their female form.