There are two very basic goals to this course:

For students to write effective broadcast news copy, and;

For students to write effective radio and television commercials.

That’s it. This course will spend the next 15 weeks detailing how exactly that is done. Broadcast writing is a bit different that traditional academic writing. It is written for both the person reading the story and for those who will listen to it. Sentences are usually more informal and should always strive to be conversational in quality (that is they should sound when read out loud as if someone were actually speaking normally). All this aside, broadcast writing still needs to be grammatically correct.

By the time this semester is over not only should you be writing effective news and commercial copy, but you should be comfortable doing it as well.