Mistakes are often our best teachers. So this book showcases mistakes, network mistakes. These examples, plus corrections and revisions, teach professionals and students a lot about newswriting not often taught in classrooms or newsrooms.
This book is really three books in one: a collection of network scripts with improvements; a guidebook to writing-and rewriting-news for broadcast; a handbook on usage and abusage. Every page contains tips that can be put to work by anyone who writes for radio or television, local or network. And many of the tips can also help in writing for print.
The flawed scripts, from television and radio, illustrate common problems in grammar, news judgment, broadcast style and storytelling. The author uses the scripts as launching pads to fire off pointers about newswriting and language. The book is reader-friendly and can serve as an easy reference: all entries are in alphabetical order, and the contents are thoroughly indexed.
Anyone can make a mistake, and everyone does. But smart writers make the most of their mistakes-by learning all they can from them. One way to improve is to find out where scripts have gone wrong-and what to do about them. When we see what not to do, we move toward a grasp of what to do. So a Study of mistakes can lead to better writing.
