What is your Writing Style?
Writing for print, video and audio
Many of us learn our writing style while at school and then possibly during tertiary studies. These can be a variety of styles but are often more formalized for print, and a more conversational style for broadcast media, that is audio and video. But what do these terms formal and conversational mean? Here is a comparison of the different styles.
The variation of writing styles for different media has been a long time developing, and even now continues to evolve. Writing for newspapers has become more conversational, and writing for video has become more abbreviated (Fang, 1991).
Newspapers or email newsletters, print
A reader scans a headline and if it is of interest proceeds to the first paragraph, if this also proves interesting hopefully, they will continue. This leads to putting a lot of information in the first few lines and then giving more detail in the rest of the article. This can be referred to as a more formal style, and it includes more complex sentences.
This method is said to have originated during the American Civil War, with war correspondents sending their dispatches on an unreliable telegraph, and fearing it would breakdown, placed the most important news first.
