AS English Language and Literature: Production of Texts

Writing for a Listening Audience: to entertain and inform

Before you start, read over the 'examiners' advice' and ensure you understand the nature of the task you have to complete.

You must write the opening scenes of a radio play, or the opening segments of a dramatised radio documentary. Your first decision must be whether you are going for the first, the fiction, or the second, the non-fiction.

You will see how you must keep all drafts and refer in your commentary to them and to the way you have revised and adapted them.

Look at the way in which writers address a 'listening audience'.

Can we identify maybe a dozen techniques?

Now, begin your commentary proper by stating succinctly the nature of the task you have set yourself.

You need to choose carefully a style model. This is an example of good and well-achieved writing whose fundamental form and manner you are going to emulate.

You need to choose such a style model explicitly and analyse it precisely in your commentary.

You need to have listened to several actual radio dramas (including at least one 'non-fiction' piece) and made notes about (a) style; (b) techniques; and (c) specific devices used at the beginning.

Use the BBC's on-line 'Radio Player' feature to scan through four or five dramas: use the scroll down menus sensibly and then download. You need broadband for this to work: you can use headphones in the sixth-form library.

Continue by analysing carefully the form, structure and style of your style model.

We are particularly keen to look at how language use reflects the features of 'writing for a listening audience' with which we began.

The best commentaries will put the style model briefly into the context of other similar pieces.

You might want to be absolutely clear about how you are going to use the style model to help you compose your own piece.

Consider your brief carefully. Read some advice for writing for radio; an article about what makes radio drama 'different'; some hints on writing for radio.

Make preliminary sketches for the shape and structure of your piece.

Use your reading of the advice pages to make notes about the task confronting you.

Note how radio drama makes certain demands of its listening audience.

This study constitutes the requirement to understand the nature of the genre for which you are writing.

For example,you might want to research into a chosen story and shape it into a 'well made play'. [You may want to find more out about Eugene Scribe and the well made-play, too.]

Write scene notes.

You'll only need very brief scene notes for the scenes you're not writing - there's no need to be stupid! - but you need detailed notes for the scenes you'll be writing.

Read more about scene notes here, along with an example.

These are the 'scene notes' for the play about the artist and his model.

More advice: read this advice, which is not very different from this advice or this. And if you want to read an example of a radio play, READ THIS.

Describe the themes and structure of your imagined piece for which you will be writing the opening.

Explain how and why you have used scene notes.

Converting scene notes into a script: dialogue.

Here is an example of a scene written up from the scene notes you read last time about Erika Popp and the racing driver.

Here is an example of a planned and executed script: The Artist and The Model.

Pay attention to the way in which playscripts are presented for the radio.

Think about these ideas:

scene notes are essential to give direction to your dialogue;

dialogue should be sparky and ambiguous;

the use of idiolect (personal language) is important.

Explain how you composed your dialogue, especially about the way in which you made language choices. Include several examples to show how you have (i) deliberately adapted your writing style to focus on the needs of your listening audience and (ii) made language choices which help the sense of conversation, for example, or to help with the exposition of the story.

This will be a major part of your final commentary.

Revise dialogue and add details about sound effects.

Find if you can the opportunity to record your piece with friends reading the parts. Listen to the effect and make adjustments as required.

Review all the notes so far.

Comment specifically on changes made in the light of recording 'actors'.

Refamiliarise yourself with the examiners' requirements.

Plan and write a first draft of the final commentary.

Work on texts

Refamiliarise yourself with the specific requirements of the examiners. Check word count.

Polish script and present in a professional form.

NB When the work is handed in, it must be in the following order:

1 clean, final copy of the radio play script

2 commentary

3 bibliography, source material and style model: this will include print-outs of internet material, including the Radio 4 'Listen Again' index page with an additional page describing what you listened to - that will be your 'style model'

4 sheet giving precise word count

5rough drafts of the script starting with the first draft (clearly indicated)

The Well-Made Play

This is our version of the 'well-made play', the so-called 'five-point story design'. You will, of course, only be writing the opening scenes, but you need to have a clear idea about what these are the opening scenes to!

Act I: The inciting incident
Mainly expository. Toward the end of the act, the antagonists are engaged and the conflict is initiated.

Act II, III: Advances and setbacks
The action oscillates in an atmosphere of mounting tension.

Act IV: "The Act of the Ball": crisis and climax.

Act V: Resolution.

Think too about these key ideas for structuring a play:

The play follows a strict logic of cause and effect.

The plot usually describes the culmination of a long story, most of which has happened before the start of the play. This late point of attack requires that the audience be informed of the antecedent material in exposition in the form of dialogue or monologue.

Action and suspense grow more intense as the play proceeds.

The protagonist is in conflict with an adversary and experiences alternately good and bad turns of fortune. This creates the emotional rhythm of the play.

The lowest point in the hero's fortune occurs just before the highest.

The denouement - literally, the "untying" - (the resolution) is logical and, hence, clear.

The over-all action pattern of the play is reproduced on a small scale in each act. It is, in fact, the principle according to which each minor climax and scene is constructed.

Not all modern plays follow these old-established rules, but, perhaps surprisingly, most do. And nearly all follow most of them. By all means break the rules for a certain effect, but don't disregard them altogether!

This is a plan for a play about an artist and his model. Notice how it follows this shape but also deviates significantly from it. You have to balance the artistic needs of the play against the actual history you're writing or inventing.