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Most of our education is spent learning how to write for the page. But a listener is very different from a reader - and audio makes special demands of language.
This workshop will help you break (or at least bend) your long-ingrained habits of writing for the eye in order to help your audio stories better hold your listener’s attention and understanding.
We'll ask and explore questions such as: how do you write for the ear on the sentence level? At the paragraph level? Do stories in sound need a different narrative structure than stories in print? How can you adapt something you wrote for print into an audio story? How can you best write for your own voice? What are the best practices for performing your script? How can you effectively write into and out of the tape you’ve gathered in the field? You'll have the chance to examine short readings and listenings, apply these concepts with in-class exercises, and personalize them with a script draft you’re working on.
We recommend this workshop for beginners - no audio experience is required to attend.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Andrew Leland is the host of the Organist, an arts-and-culture podcast from KCRW and McSweeney’s, and is a contributing editor of the Believer magazine. He teaches radio journalism at UMass Amherst, and has taught writing and radio at Smith College, the Missouri School of Journalism, Transom, and elsewhere. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB magazine, the catalog for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and elsewhere. He’s written or produced audio for Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, Slate magazine’s Panoply network, Detour.com, City Arts and Lectures, and HowSound, among others.
PRICING
The cost of this two-hour workshop is $50 for non-members and $40 for members of the Podcast Garage or members of the Harvard Ed Portal (i.e. any Allston-Brighton resident). Sign up below!
We're offering scholarships for this workshop. Learn more here.